Progressive Pockets: a podcast about the untapped power of our wallets to build the world we want
A podcast at the intersection of social impact and personal finance that covers questions of how we might spend, donate, and invest more in line with our values.
Hosted by Genet "GG" Gimja
Formerly known as the Spend Donate Invest Podcast
Progressive Pockets: a podcast about the untapped power of our wallets to build the world we want
130. Effective Altruism, AI, and Sam Bankman-Fried
The philosophy of Effective Altruism captured the minds and wallets of Silicon Valley's elite - using reason and evidence to maximize positive impact. But is this clinical approach to the world’s problems really possible? And what happens now, after the shocking downfall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, once a leader of the Effective Altruism community?
In this episode, let’s examine Effective Altruism’s core principles of earning to give, cause prioritization, and longtermism that drew in Bankman-Fried and many tech leaders. Did his professed altruism merely mask grotesque fraud and self-interest? Or was he a true believer whose actions undermined the very ideas he championed?
And more importantly, what can we learn when it comes to our own giving?
Links from today’s episode:
FTX’s Collapse Casts a Pall on ‘Effective Altruism’ Movement - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/business/ftx-effective-altruism.html
Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity | The New Yorker
Effective Altruism's Philosopher King Just Wants to Be Practical
The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer | Foundational text on Effective Altruism
Doing Good Better by William MacAskill | Foundational text on Effective Altruism
ICYMI another episode you might enjoy:
Episode#107 Dr. King's Radical Money Beliefs
Connect With Genet “GG” Gimja:
Website https://www.progressivepockets.com
Twitter https://twitter.com/prgrssvpckts
Work With Me:
Email progressivepockets@gmail.com for brand partnerships, business inquiries, and speaking engagements.
Welcome to Progressive Pockets! I go by GG, that’s short for Genet Gimja. This is a show about money, our money, as individual people. But this podcast isn’t about money in the typical way that we tend to talk about it, it’s not about how to make more, on the other hand, this podcast is about the power that our money has, the power that we might be leaving on the table.
There are lots of episodes about how we might think about our investment portfolios, how to get some of the climate destroyers out of there, how to think about sustainable shopping, and another popular topic on this show is about our giving. So, where and how do we give our money away.
I’m wondering how familiar you are with Effective Altruism. It’s a belief system that is popular with the tech bros and came from the philosophy bros. It came up a lot in the news coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall because he was one of the leaders of the Effective Altruism community.
So what is Effective Altruism? By all accounts, this belief system was inspired by an essay written by the philosopher Peter Singer in 1972 where he argued that we have an obligation to prevent extreme poverty if we can do so at little cost.
In the early 2000s the term “effective altruism” was coined and started to crystalize it’s core belief, that there is a MOST efficient way to identify and solve the problems of the world.
By the late 2010s, Effective Altruism had become associated with billionaire tech bros like Dustin Moskovitz the cofounder of Facebook, Michael Dell the founder of Dell Technologies, and Sam Bankman-Fried the founder of FTX who pledged to donate large portions of their wealth to effective altruist causes.
When I first became curious about Effective Altruism, I read books by Peter Singer, I read “The Life You Can Save” which he wrote in 2009, I read “The Most Good You Can Do” that he wrote in 2015, I also read a book called “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill also from 2015. I have not read the latest book from William MacAskill about long termism, which Elon Musk has praised. I’ll get to that in a moment.
When you read about the founding fathers of Effective Altruism it is immediately clear that these guys are philosophy majors at Oxford type of guys who love to sit around and debate about theoretical morality. They are white, they are men, they sit at these incredibly privileged perches and from the famed ivory towers 10,000 feet above and they talk about saving lives or the planet in extremely theoretical terms. I know this because I have sat in some of those same perches right alongside them. I have sat in million dollar conference rooms debating what to do about global poverty. What does Taylor Swift say, Hi, it’s me? I’m the problem. I’m dragging myself too.
There are some questions that Effective Altruism asks that are wonderful questions to ask:
- “How can we do the most good with our resources?”
- “How can we maximize our impact?”
- “How can we ‘do good’ better?”
Where Effective Altruism starts to lose me every time is when the desire for efficiency and certainty goes too far.
So here is the first step of Effective Altruism, this is how you get started.
First, you rank all of the problems in the world. That’s the first step. You list every problem in the world, the mental health crisis for young people in the US, the loneliness epidemic in western countries, the tsunamis in Asia, the malaria in Africa, the risk of nuclear war, police corruption including brutality, climate migration, domestic violence, cancer. You keep going until you have a list of the problems in the world and now you rank them.
The ranking criteria being what is the most pressing global issue.
This is where Effective Altruism starts to get rocky. Ranking global problems is subjective, there’s no quantitative way to rank which is more pressing- police corruption or domestic violence. It’s a subjective ranking pretending to be objective.
The next requirement of Effective Altruism is that you take this ranked list of global problems and you rank how solvable the problem is. Solvability is measured by dollars and hours. How much money or how many hours of work is it to solve this global problem?
The idea is that now you have a ranking of what global problems are the most important to try to solve and a ranking of how much time and money it will cost to solve the problem.
So the natural conclusion is to focus on the highest ranked problem that has the lowest cost to solve.
I can see the appeal in this way of thinking. Effective Altruism says you know, the world’s problems can be simplified to simple math. Complex problems like domestic violence are too hard to quantify so let’s focus on global problems that are very quantifiable and measurable.
There’s a simplicity to that that is much easier than sitting with the complexity of the world’s problems. It’s inputs and outputs.
And that’s how you get programs that Effective Altruists are crazy about. Malaria bednets for example. Effective Altruists got really excited about malaria bednets because it was so quantifiable. If you spend this many dollars on a bednet, it reduces the number of people that contract malaria by this percent. Very clean math, inputs and outputs.
So if you follow this way of thinking to its natural conclusion you get the concept of longtermism. Malaria bednets used to be all the rage within the Effective Altruism community and now the new craze is all about protecting future humans against AI. I mentioned William MacAskill’s new book about longtermism that Elon Musk has praised. The premise of his book on longtermism is that if you do the math, again with the oversimplifed math, there are way more people that will exist in the future trillions of people compared to the measly 8 billion people alive today. So if we want to maximize the good we are doing, we should focus on the quadrillions of future people versus the relatively smaller number of people that exist today.
And back to that ranking of global problems, if you think about it with this Effective Altruism way of quantifying and ranking global problems, AI can touch way more people that malaria or cancer or mental health or climate change could ever hurt, so the new focus has become protecting future people against AI.
This is what happens when we use the number of people affected as one of the only important criteria for ranking a problem, and it’s also what happens when the decision makers are Silicon Valley tech executives. Their world view is limited by their lived experiences, educational backgrounds, and who they are surrounded by and in conversation with.
Some people say that Effective Altruism is a cold and narrow way of looking at the world’s problems. That the desire to be rigorous and quantified can come across as clinical and sometimes even cruel. My sense is that effective altruism is a response to the discomfort of sitting with the complex, hard to measure, hard to solve, vague, ambiguous problems in the world. I think that it’s a coping mechanism from people who can’t stand the discomfort of sitting with these uncomfortable realities of the world and the problems we need to solve.
I also think there’s ego involved too. The idea that we are the best ones to decide how to help, that we are the best ones to know what needs doing, this is ego.
We can rely on the people in the field, on the ground, that are embedded in communities, actually doing the work. If there’s one message I could share with the tech billionaire bros it would be this: being good at creating and monetizing technology is easier than solving societal problems. And being good at creating tech doesn’t mean you’re good at solving societal problems. Of course you can be part of the solution, there’s a real role for the private sector in solving societal problems, but the role should be a supporting role, not the lead.
Back to Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX. When he was found guilty of billions of dollars of crimes, some journalists tried to make the argument that because he was such an outspoken leader in the Effective Altruism community that there would be a hit to the credibility of this philosophy altogether, but I’m not sure that really happened.
One of Sam Bankman-Fried’s favorite talking points was that he was trying to make as much money as he could, so that he could give it away to solve global issues.
This idea used to be pretty popular within the Effective Altruism community, that we should choose jobs where we can make tons of money so that we can give it away. Not to charity, because of course, we know better than they do about how to solve the world’s problems, but we should give it away to other Effective Altruists.
Now, were there people who genuinely believed that he was piling more and more money, billions on billions of dollars out of some kind of altruistic motivation? I don’t know.
So I don’t think that the hypocrisy of him pretending to be this guy who was making billions for philanthropic purposes was actually committing fraud, I don’t think that revelation really will hurt the Effective Altruism movement. That’s my take. I think the people who are still on board with this worldview are still on board despite this one bad apple.
However, Bankman-Fried was a major donor to effective altruism organizations through his FTX Foundation and other groups. With FTX imploding, some of these funding sources dried up, so that might have an effect.
And maybe the revelation that Bankman-Fried was actually hiding this very lavish lifestyle and stealing from his customers, I do think that contradicts effective altruism's goals of maximizing good through reason and integrity. The whole philosophy was born out of debates on morality and integrity, so I do think that maaaaybe him being found out as a fraud could do some reputational damage to the community particularly when I think about gen Z and how they might be turned off by this.
So to answer the question of whether Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall is going to hurt the Effective Altruism movement, I think it's a mixed bag.
In the meantime, I want you to be prepared out there in the world so that the next time someone says, wow, you’re giving to the food pantry in your neighborhood? How do you even know that’s the most efficient use of your money, I want you to be empowered to hold out your arms, bring them in for a hug, and say, it’s ok. I know, the complexity of the world’s problems is scary, you can donate where you think you can help, and I’ll do the same.
Whew! Some episodes are educational and some episodes are rants, that are also educational LOL.
To recap, here’s what we covered today:
- Effective Altruism is a school of thought that came from a few philosophers who were trying to sort out as an intellectual exercise, if you had a dollar, what would be the most efficient way to do some good with it?
- One of these core beliefs is that we can and should rank the problems of the world, to decide where to focus our help.
- And finally, after the ranking exercise, they believe that we can and should calculate the most efficient way to solve the problem.
- Some tech billionaires seem to love this school of thought. Sam Bankman-Fried was a leader of this community.
- It is possible that revelations about how corrupt Sam Bankman-Fried’s behavior was may have tarnished the reputation of this community, but time will tell. Gen Z, if you’re listening, keep that third eye open. I know you already are. Although do gen zers listen to podcasts? Hmmm.
If you have more time today, here’s another episode to check out, episode 107 Dr. King’s Radical Money Beliefs. Dr. King was another philosopher, and he also had ideas about how we should do the most good in society. He came to different conclusions. I’ll include the link in the show notes.
If there’s something else you’ve been wondering about, something related to our money and our power and the world we’d like to help create, please send me a note, I’d love to cover your suggestion on this show. You can get in touch anytime at progressive pockets at gmail dot com or you can fill out the form at progressive pockets dot com.
Let’s end with a quote, I like this one because it addresses this point of complexity and futurism. The quote is from Howard Zinn.
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
Let’s talk again soon!