I’m sure that by many accounts, the self-directed profanity of debunked crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried conforms nicely to those unwritten rules of etiquette for public atonement and humiliation in the information age. A practiced appeal to one’s pathetic nature is, after all, practically expected of every public figure at some point in their careers. It’s funny how ‘spontaneous’ twitter apologies predictably tend to include calling oneself awkward names and promising to do better; but our collective ‘refusal’ to accept his apology is perhaps likewise well-within protocol — once again memes of guillotines make their tired rounds. Within this ‘public discourse,’ what else can one do besides blame the logistics, miscalculation, a well-intentioned but doomed strategy, a failure to communicate, or— when really backed into a corner — clarify that this was a mere lapse in judgment ? After all, as-if anticipating what would come, Bankman-Fried had promised to give virtually all of it away to various worthy causes, hadn’t he?
But could Sam Bankman-Fried’s apparent understanding of his own situation (as a poor miscalculating philanthropist) and his recently-unveiled predilection for self-bullying possibly be a deeper reflection of his upbringing and prominence within the Effective Altruism community – a community based around a nebulous core of ideas including, but not limited to, charitable giving, rationalism, and social optimization? ‘Thought-leaders’ from this ‘quirky’ ‘alliance’ of tech workers and Ted-talkers have taken no pause in mounting a stunning two-tier defensive campaign of heavy-duty apologies and valiant efforts to gloss-over the unraveling of global Ponzi schemes — which, according to them, must be understood as a mere blip, a blemish, a prideful oversight. After all, such an ‘ends-justify-the-means’ mentality in no way reflects the basic principles of Effective Altruism, and the humanitarian crises all over the globe are simply too urgent to be distracted away from. But I can still hear the half-hearted cries, as if from ghosts:
“… a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.”
Such is the apparently dehumanizing work of doing the ‘right thing’ in ‘the most efficient way.’ But Effective Altruism couldn’t have established itself as the intellectual vanguard of Silicon Valley without much of the footwork already in place. Indeed, its tenets are so widespread and popular as to hardly seem philosophical at all: it’s good to give ; the most altruistic kind of giving expects nothing in return. Many opponents of this movement even tacitly concede these points; detractors, for example, would like us to know that while many philanthropic endeavors of Effective Altruism (EA) accomplish good things, the community at-large is complacent about existing political structures which exploit us. As if increased attention to these qualms would make EA acceptable! Such opposition often amounts to a competing collection of facts, a list of stances regarding issues. While their disagreement with EA on issues may lead these critics to forsake the whole project, it is not because of its crucial mistake in composition. Prominent EA advocate Scott Alexander likens various popular criticisms of the movement as attacking a jenga-tower of assumptions – most (if not all, according to him) prominent criticisms only seem to be aimed at the top parts of the tower, leaving the majority of it in tact:
There’s a lot of commentary. Effective altruism is now a semi-organized movement, with leaders like Will MacAskill and Toby Ord and institutions like the Open Philanthropy Project. It’s produced a vast literature on effective charities, ranging from how to best prevent malaria to how to promote animal welfare to speculative scenarios about AI apocalypse. These aren’t above criticism, and lots of people have criticized them. But if you criticize them successfully, and feel like they’re discredited, then you’re back at the basic tenets of the movement again.
And indeed, it seems like the ‘charitable-giving-industrial-complex’ has won over public opinion on many of EA’s core assumptions; hence many of its critics feel compelled to leave the lower levels of this tower undisturbed. But does Effective Altruism as a composition evoke the Good that it claims to seek, a Good that manifests in the mutual self-interest of all parties involved? Are their bizarre ‘thought experiments’ or statistical formulas the hallmarks of guided reasoning, or do they give a rational veneer to a hodgepodge of practices that ultimately seed doubt about our individual capacities for bringing about this Good ? What lies ‘between the lines’ of these thought experiments, so-to-speak? What kind of view of man is attendant in their social optimization problems? Do these assumptions directly lead to something like the incident which is currently unfolding? Should the Good also be beautiful?
The eager forms of self-deprecation in Bankman-Fried’s public apology – while by most opinions warranted – must also be understood within the latent views of the Effective Altruism community. His predictable gestures are perhaps also the true calling card of the movement. How absurd it is to imagine how Sam Bankman-Fried might act differently throughout this tragic unfolding! It would, paradoxically, be something of a moral accomplishment in itself were he to drop all pretenses to personal integrity, and make a dangerous run-for-it. The fact that he is now a prisoner in the eternal and fruitless attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of those with whom he was previously ingratiated, begins to seem like evidence that this movement does not want its adherents to be free and self-respecting. Even today, in the golden age of the DSM-5, the popular (and institutionally enforced) conception of ‘working on’ our personal psychological problems abounds, as if we can scold ourselves out of misbehaving.
Of course, from the perspective of the thought leaders of Effective Altruism, in order to prescribe a collection of rules to clean up the mess of the world, it must be assumed that most people are incapable of coming to their own conclusions for doing-good on their own; this is what lurks behind the statistical reasoning, thought experiments, and prescriptivism. To some extent, any organization which moves tens of millions of dollars in contributions, employs full-time staff, and recruits Bill Gates to give inside-cover testimonials of their books must do this. One might retort that, of course, these organizations are voluntary, they foster some semblance of discourse amongst its adherents, and, in typical relativist fashion, ask if this is not the modus operandi of any thought movement ? But the prominent ‘In-a-nutshell’-style summaries for those too pressed-for-time to consider consequences of EA’s assumptions start to seem like the base of Bankman-Fried’s pyramid scheme. Perhaps the mild-mannered demeanors of Peter Singer and Will MacAskill and the extensive PR campaigns serve the same purpose. Just how much of the ‘saving a child from a pond’ thought experiment is rational? Does it instead intimidate us into drawing a false connection between a common sense personal scenario and a much more tenuous and arguably exploitative form of geo-politics?
You see why the ‘institutional critique’ (which says that Effective Altruism ignores questions related to structural changes, and the potential for large-scale institutional change brought about by mass action and political involvement) is so welcomed by the EA community: both the managerial tones of Effective Altruism as a ‘philosophy’, and the institutional critique seem aimed at delegating their adherents to mere numbers, toning down their creative potential as individuals to skillsets, personal psychologies, or their diluted presence in a large group of ‘like-minded’ technocrats, demonstrators, donors, et cetera. Increasingly, we see EA spokespeople entertain the possibility that institutional change might comply with their ‘longtermism’ strategies after all. By acknowledging that they may have overemphasized charitable giving in early promotionals, and that the movement is not opposed necessarily to efforts for institutional reform, EA has ‘demonstrated’ its ability as an organizational structure to ‘adapt’ itself to its own blind spots – in order to ‘scientifically’ evaluate the areas where Good can be achieved. As with many of the social sciences, this seems to conflate a dispassionate approach to rote problem-solving with a true scientific methodology. And ultimately, this managerialism reveals a view of morality and science as something static, blindly empirical, and independent of the creative potential of rational thought. In many ways the statistical reasoning that the EA community heralds as its gold standard is so intertwined with this one-dimensional morality that it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff: seemingly-innocuous conclusions, e.g., that the wise choice of one’s career can multiply one’s capacity to do good seem to resonate most as a latent threat. You wouldn’t want to waste your life, would you? One cannot help but to ask what these organizers think of those masses of people implied-yet-ignored by their schema. Are construction workers, plumbers, or factory workers unwittingly giving up on careers that may multiply their lifetime goodliness?
While, for example, curing river blindness in Africa is a good thing, it is precisely the way it functions as a `good-in-the-large-scale-abstract’ which allows this innocuous aim to support such preposterous conclusions for this movement (e.g., donating our time and money to global charities based and controlled in the West). It is exactly this specific kind of abstraction — not necessarily the fact that one of its most prolific members ran a scam — that makes EA an enterprise which precludes a certain idea of the Good for both its adherents in the West, and the ‘recipients’ of its aid. The technocratic language of effective-giving makes details of the specific livelihoods of recipient and benefactor appear irrelevant, when these details might tip the scales of its own optimization. Although we have seen that EA’s sanitized, ‘empirical’ approach appears to permit one to justify certain unethical behavior (as long as one donates part of their salary to the most effective charities), a critique founded upon this point alone will also miss something. After all, EA does not simply focus on charitable giving (even though most of their career advice seems aimed at funneling young people into nonprofits). A particularly nefarious aspect of any sham seems to be the way it thuggishly structures its criticism. What is missing in the prevailing critiques of Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism is that there is a composition to the Good, which allows good acts to be materially-embedded in our immediate world, and creates progress for all instead of a continuously-morphing form of aid. A true multiplying factor upon one’s capacity for doing good doesn’t tell you in a polite way that you should find a different job.
What is actually being erased through the discourse of effective-giving is the remarkable historical breakthrough of the common Good, of the possibility for a mutual self-interest which drives growth and development far more effectively than the stunted image of a nerdy benefactor who ‘does good’ for nothing in return. A hypothetical map of the personal interests involved in the pipeline from ‘high-earning job’ to ‘recipient of humanitarian aid’ would reveal something unidirectional best; the fact that these interests seemingly align against the effective-altruist is completely inconsequential. What is important is that this configuration of interests actively prevents a configuration in which the standard for all is increased through cooperative development, which is an insight that introduces such a geometrical advancement on development that to ignore it amounts to gross neglect. And if this advancement is not explicitly avowed, then perhaps it will return, unconsciously, in a more perverted way.
The Good in the world of Effective Altruism is arrived at empirically, it is metricized, it exists on spreadsheets; trial-and-error is its convenient ‘strategy’. Even many of its critics tacitly support the same pessimistic view of the Good. To really understand what Effective Altruism misses in this conception, let us look instead at a certain foil of it in a contemporary morality play. If Effective Altruism is presumably a means of doing Good which is abstracted beyond its adherents’ immediate passions or interests (most donors will never see the money of their effective-giving in action, and they could never, by definition, directly validate that their lifestyles are in fact statistically-optimized), even our immediate world in any consequential way, then writers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul is a tragic depiction of the inverse scenario — whose characters willfully engage in destructive acts with a love-of-process which typically exemplifies the highest good. In other words, the characters of this tragedy do awful things in a physically moral and materially-embedded manner. The plans and schemes of these characters point to a certain dedication to their immediate causes and surroundings, a dedication that often requires attention, ingenuity, and a characteristic cleverness beyond those around them. The mundane causal connections of the physical world, for these characters – and for their audience – is transformed into a potential which permeates everyday life. The story is compelling because of its fastidious attention to rational detail in objects and characters, not despite it. Cellphones, gas caps, bellhop bells, and legal paperwork participate in the story as the rational (inanimate) substrate of these characters’ physical and moral existence, not as the McGuffins which drive the plots of many of Hollywood’s biggest action adventures. This physical stuff of plans and intentions is all but ignored by the minor characters — and arguably many affluent philanthropists. But for this vested-interest in their physical situations, ultimately it is another lack-of-faith which the characters of Better Call Saul tragically suffer. If they are aware of the physical potential of the Good, then it is only unconsciously, in the absence of the larger organizing potential of mutual self-interest. The ultimate motivation of a character like Jimmy is one of immediate self-gain, because a Harmony of Interests within the physical world of material relations has been forsaken, or hasn’t been inculcated at all. A staple of Gilligan’s tragic compositions, the characters who genuinely exemplify moral positions (for example, Chuck) are too sparsely distributed — they succumb to the plot and ill-intentions spiral out of control.
The characters of Better Call Saul fail to realize the potential for a harmony of interests already at play in the material/physical aspects of their scheming. In classical tragic form, the moral deficiencies of these characters – their turning from a certain Good – overwhelm the latent good in them (this latent good being a certain commitment to process in their immediate surroundings). Effective Altruism, on the other hand, appears to inflate the importance of achieving a heavily-abstracted Good, one which is only noticeable by means of statistics, thought experiments, and largely pertains to helping those far away (encapsulated in the deceptive line `most ways of making a difference achieve little,’ ) at the expense of the very human realization of this Good contained in process. Ironically, while promoting high-earning careers in the West, what EA tells us is that we simply cannot trust our own immediate motivations, and must displace this into a trust in nonprofits. The often mundane but nevertheless compelling circumstances in which crimes are committed in Better Call Saul and the extraordinary potential of thoroughly ordinary characters, is perhaps mirrored in the a new ensemble of Effective Altruist public intellectuals, who are here to calm us with their dispassionate demeanors, statistical expertise, and fantastical thought experiments; who support a precisely-engineered style of public engagement in forums and meet-ups; and who commit fraud in the most hapless and salacious manner.
Leibniz is oft-ridiculed for his (self-explanatory) metaphysical principle that we live in the best of all possible worlds. But is this principle as naïve as modern ‘realists’ would make it seem, if as humans, we cannot avoid acting as if we live in the best world possible all the time? A similar situation appears with respect to morality — even staunch moral relativists and nihilists act with a moral compass, even if the dial of this compass is intentionally inverted. And, as explained above, we seem to be unable to avoid acting within the radically-optimistic framework of mutual self-interest, even when we explicitly (often in-words-only) give up this framework for the sake of philanthropy. It is when we try to convince ourselves that the connections in the world are accidental, that good things must happen in incremental ways and at great expense, that we fail to live up to our moral potential. Effective Altruism as an organization is founded on such presumptions; the only way to affect the greatest good according to this community is by willfully giving-up on personal gain and self-determination. And Bankman-Fried seems to have ultimately realized that this cannot be characteristic of the greatest good — mutual-self-interest returned in a repressed, and tragically inverted, form in his case. He, like all of us, cannot help but to act with an implicit understanding of a harmony of interests. There is no such thing as the perfect charitable giver, and this is good, because it would mean turning away from a still greater good. The “longtermism” of this intellectual vanguard might be replaced by an understanding that, to quote Leibniz himself,
“The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.”
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