What is the impact of effective altruism? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it differs from simple logical consideration, i.e. how it would be responsible for any of Anthropic's eccentricities.
It’s logical consideration with “logical” meaning Spock style logic, ie utilitarianism at all costs. Another prominent EA is SBF for example. It’s designed to sound innocuous and many of its cultish promoters may genuinely believe it’s innocuous, but it’s not.
Can you help me understand what costs? Utilitarianism alone would not necessarily be so obsessed with these safeguards -- Anthropic seems to have much more of an obsession with moral good than utilitarianism alone would suggest. I feel utilitarianism alone would likely be more obsessed with advancing the technology, making it generally available, and more generally compensating for attackers advancing at similar rates, than with obsessively trying to avoid being the way they get there. In other words, utilitarianism alone wouldn't explain such the obsessive sense of responsibility and fear of reprehensibility over how their tools are used.
the problem is pretty simple. what do you think happens when you ignore the source of income needed to be "effectively altruistic" or the timelength needed to implement your altruism.
if I pollute your groundwater today, but promise you in the future to give you double the clean water, because ill make billions on some industrial process, youd understand.
the simple physics is about entropy: ignoring local effects and claiming youll do global good is effective altruism.
unless you misunderstand: the hard part of altruism is knowing whether you are actually doing good or just making yourself feel good by deluding the subject.
many social science fails to move social improvements from lab to real world implementation because of structural variables that cant be overcome.
so effective altruism is the belief you can reverse entropy by ignoring local effects...in practice
Thank you! So, this would cover things like ruining cities with datacenters under the impression that they'll understand once the global superintelligence cures cancer. Or etc.
I don't think Anthropic is the one aggressively expanding their datacenters to areas where literally everybody does not want them, but that's "effective altruism", right? Just justifying bads with a supposedly larger good?
It's not real. It's like naming your movement "The Good People". It sprouted from the "Rationalist" community, which is even more self-aggrandizing.
Neither has any hope of doing any good for the world as they don't understand evolutionary pressures. They are set up to reward making members feel smart, not accomplishing anything.
And if they ever gain any real power, they will be corrupted immediately.
I don't see any of that in Anthropic at all. They're not intelligence above all else, not by a long shot. They're scared of intelligence and obsessed with ensuring it can't be abused, even as they advance the frontier.
which is effectively a delusion about out racing entropy: guys, if we just make a lot of money, we can fix all thw problems that making a lot of money creates
