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The next few tweets frankly makes EAs sound like a bunch of not very bright children.
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Apart from rounding things off to normality, another reason people balked at this conclusion was because of SBF’s associates. Roughly, the idea is that no one could behave so badly while surrounded by a bunch of good, well-meaning people. And SBF was surrounded by EAs.
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Emphasis on children. Another tell is that EAs uniformly seem pretty young, especially in relation to philanthropic circles. Their main guy William MacAskill may be an Oxford professor but he’s still just 35.
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Many older wealthy patrons I think indulge EAs like precocious children and their age alone makes the relationship a bit safer. A 60-year-old billionaire is a known quantity one way or another. SBF is young so much more able to play wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or fox in henhouse.
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One of my prejudices is believing that only age can get you to good moral judgment. Intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient. Life experience is necessary but not sufficient (too much too early, like being in a war as a teen, is mostly going to create debilitating trauma)
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I don’t quite understand the Venn between EAs and rationalists. For a long time I thought they were co-extensive because they seem so similar in all ways. Young, earnest, mathematically literate egoists caught in a bit of a mutual validation death spiral but not bad people.
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Mathematically literate is doing a lot of work here. They trade on the prestige that image brings in their circles, certainly, but their purported technical ability very obviously doesn't help them solve real problems, only rhetorical ones.
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