Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims — EA Forum
forum.effectivealtruism.org
Recently, Ben Pace wrote a well-intentioned blog post mostly based on complaints from 2 (of 21) Nonlinear employees who 1) wanted more money, 2) felt…
  • thesmokingman@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I don’t understand why any of these people have any problems with any of this abuse. If one person is harmed in process of benefiting a large group of people, isn’t that effective altruism? Wouldn’t Nonlinear be able to say, “so what about us fucking our employees, we’ve made AI safer which will save forty seven quintillion lives that’s EA baby!”

    Or do I fundamentally misunderstand effective altruism based on critiques of the founder’s support of Sam Bankman-Jailed?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think you fundamentally misunderstand the ethical reasonings behind EA. As this drama has kept carrying on, and now is again reaching hundreds of comments the amount of time this affair wastes of EA people both involved and not involved is massive. All this time is not spend reducing EA risk, so logically all these hours wasted are murders of future people. So for the good of the future all these people must be expelled from EA, ideally in such a way they never can waste time of anybody related with EA again, various types of kinetic or legal solutions exist for this.

      • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I wish you were joking but they literally say this in the post:

        At that hourly rate, he spent perhaps ~$130,000 of Lightcone donors’ money on [investigating us]. But it’s more than that. When you factor in our time, plus hundreds/thousands of comments across all the posts, it’s plausible Ben’s negligence cost EA millions of dollars of lost productivity. If his accusations were true, that could have potentially been a worthwhile use of time - it’s just that they aren’t, and so that productivity is actually destroyed. […]

        Even if it was just $1 million, that wipes out the yearly contribution of 200 hardworking earn-to-givers who sacrificed, scrimped and saved to donate $5,000 this year.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Come now, my solution would involve a catapult, or if we can find the budget a trebuchet, clearly im not the same. ;).

          Joke aside, that is pretty sad that they actually wrote that. And those kind of arguments are so dubious imho that I would be more inclined to doubt any of their defenses are true. (If I was in any way involved). Esp as the argument also just assumes the accusations are unfounded.

          • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Think of how many souls could have been saved if you didn’t waste the church’s time investigating all those abusive priests! Truly the investigators are sinners on a staggering scale!

            • thesmokingman@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              This is the natural extension of what I was trying to say. There’s no need for accountability because that spends money that could be better spent on saving the world. The opportunity cost of doing literally anything other than saving the world is more than one life so we’re fucked if we do anything else.

              Every time I think I can comprehend stupid people with lots of money shit like this happens.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Yeah but you also cannot let these priests go unpunished, so my solution involves everybody involved, the alleged priests, the alleged victims, everybody talking about it including us. All of them, biff zoom, right into the sun.

              While this is a joke, there is an idea in here somewhere. If the accused really worried about the secondary effects of this on EA and the waste of time it all causes they should quickly settle with the people they hurt or even step down, EA has already decided that the people who bring in money are more important than the replaceable people who do the EA work (That is the whole idea behind how it is more effective to work for wallstreet and tithe than actually be a boot on the ground fixing things), and I highly doubt these people are the visionary math geniuses who do the AGI safety coding or whatever is needed to stop the paperclip bad ending. Like if you really worry about secondary effects and the risk for EA etc etc, just quit, pass the torch to some other cultist EA member, problem solved.