SBF

Chapter 29Effective Altruism

I've been debating about what I want to say here, and I have come to a decision. I'm going to give you a personal account of my own experience with Effective Altruism, the social movement that SBF credited with moving him to go big in crypto.

If you've read anything about SBF already, you know he's an adherent of this philosophy espoused by Princeton's Peter Singer and Oxford's Will MacAskill, among others.

Quick summary: adherents find a way to do the most good they can with their lives, and their decisions about what to do are driven by data. A subset of such people can do the most good by doing good things, but, for most people, the good they can do comes from making money and giving away as much as they can afford to good organizations.

This spins out into all kinds of philosophical directions, but that starts the spin.

SBF opted to make lots of money. Sam was also a utilitarian. Utilitarianism and EA have a lot in common. Utilitarians just try to boil questions down into good and bad, pleasure and pain, and be really frank about trade‐offs. Add up the good side, subtract the bad side, and then make a decision.

An example: in Politico, they quoted SBF talking about his shift to veganism in a very utilitarian way. He said, “Quantitatively, you enjoy eating a nice meal for 30 minutes and there's five weeks of torture that went into producing that.”

It's also worth noting that EAs are strongly related to another strain of philosophical thinking ...