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The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash (ft. F1nn5ter)

Get Nebula cheaper with this link: https://go.nebula.tv/philosophytube Watch "The Prince: https://nebula.tv/videos/philosophytube-the-prince" Support the show! - https://www.patreon.com/PhilosophyTube When crypto company FTX crashed, it posed big questions for the Effective Altruism movement! Twitter: @PhilosophyTube Instagram & TikTok & Tumblr: @theabigailthorn Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosophyTube/ Email: philosophytubebusiness@gmail.com BIBLIOGRAPHY: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSFGULN6WeMjXpBWlpv3RCE0MmchCIsu3fa_UPCt_yNEKK4PjyQK1CihSXMPYl0miuc0msfbL0Gz6Xc/pub 0:00 Intro 2:23 What is Effective Altruism? 7:27 Who is Sam Bankman-Fried? 15:23 What is Longtermism? 30:34 How Do We Change the World? #crypto #charity #philosophy

Philosophy Tube

1 year ago

several years ago I was invited to be the ethics consultant at a banking conference they put me on a business class flight to a luxury hotel in Madrid they didn't pay me by the way I'm guessing that was the payment where over several days I and the other attendees discussed how we could fix the various problems facing the world Healthcare debt Financial collapse until the final day when I closed out the conference by giving my keynote speech and my ethical advice to all these Bankers was that th
ey should immediately resign conferences like that are held all the time at the top end you've got stuff like the world economic Forum the Clinton Global initiative the social good Summit further down the list says the thing that I went to rich people have been trying to figure out the most effective way to get rid of their money for a long time and there's a new movement trying to answer this question called effective altruism it was going very well until last year when one of its big members t
ook a big fall the once crowned king of crypto now adorned in handcuffs former billionaire FTX founder Sam bankman freed arrested in the Bahamas today following the historic Financial collapse of his massive cryptocurrency exchange Sam bankman freed was close friends with a philosopher named William mccaskill who helped found the effective altruism movement the fact that SPF was part of the movement helped him gain credibility and investors and now that he's facing jail time it's worth asking th
e question is effective altruism to blame in this video I'm going to tell you what effective altruism is and how it tied into Sam bankman Freed's rise and fall I'll give you a detailed review of mccaskill's best-selling book and also talk about another idea called long-termism which Tech billionaires like Elon Musk say is the future of humankind it's a story that will take us from Oxford University to the Bahamas and back a story about charity ethics crime Mr Beast technology and history and it
all starts with a little bit of philosophy okay [Music] today the effective altruism movement is huge with tons of organizations and hundreds of members controlling millions of dollars they're often in the press in no small part thanks to SBF paying Vox 200 000 to write a bunch of articles on them and their star philosopher William mccaskill wrote a best-selling book called what we owe the future which was recommended by Elon Musk himself that's how you know it's good but the movement started fr
om comparatively humble beginnings in 2009 at Oxford University when mccaskill was thinking about ethics and charity and how to help the poor and yes I am going to continue pronouncing that word poor because I am from Newcastle and I'm going to continue pronouncing that word Newcastle because that's how it's freaking pronounced let me walk you through an example of the way effective altruism thinks twitch streamer and friend of the show Finster recently announced a 50 000 giveaway to help trans
people in the UK get better health care that money could have gone to anything but that particular cause was finster's Choice the trans Community has been incredibly welcoming and accepting to me and me doing what I do and I have good news turns out I'm not giving away 25 000 I'm giving away fifty thousand dollars most charitable donations work like that people choose a cause that's close to their heart but effective altruism says we should be a little bit more rational let's say you've got a ch
oice between two Charities you can either donate to one that trains guide dogs for the blind in your neighborhood or one that gives people in developing nations medicine when they have trachoma an infection that causes blindness training a guide dog takes about forty thousand dollars and curing someone's trachoma costs about fifty dollars so for the cost of one guide dog here you could save about 800 people from blindness there you might love dogs but you could do more good your altruism could b
e more effective if you use your head instead of your heart sorry Fenster I should have just given the money to dogs we don't need to get bogged down in that specific example it is just an example of the kind of thing effective altruists do they try to find out which charitable causes are best for example you might have seen some YouTube videos sponsored by givewell they're an EA organization that claims to investigate and recommend effective Charities if you're very clever you'll already have n
oticed that effective altruism makes a number of key assumptions the first is that just because somebody is far away doesn't mean they matter less there are people who need help in your neighborhood and people who need help in developing nations and just because some of them are closer doesn't mean you should help them first numbers however do matter you should always help more people if you can and the consequences of your donation matter as opposed to your intentions or your relationship to th
e people that you're helping as we'll see later on all of these assumptions can be questioned but first what is this movement who are these people according to their own surveys EAS tend to be young in their 20s and 30s male white and University educated they're people who want to make the world better obviously often people who are dissatisfied with politics most describe themselves as left-wing or Center left and atheist or agnostic it might also be fair to say that the movement attracts a cer
tain kind of personality somebody who enjoys intellectual Challenge and rigorous debate maybe people who have a little bit of a contrarian streak many people like that are to be found in Elite institutions like Oxford University and the San Francisco Tech startup scene EA's two big strongholds and indeed many people like that are also to be found in the audience of this show critics of effective altruism say it's not really a philosophical method it's more like an internet subculture and there m
ight be a grain of Truth to that a lot of EA members say that it gives them a connection to something bigger or a sense of community and what is more about their feels than the thinkings on the other hand that might not be a bad thing if your college age white sun tells you that he's gotten involved with an internet subculture there are definitely stranger things he could be doing a lot of EAS also have quite high paying jobs the movement encourages something called earn to give the idea is that
if you take a job in finance or management consultancy with a fat paycheck you can donate more and thereby do more good than somebody with a lower paying job I mean you shouldn't make landmines for children but the idea is find a morally neutral or good job that pays a lot and donate on the side advice that didn't go well in the case of Sam bankman freed Millions will certainly face charges in the U.S because the Bahamas these are things I would give anything to be able to do over again less th
an a year ago Sam bankman freed was one of the richest men on Earth with a net worth of more than 26 billion dollars he found that a crypto trading company called FTX which quickly became one of the largest crypto hubs in the world but at the end of 2022 it all came crashing down in a matter of days FTX tagged and Sam was arrested on multiple counts of Fraud and money laundering allegedly he was using his clients funds to gamble on the stock market like the bad guy from Casino Royale and when Au
thority he's finally caught up with him they found him whipping Daniel Craig's balls with a length of rope the collapse of FTX may have sent crypto into an irreversible decline only time will tell and it also sent ripples through the effective altruism movement to understand why we need to go back to the beginning when SPF was still a student he was considering a career in Animal Welfare when he happened to meet William mccaskill who told him he could earn to give by going into Finance so Sam st
arted a trading company called Alameda research and then he started FTX he let his ex-girlfriend run Alameda whilst he ran FDX from the Bahamas because it's so nice there you know I'm sure the fact that it's outside American Financial Authority jurisdiction had nothing to do with it just to make sure I sent philosophy tube's lawyer Trixie Mephistopheles down to the Bahamas to form an expert opinion Trixie how's your investigation going and great great ftx's job was to let customers convert crypt
o into real money and back whilst alameda's job was just to trade the stock market they were supposed to be separate operations but long story short it now looks like those two companies were secretly working as one Alameda was losing huge amounts of cash and FTX was secretly transferring billions out of the back door to keep them afloat meanwhile Alameda was buying cryptocurrency to keep the price of ftx's assets artificially High kind of like double dipping on the salsa but also I stole your c
hips when the news broke people started selling their crypto and FTX didn't have enough money in the back to give them their cash because they'd sent it all to Alameda they filed for bankruptcy and now they owe money to more than a million people including a 55 000 tab at a Bahamas resort called Margaritaville sandbankment freed and his associates were arrested and charged with fraud which he says he didn't mean to do his associates pled guilty almost immediately and Sam himself will stand to tr
ial later this year fun fact his lawyer is the same guy who represented jizzlin Maxwell and it was mccaskill who started him down that path ironically by trying to do good mccaskill ended up contributing to a very great harm That's the Law of unintended consequences and it's almost as strict as the law of Securities fraud the big investors will probably be fine but the little guys who tried to get into crypto and lost everything they're the ones who are suffering it might be tempting to laugh bu
t we should remember that anyone can fall victim to a scam SPF used effective altruism to present himself as someone who cared about ethics over profit he pledged a lot of money to EA approved Charities and he may even have been sincere but a lot of people in the movement were pretty disappointed it looks like the money he promised to charity isn't coming at least not before somebody pays back Margaritaville for all those pina coladas William mccaskill publicly denounced his former friend and so
me critics even accused the entire movement of being a scam the community is a Relentless grift it has billions in the bank a palatial estate in Oxfordshire and links to some of the richest people on the planet hundreds of millions of dollars are poured back into the community for movement building and leading EAS while presenting themselves as modest and self-sacrificing flew in private jets bought hundreds of millions in Bahama real estate and were offered literally millions from Tech billiona
ires to boost Book Sales if you want to do good in the world and you should steer clear of EA harsh words and maybe a little bit too harsh there were people within the movement who said from the start that getting involved with crypto and SPF specifically was a bad idea especially after bendelo another crypto billionaire and EA donor pled guilty to money laundering I don't think it's fair to say that the entire thing is a grift there were people who spoke up and tried to do the right thing the p
roblem seems to be that the movement's leaders didn't listen to them going back a few years it seems like this is a recurring problem a recent article in Time Magazine details allegations by several women that they were harassed or abused by prominent men within the movement and that when they spoke out they weren't listened to in 2021 the philosopher Zoe Cramer wrote a paper criticizing certain aspects of EA methodology she was a member and thought they'd appreciate some constructive feedback b
ut the reception she got was pretty chilly the EA Community Prides itself on being able to invite in process criticism however warm welcome of criticism was certainly not our experience in writing this paper senior Scholars within the field told us in private that they were concerned that any critique of central figures in EA would result in an inability to secure funding from EA sources such as open philanthropy we don't know if these concerns are warranted nonetheless any field that operates u
nder such a chilling effect is neither free nor fair having a handful of wealthy donors and their advisors dictate the evolution of an entire field it bad epistemics at best and Corruption at worst writing a critical piece should not incur negative consequences on one's career options personal life and social Connections in a community that is supposedly great and inviting and accepting criticism seems like the FTX disaster isn't the only time that EA's leaders haven't listened to the membership
mccaskill responded to Kramer saying he's aware of this criticism and he wants to start actively funding critics in order to strengthen the movement's ideas to which I can only say will patreon.com philosophytube when your whole stick is we know how to ethically spend other people's money and some of your biggest guys turn out to be fraudsters and creeps it kinda doesn't look good but effective altruists could come back and say that these are organizational problems that a lot of movements have
but the ideas are still good maybe there's work to be done in terms of how they're implemented and also making sure that everyone in the movement is safe but the goal is still worth striving for and If This Were A Different video essay Channel that's probably where I'd leave it I've told you what effective altruism is and why it's in the news so now is the part where I say Instagram Tick Tock patreon nebula Bish bash Bosh but this is philosophy tube and on this show we like to go a little bit d
eeper everything I've told you so far is not the full story there are bigger questions for Effective altruism not just as a movement but as a philosophy one big question in particular which I'd like to tease out now by taking a detailed look at mccaskill's book and turning our minds towards future [Music] [Music] in the early years of the 21st Century effective altruism started to change there was still an emphasis on ethics and charity but the movement's leaders including mccaskill embraced a n
ew thought called long-termism which is all about threats from the future mccaskill says we are living at a critical time mammal species typically survive about 2 million years and humans first evolved about 200 000 years ago so we're pretty near the start of our story but recently we have acquired the power to destroy ourselves if we're not careful we might not make it much further we're like teenagers he says the decisions we make now will profoundly affect the rest of our lives so we need to
be careful the trillions of human beings who are yet to be born are counting on us so if you want to do good the most effective thing you can do is Safeguard the people of the future long-termism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it what we do know will affect Untold numbers of future people will need to act wisely I'll start with what I liked about the book mccaskill has some interesting discussions of the ways that technology can
affect society's values the idea is the that when you create a piece of tech to do a job it becomes more difficult to ask should this job be done we talked about that on the show last year in my episode on transhumanism I do wish he'd gone into a little bit more detail because there are other philosophers who've talked about that before Bruno LaTour of getting marazov Martin Heidegger and he doesn't mention any of them but it is interesting stuff some of mccaskill's critics have accused him of d
eliberately downplaying the threat from climate change focusing too much on the future and not enough on the right now and he is a little bit tame compared to certain other writers he likes the idea of non-violent protest and green non-profits just compare that to the philosopher Andreas mom who we talked about on the show last year he wrote a book called how to blow up a pipeline so mccaskill is a bit reserved compared to others working in the field but no that's not necessarily a bad thing I t
hink it's a stretch to say that he deliberately downplays it and he even says this in order to solve claim climate change what we actually need is for companies like shell to go out of business based effective altruism classic as well it goes like this suppose a homeless person asks you for money and you've got three pounds in your pocket but you're a dedicated effective altruist so you say no because you don't know what they're going to spend that money on you don't know the consequences of tha
t action instead you put that money towards buying malaria nets for somebody 3000 miles away a Critic might say that you've missed the point of morality a human being asks you for help and you ignored them you could have given them that money you could have given them something more valuable by looking them in the eye and saying I'm sorry it's all I've got on me right now but I hope things turn around for you you could have given them your respect even if it wouldn't have the optimum consequence
s isn't morality about human beings and the way that we treat each other I mean what about Justice what about generosity what about kindness I mean yes you might say those arbitrary emotional attachments but isn't having arbitrary emotional attachments what being human is all about I mean we might as well let the computers take over if you're just going to make all your decisions like freaking Spock finally someone agrees with me and what this amounts to is rejecting the idea that consequences a
re the main thing that matters when it comes to charity we can make this same objection specific to long-termism too mccaskill worries about future people but future people by definition do not exist we can worry about the consequences of our actions for children who are alive now but the people of the first 21st century are imaginary how can we say that they have rights or they should be treated a certain way that's not to say that we should never think about the future just that if we do then
protecting them is a bit of a weird way to structure that conversation because there is no them again isn't morality about real people and the way that we treat each other mccaskill has quite a good response to all this he says yes doing ethics about the people of the future can seem a little bit bloodless and Abstract but it kind of has to be because of the impact that we all have every day on the future if you live in a city then by choosing to take public transport to working back rather than
drive over the course of a year you will ever so slightly impact the schedules of tens of thousands of people over hundreds of days statistically it's likely that on one out of those tens of thousands of person days the person who impact had had sex and conceived a child later in that day and you affected ever so slightly the timings of that conception changing which spare met the egg and thus changing who was born that different person will then impact the schedules of millions of other people
changing what children they have and so on in an identity Cascade past a certain date everyone who has ever born will be different from who would have been born had you chosen to drive instead and the entire course of your history will be different Wars will be fought that would never have been fought monuments built that would never have been built works of literature written that would never have been written all because you chose to take the bus philosophers call this the non-identity proble
m our actions don't just affect what kind of lives people in the future will lead we affect who they will be so any discussion about future people kind of has to miss out on their individuality because it's constantly in flux this point was originally made by a philosopher called Derek parfitt and mccaskill's discussion of it is quite interesting although just because you're summarizing what another philosopher said in an entertaining way that doesn't make you clever wait what turning now to wha
t I didn't like so much about the book you can kind of tell it was written by a man because there is almost zero discussion of Reproductive Rights if I was bringing out a book in current year about the moral duties that we have to unborn people the first thing I would have put in it page one 72 Point font do not use this book to criminalize abortion maybe he'll discuss that in a future Edition mccaskill talks about the threat to humanity from A.I and I personally found his discussion of it to be
a little bit thin he says that software can be easily copied between computers just look at the video game pong came out on the Atari but now you can play it in your browser or you can even play it on your phone it's everywhere so like what if a rogue AI also copied itself and spread around the net in a similar fashion that could be a really big threat and I feel like he's generalizing there from quite a specific case pong is a very simple program that's why you can run on other things like I d
on't think you could run Skynet on an Atari surely a rogue AI would be quite a complicated program and so it would require things like server racks and air conditioning and electricity the physical infrastructure that would make it vulnerable and probably help keep it in check also pong is an outlier even as far as game scope a lot of old video games aren't archived to generalize from pong to world ending AI in the space of two paragraphs is in my opinion a little bit rushed if you're trying to
argue that one of the best uses of Charity money in the world is researching AI based on that example if I was an investor I'd be going is there someone else I can talk to and there is this is the precipice by Toby ORD the other philosopher at Oxford who also helped found the effective altruism movement and who is also a long-termist this book came out first and it's basically macaskill's but a little bit better I don't think that mccaskill is ripping ORD off but mccaskill said humanity is like
a teenager Ford said it first mccaskill says that technology can lock in bad values long term or to set it first or it has a whole discussion about asteroids which mccaskill reproduces almost exactly but I found odd to be more persuasive he's more detailed he considers more points of view he doesn't put all of his eggs in the consequences basket so he doesn't necessarily have to muck around with a non-identity problem his discussion of AI is stronger too he says yes a rogue AI would require thin
gs like server racks but it could manipulate people into giving it them Russia or whoever could right now create a deep fake of the president saying something outrageous and spread it on social media to try and influence and manipulate people and if a person can manipulate people then a rogue AI could too welcome to the 2032 presidential debate for the Democrats Alexandria ocasio-cortez and for the Republicans a chatbot made of everything Tucker Carlson's ever said if you're looking for a book a
bout long-termism I would say get this one my official review of mccaskill is that it's interesting but the intellectual content is at times a little bit lacking okay well maybe I'm not one to talk and you might say well Abigail you've never written a best-selling book and that's true in the present but in the future I could write a great book I could write the best book ever and be awarded many honorary doctorates for my contributions to philosophy you should take me very seriously based on the
expected value of my book which will Top the New York Times bestseller list in the year 3054. and you might not find that joke funny now but there is a small chance that you will find it extremely funny in the future so really you should be laughing being a little bit silly but it's in service of a serious point a big question hanging over both of these books and maybe the entire effective altruism movement it goes like this imagine you're walking home one night and somebody stops you and says
I am the wallet inspector give me your wallet and I will return it to you tomorrow with 100 pounds inside as a reward for your cooperation and you say no and so they say okay how about a thousand pounds a million a billion pounds I am a wizard in addition to being the wallet inspector I will give you a billion pounds and to make you live a million years and you say no there is almost zero chance that you're telling the truth the odds of you telling the truth are one in a trillion but the wallet
inspector keeps promising you more and more to the point that even though the odds of them telling the truth are tiny you've got a one in a trillion chance at Paradise and all you're going to lose is whatever you've got in your wallet so the rational thing to do is hand it over but you're stubborn you still say no so the wallet inspector changes tactic and says unless you give me your wallet Humanity will end I can see the future using my wizard Powers if you don't hand over your wallet you'll d
rop it on your way home and tomorrow morning an old lady will slip on it and a passerby will stop to help her and he will be slightly delayed in his journey which means he will have sex at a slightly different time tomorrow night than he otherwise would have done conceiving a different child than he would have done and that child is super Hitler so unless you give me your wallet the future is doomed you might think that the odds of my telling the truth are infinitesimally tiny but the risk to th
e future is huge trillions of lives are depending on this so you need to do the right thing and Safeguard the people of the future by handing over your wallet this thought experiment is called Pascal's mugging and it's supposed to highlight the difficulty of making decisions now based on future value or future risk clearly something's gone wrong in these scenarios and in a footnote to mccaskill's book he says that we should just put such cases to the side but I'm not satisfied I think we're on t
he trail of something big if you're very clever you'll already have been asking back in part one how do effective altruists decide which Charities are the most effective and I have a clever answer to that you do an experiment and you find out for example you find a bunch of blind people and you give some of them medicine and some of them advice about cleaning their eyes and you see which works best they weren't the first people to think of this economists have been playing around with it since t
he 90s but the idea is pretty simple run charity like a science experiment thing is there are some tactics for helping the poor like medicine that are easy to study but what about things like reforming political and financial systems that might help the poor a whole lot maybe even more than charity but it's tough to study that without actually doing it critics say this results in measurability bias EA tends to favor short-term small-scale interventions that don't tackle the root of the problems
some of those short-term interventions don't last or have long-term negative effects this is all to say that it is by no means settled what effective actually means and In fairness to them some EAS are aware of this and they do talk about it but none of the EA philosophers I've read quite seem to understand the depth of this issue the lesson from Pascal's mugging and the measurability bias problem is that evidence and reasoning will only get you part of the way what gets you the rest of the way
is clout given incomplete evidence who can fill in the gaps to tell the most persuasive story persuade you to give them your money and if clout is what's filling in those gaps that prompts the big question who has all the clout [Music] remember back at the start I said that rich people have been trying to give their money away for a long time well in his book winners take all the journalist Anand giri hadara says that modern philanthropy was invented in the late 19th centuries when the USA was v
ery unequal men like Andrew Carnegie and JD Rockefeller got very rich and faced a lot of criticism for it so they invented a new way to donate money the private foundation and these days private foundations are everywhere in exchange for their charity these men expected not to get criticized for how they made their money if they engaged in unsafe working practices or union busting or they didn't pay their taxes well that's just a temporary blip on the road to a better world and here we can see t
hat the effective altruist idea of earn to give is really nothing new it's just a restatement of this old idea that the best way to help people is through the free market and business through giving money away yes but never changing the system that makes the money and from the 19th century to the present day this idea has remained pretty much unaltered here's a recent quote from a British politician which perfectly encapsulates this 19th century way of thinking about poor I think the Dynamics of
capitalism business create Investments are good if you want a more equal Society what's the best way to do it to lift up those at the bottom or to bring down those at the top I'd much rather lift up those at the bottom I'm very aspirational girihedaris points out that if you want to get invited back to the banking conference if you want to do TED talks and corporate speaking gigs if you want book deals and a high-paying job if you want newspapers to support your political party you kind of have
to tow that line don't talk about Lenin at the banking conference if you want clout that world is where the clout is if only I had told that conference what they wanted to hear somewhere in a parallel universe there's an ultimate version of me and she doesn't have any Integrity but she does own a house I think that effective altruism is very well suited to that world mccaskill's book in particular there's almost no politics in here it's very win-win very business friendly because it's a fusion
of those 19th century ideas about poverty with modern development economics and some ethical philosophy I'm sure mccaskill would come back and say that effective altruism is about following the evidence if it turned out that the best way to help the poor was through socialist Revolution well then he'd be all for it but remember measurability bias the evidence only takes you part of the way and when there are gaps it's that world of business clout that rushes in to fill them this might explain wh
y EA was such an easy Mark for crypto the crypto sphere is powered by hype about how we're all gonna make it sometimes that hype is pretty unrealistic it might also help explain why a lot of the Charities they recommend are run by westerners instead of by the people on the ground EA has indoctrinated its followers to strictly support a small select list of Charities that have been labeled most effective by the movement's own charity Raiders like give well giving what we can the life you can save
Etc of which the name Charities right now are all Western if you randomly asked one of the people who themselves live in abject poverty there is no chance they will mention one of EA's supported effective Charities as having impacted their lives more than the work of additional Global anti-poverty agencies and it seems like EA's leaders don't really want to talk about that mccaskill and AUD write a lot about progress and Humanity's potential but they say almost nothing about who gets to define
those Concepts who gets seen as an expert who decides what counts as evidence whose vision of the future gets listened to in my opinion those aren't side questions to hide in the footnotes their core to the whole project and if the movement had listened to them a few years ago maybe the FTX disaster could have been avoided but on the other hand just because the movement dovetails nicely with the ideology of the rich doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong effective altruists could come back
and say well philanthropy does a lot of good effective altruism is probably better than nothing right I mean at least we're doing something this perspective is especially pertinent right now because one of the biggest YouTubers in the world is a philanthropist Mr Beast is basically the most famous man on Earth if you're under 25 and he recently came under Fire for this video in which he paid for a thousand blind people to have surgery restoring their sight some people said it was morally iffy to
turn charity into spectacle others said that people in need shouldn't have to rely on the random generosity of content creators and before anyone in my comments goes in too hard on Mr Beast a lot of those criticisms could be applied to me I've used this platform to do public charity before did I do that because I really wanted to do the right thing or was I just trying to make you like me which benefits my career an effective altruist might say well does it really matter there are a thousand pe
ople who were blind yesterday and they can see today isn't that a fact worth celebrating the real question we're bumping up against here is how do we change the world do we work within the system or try to dismantle it do we talk to Bankers or try and shut them down if a movement is trying to do good how do we deal with the bad things that it also does these aren't questions that I can answer for you they're questions that we all live inside of I would never tell you to either join or not join t
he effective altruist movement my job is to tell you what the theory says and why people believe it so that whatever you decide to do you do it with your eyes open I'm very intrigued by this topic of who gets to tell stories and I got to tell my own recently I wrote a play called the prince which was on in London it's about a bunch of characters in a Shakespeare play Who start to realize that they're all stuck inside a play and we were struggling to finance the show until I went to a streaming s
ervice called nebula and said hey what if you guys paid for it and then filmed it and hosted the film on your streaming service they took a chance on me as a new writer but it paid off because the show immediately sold out made a profit and won a whole bunch of rules like absolute dream scenario so if you would like to see that show you can go.nebula.tv the prince that's where it'll be along with every episode of philosophy tube which gets uploaded to nebula early and without ads and not just ph
ilosophy to you either there's loads of creators on nebula remember Lindsay Ellis used to make really good video essays and retired from YouTube while she's back making new content exclusively on nebula and there's more nebula subscribers get free goodies like we had a red carpet Premiere in New York City for The Prince and nebula Subs got free tickets so nebula is good it's 2.50 a month if you get the annual plan which is absurdly cheap compared to other streaming services it helps me out it he
lps the crew out and it's a very effective way haha of spending your entertainment budget everybody has their job nine to five and getting drained they settle for a second rest scared to risk what the future might break what the future might be [Music] someone to knock at my door telling me there's more waiting for me thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] there is more waiting for me [Music] [Music] time I think our blisters [Music] foreign [Music] I just want to say it to
after the credits all this this money the money is real but it's not mine and don't worry it doesn't belong to my patients it actually belongs to Finster who just like had that I just had it thank you very much just like had it on him because he I don't know it's in London okay

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Finally someone else referring to him by his proper title; "Grimes' Ex"

@adriannadavies853

I read a book called The Anxieties of Affluence, which was a sort-of anthropological look at the ultra wealthy families of Manhattan. Nearly all of the (mostly women) in the families struggled a great deal with how to be rich "ethically", and how to best donate to charities. But the thing is, how is a random millionaire in Manhattan supposed to know what exactly their community needs, or how their money can best be implemented? As a result, the majority of wealthy people tend to donate to their children's (probably already financially healthy) schools. The book made the conclusion that rich people should simply be taxed more, as even though the govt is not by any means a perfect means to distribute wealth effectively, it is at least ran by people who are (theoretically) democratically elected to represent their communities. I really think philanthropy is just another big smoke screen the wealthy use to avoid taxes. It's an incredibly ironic twist of fate to me that most rich people donate to their children's private schools, while public schools languish due to a lack of tax revenue from their neighborhoods. Cool!

@Troconnell

I just want to take a moment to appreciate how this information is being delivered by a person in costumes that look like they come straight out of video games.

@kerrydwin5367

I live on the Swinomish Reservation, where Shell had an entire train derail and spill into our watershed. I'm working now for a degree in Environmental Biology to deal with the long-term effects of this catastrophe. This video helped me a lot to understand what I'm doing and why. Thank you <3

@r7calvin

IMO, the weakness of longtermism isn't so much the obsession around outcomes (if morality isn't effective and practical, then it's more of an academic exercise/posturing than truly about empathy anyway). The issue is that you can argue for almost any position if you're allowed to arbitrarily expand the scope of the problem as you see fit. Part of this is just due to the limitations of extrapolating far into the future — something project managers are keenly aware of. We can barely give accurate estimates of tasks that take on the order of days, much less create and follow a detailed schedule spanning months. That's why the preferred approach is to iterate on short intervals and constantly readjust to unexpected issues or changes in requirements, landscape, knowledge, technologies, etc. Similarly, when you try to predict moral outcomes centuries into the future, things become so fuzzy that everyone is pretty much just making random-ass guesses. At that point it's purely about rhetorical ability rather than logic- and evidence-based actions. This lack of rigor and abundance of subjectivity is fertile grounds for injecting doubt into difficult courses of action the near-term benefits of which we can actually be extremely confident in.

@namelesscreature8843

Came for F1nn5ter, stayed for the lesson

@Bennick323

I might have missed a line somewhere but... I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to realize EA stood for Effective Altruists rather than Electronic Arts... I was starting to go crazy.

@endlessxaura

I think there's also a question about how good and harm exists in the first place. Many disabled people, myself included, suffer because we live in a world that routinely fails to accommodate them. Alleviating disability can be helpful, but it puts the cart before the horse.

@MrTaxiRob

I gave a similar "keynote speech" at a construction project meeting back in the 90s. I eventually left the business entirely and could not have been happier. Unfortunately I was forced to return to it and everything is worse than I could have ever imagined it becoming. I'm struggling to get out of it again in order to keep myself from going insane.

@caseykoons

"The crypto sphere is powered by the hype about how we're all gonna make it. Sometimes that hype is pretty unrealistic." - Abigail. So generous, careful, compassionate! Other times it's a deliberate predatory lie. - me

@valdimer11

It was actually nice to see that all of my concerns I've ever had in the world today of unfettered capitalism and the rich class were elucidated. It was one of those things where I could see a problem but I could point my finger at the nature of the problem. It's like if you are writing a snippet of code and you know what you want the code to do, you understand the logic behind it, but you can't translate it into something readable. You gave me the tools I needed to understand categorically and the logic and concepts behind the things I see wrong in the world today. Thanks.

@mdansbyjr

The problem I have with the non-identity problem is that it cancels itself. For, by NOT taking the bus (to extend the example), you have an equal-but-opposite impact on those same events in the other direction ... and, thus, an equal responsibility to THOSE children as well ... cancelling BOTH arguments with each other.

@Whatyamightcallit

So i am coming back to this video, since it was the first video of yours that i have watched. Since then i have watched a total of 18 of your videos within the last 3 weeks or so. And I got to say, the more you become you, the better these videos get. These videos have helped me get out of a mental stalemate. That combined with some therapy, and a joint here and there, has gotten me back into the saddle of a horse I had unknowingly had left in the stables for years. And I must thank you for that.

@arrayofemotions

Hi Abi. so I work in the INGO sector but hadn't really heard much about effective altruism. There's definitely a lot to unpack here, so thanks for the breakdown. It seems the big difference between EA and how INGO's work is that INGO's have a values-based theory-of-change that does focus on systemic issues where the solely evidence-based approach of EA falls short (although reputable INGO's do also use evidence and learning to shape their programs).

@mrsdsparky

I am so happy that I found your channel. You’re phenomenal at storytelling and educating.

@HillyPlays

Abigail this might be your best yet. I love reading your captions and it's such a clever way to keep people engaged through the end of the video to help metrics. The Prince was SO good. Thanks for the great video and excellent essay of things to chew on.

@ievaday

I really like the form of your videos. The topic of the video title is buried amidst all the examples and related side-stories, so many pieces and parts. And then gradually, as I keep watching, the videos get into this perfect flow, all the pieces assemble like a mosaic into a full picture. And before I realize it - the video is over. I subscribe to many essay channels about many topics (books, tv shows, films, screen writing, character writing, AI and gameplay mechanics in games, and others) but your videos have this unique structure and feeling. Sometimes I get this itch to watch something in this form but almost nothing can scratch that itch (well, maybe CJ The X, lol). So, thank you Ms. Philosophy Tube.

@lauren8135

Being a consultant at a banking conference where you didn’t get paid. That tracks. That tracks so hard, in fact for a financial institution.

@LegosSnake

The idea of giving your personal thoughts during the credit with the captions is genius. I liked the vid a lot. Excited to see The Prince on nebula