EA - The Effective Altruism movement is not above conflicts of interest by sphor

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Effective Altruism movement is not above conflicts of interest, published by sphor on December 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I'm linking and excerpting a submission to the EA criticism contest published by a pseudonymous author on August 31, 2022 (i.e. before the collapse of FTX).The submission did not win a prize, but was highlighted by a panelist:I was unsure about including this post, but I think this post highlights an important risk of the EA community receiving a significant share of its funding from a few sources, both for internal community epistemics/culture considerations as well as for external-facing and movement-building considerations. I don't agree with all of the object-level claims, but I think these issues are important to highlight and plausibly relevant outside of the specific case of SBF / crypto. That it wasn't already on the forum (afaict) also contributed to its inclusion here.Due to concerns about copyright, I'm excerpting the post besides the summary and disclaimer, but I recommend reading the whole piece.SummarySam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a major donator to the Effective Altruism ecosystem and has pledged to eventually donate his entire fortune to causes aligned with Effective Altruism.By relying heavily on ultra-wealthy individuals like Sam Bankman-Fried for funding, the Effective Altruism community is incentivized to accept political stances and moral judgments based on their alignment with the interests of its wealthy donators, instead of relying on a careful and rational examination of the quality and merits of these ideas. Yet, the Effective Altruism community does not appear to recognize that this creates potential conflicts with its stated mission of doing the most good by adhering to high standards of rationality and critical thought.In practice, Sam Bankman-Fried has enjoyed highly-favourable coverage from 80,000 Hours, an important actor in the Effective Altruism ecosystem. Given his donations to Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours is, almost by definition, in a conflict of interest when it comes to communicating about Sam Bankman-Fried and his professional activities. This raises obvious questions regarding the trustworthiness of 80,000 Hours’ coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried and of topics his interests are linked with (quantitative trading, cryptocurrency, the FTX firm.).In this post, I argue that the Effective Altruism movement has failed to identify and publicize its own potential conflicts of interests. This failure reflects poorly on the quality of the standards the Effective Altruism movement holds itself to. Therefore, I invite outsiders and Effective Altruists alike to keep a healthy level of skepticism in mind when examining areas of the discourse and action of the Effective Altruism community that are susceptible to be affected by incentives conflicting with its stated mission. These incentives are not just financial in nature, they can also be linked to influence, prestige, or even emerge from personal friendships or other social dynamics. The Effective Altruism movement is not above being influenced by such incentives, and it seems urgent that it acts to minimize conflicts of interest.Introduction — Cryptocurrency is not neutral (neither morally nor politically)... Cryptocurrency is not simply an attempt to provide a set of technical solutions to improve existing currency systems. It is an attempt to replace existing monetary institutions by a new political system, it is therefore political at its core...My point here is not to debate on the virtues of the societal model promoted by cryptocurrency actors, but rather to convince readers unfamiliar with the cryptocurrency industry that it is deeply infused with political ideology and is certainly not a purely-te...