The way effective altruism has been criticized in the wake of SBF has been disturbing to me, because it frequently conflates:

- Genuine and meaningful criticism of the latest manifestation of "ends justifies the means" thinking (and how it inevitably just becomes a rationalization for whatever you want to do)

- Significant questions about whether longtermism and a focus on hypothetical future people leads to an altruistic impulse getting detached from genuinely useful action

- Sneering philosophical chauvinism that acts as though the way people normally behave (caring a lot about people and things close to them and caring little or not at all about people and things that are far away) is inherently, obviously the right way to act, and anyone diverging from that should be inherently viewed with suspicion

- Tall-poppy syndrome, acting as though people wanting to change the world is itself a problem, rather than flaws in their approach.

There's plenty of ways to poke at the assumptions of EA-as-practiced, but it often feels like the prevailing tone is "these weirdos, why are they trying to be any different than the rest of society?" - which feels more and more like an inevitable trap for outside criticism of any subculture.

(Disclosure: I give 10% of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation as a result of reading about EA ideas, so I consider myself EA-aligned. I don't do any longtermism stuff or participate in discourse beyond that.)

Sacrificing the needs of the few for the greater good of the many is fundamentally flawed as we have seen many times in the past. The fact that EA still sells this idea and naive people fall into its trap show how foolish even smart people can be.

Sam Altman is very smart. The few times I interacted with him, he would always go above and beyond. But even very smart people can be very very dumb / simply not have the mental stamina to deal with multiple hard questions.

It is actually a flaw in our society where material success makes people be put on a pedestal and given importance and then tears them down harshly when inevitably they crack in some manner / appear human.

Man blog spam really evolved tremendously over the last 2 decades, usually this kind of stuff would get spit out a month or so afterwards, but less than a day is amazing

We still don't even know what happened, which might be par for course, but damn

This is a pretty weak character assassination. Maybe they should have waited for the actual facts, which in fact we still don’t know.

Sounds ambitious as a piece, but pretty weak.

The piece fails to zoom out and ask, "Why do Sams keep happening?"

It's more difficult to live with the answer than it is to arrive at the answer:

VCs love single-vision, "we're going to change the world"-type leaders.

The problem this group has, correctly identified by the author, is naïveté, narcissism, seeing people as a means to an end, and an ideology that distorts their reality. These types[1] really get VCs excited, get loads of funding, and then crash an burn.

Kinda sucks this best we can do. I had higher hopes for humanity. I thought we could change the world.

1. See Holmes/Theranos, Hsieh/Zappos, &c.

No insight. The author clearly started with the idea of Altman as some tech bro stereotype and then went in search of quotes to support that assumption, but he didn't find much of interest.