On the Edge by Nate Silver

Author:Nate Silver [Silver, Nate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Okay, gang, here’s where I’m going to break the fourth wall. You paid for this tour of the River—er, you paid for this book—so it’s yours to do what you want with. I know from having given this tour before that some folks like to skip ahead to chapter 8 where SBF meets his fate in a New York courtroom, and then catch up with the rest of us afterward. However, my recommendation is that you stay with the group. I’m going to investigate some terms, like “utilitarianism,” that are essential to understanding SBF’s mindset. And while I don’t think EA is exactly to blame for what SBF did, his relationship with the movement isn’t an incidental part of the story either.

But there’s a larger lens, too. Effective altruism, and the adjacent but more loosely defined intellectual movement called “rationalism,” are important parts of the River on their own terms. In some ways, in fact, they are the most important parts. Much of the River is concerned with what philosophers call “small-world problems,” meaning tractable puzzles with relatively well-defined parameters: how to maximize expected value in a poker tournament, or how to invest in a portfolio of startups that brings you upside with little risk of ruin. But in this final portion of the book, we’re visiting the part of the River where people instead think about open-ended, so-called grand-world problems: everything from where best to spend your charitable contributions to the future of humanity itself. Grand-world problems are much easier to screw up, and the consequences for screwing up are much bigger. If a Riverian type can mess up as badly as SBF did on a congressional primary—a small-world problem—think about one with potentially civilization-altering technology like AI in their hands.

However, the reason some Riverians have become obsessed with grand-world problems is because the Village and the rest of the world screw them up all the time, too, in ways that often reflect political partisanship, an endless array of cognitive biases, innumeracy, hypocrisy, and profound intellectual myopia. To take one glaring example that Flynn reminded me of: the U.S. Congress has authorized relatively little—only around $2 billion in spending as part of a 2022–23 budget deal—to prevent future pandemics, even though COVID-19 killed more than 1 million Americans and cost the U.S. economy an estimated $14 trillion. Reducing the chance of a future such pandemic in the United States by even 1 percent would be +EV even at a cost of $140 billion—and yet Congress is barely spending one one-hundredth of that.

These high-stakes decisions are part of why EA and rationalism attract wealthy and powerful people—the new elite that SBF thought he was cultivating at Eleven Madison Park is just the tip of the iceberg. The ideas behind EA have had influence on everyone from Warren Buffett to Bill Gates, even if they wouldn’t necessarily use the EA label to describe themselves. And EAs and rats (rationalists) have long played a leading role in the conceptualization and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.