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I saw the development of EA as a[nother] naive series of misapprehensions about how to live in what the EA adherents see as a scary world. Akin to, "let's abstract this scary world, it'll become less scary, and we can affect / control the outcomes". That's weak adolescent thinking, and bad math besides. And this was after reading MacAskill’s book, which likewise struck me as naive academia-ism; as unpragmatic as any wooly professah unable to do basic household chores, basic tasks of living with others, of simply putting one’s shoulder to the job individually and then collectively. Very little ’survival’ in the world we live in skills [and so it was an amusing though unfortunate confirmation to read a profile of MacAskill in the New Yorker; and i dont care about lowbrow middlebrow [New Yorker/Atlantic] highbrow…. it’s all just brow; despite being ‘the most upcoming young philosopher’, his daily practical life sounds like a mild abstract chaos of ineptitude, though clearly he's a lovely human]
The ‘values’ inherent in EA seemed to me some sort of extremely core Christian penance: induced suffering and avoidance of a meaningful engagement in one’s work, in one’s life, for an abstract “good” at some unspecified future time; a ‘state of grace’, which again, grace = a piece of Christian dogma, grace being granted by god [Leroy?] Storing up ‘riches’ for the future. Instead of hoarding gold, like preppers and other religious zealots saving for armageddon prior to salvation, let’s use Crypto! Easily subverted by a mountebank like Sam Bankman-fried (bankman! now that’s funny).
The idea of working a job that pays well, but a job you dont care about, or even hate, eg - ‘i work at Goldman’ - in order to gift a lot of cash in the future to some intangible and unspecified “general good”. In other words, sacrifice your own personal integrity, it’s ok to corrode your own personal core by doing hateful work, in order to help some guy in 50 years not get malaria. Nope; that’s an edifice built by naive lummoxes who’ve never really ‘worked’. How to find the beauty and meaning in one’s current life, one’s current work - and extend that beauty and meaning to others - THAT is what spurs altruism. The desire to share one’s own personal handiwork.
I can use EAs “metrics” to show that my own personal ‘work’ - which is far smaller scaled than SBF & etc level ‘earn big for the future’- will continue to create positive generational change. The old words, the old concepts - they’re old because they work. EA…was and is novelty for youngsters who want to avoid engagement.