Comment by gruez
20 days ago
>It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.
You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?
For the same reason people don't think it's OK to rob a bank and donate the money to charity.
That analogy fails because robbing a bank is straightforwardly illegal and norm-breaking (by the majority of the population), whereas being a tobacco executive isn't.
Unethical behavior not being treated as norm-breaking unless its illegal is part of what’s being criticized here, I think.
Not if you ask the younger generation
> For the same reason people don't think it's OK to rob a bank and donate the money to charity.
I have a problem with violence...
Because enabling evil on a large scale to pay for doing good on a small scale doesn't achieve net good.
It wouldn't work because being a tobacco exec is just really harmful: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-i...
Anyone who could do that job has many far better ways they could apply their career.
Because it's sociopathic at its core, I don't have time to pull up the HN back and forth where it was debated during the FTX stuff
but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."
>but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."
Since money is fungible but finite, basically any sort of donation decision involves sacrificing someone. Donating to fund malaria nets when you'd otherwise have funded your local little league team means you're in effect, sacrificing the local little league team. Moreover, by donating their own money, they're by definition "sacrificing myself".
This line of thinking (and EA in general) taken to its logical conclusion results in stuff like LW's famous "moral dilemma" about torturing someone for 50 years being justifiable if it prevents sufficiently many people from the discomfort of having a speck in their eye.