altruism

 At a New York City dive bar on a recent December night, Pitbull blared from the sound system, and a gathering of like-minded young people had passionate debates about morals and the future of humanity. The local community of effective altruists was holding its “end of year celebration.”It seemed like EAs had little to celebrate. Because for the second time in as many years, a guy named Sam was the subject of an extraordinary tech story and an apparent indictment of the EA philosophy. This time it wasn't crypto criminal…

The dos and don’ts of processing data in the age of AIImage by Gilles Lambert on UnsplashBeyond profits: Giving vs gaining in the digital ageThe digital economy has been built on the wonderful promise of equal, fast, and free access to knowledge and information. It has been a long time since then. And instead of the promised equality, we got power imbalances amplified by network effects locking users to the providers of the most popular services. Yet, at first glance, it might appear the users are still not paying…

 The chief executive officer of artificial intelligence startup Cohere criticized the “self-righteousness” of the effective altruism movement and those overly concerned with the threat of an AI doomsday in a letter to his staff on Wednesday.The AI industry has been increasingly divided between those who urge caution and restraint in the development of the technology and those who want to barrel ahead quickly. That tension was on full display this past week amid the rupture between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the board…

Listen to article(2 minutes)Over the past few years, the social movement known as effective altruism has divided employees and executives at artificial-intelligence companies across Silicon Valley, pitting believers against nonbelievers.The blowup at OpenAI showed its influence—and the triumphant return of chief executive Sam Altman revealed hard limits, capping a bruising year for the divisive philosophy. Copyright ©2023Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Listen to…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Job seekers looking to land a role with an altruistic organization may feel too guilty to ask for higher pay, according to a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Both for-profit and nonprofit organizations increasingly employ what has been termed…

Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images)It turns out “effective altruism” isn’t so effective when a billionaire donor’s money dries up.Watch an Exclusive Clip From the Finale of Interview With the Vampire03:26Segment of Challenger Space Shuttle Found at Bottom of Atlantic OceanYesterday 1:50PMThat realization rang especially true this week for members of the FTX Foundation’s Future Fund, whose entire team resigned on Thursday saying they“are now unable to perform our work or process grants.” The resignation comes amid a continued…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Be able to control oneself, cooperate or help others: having socio-emotional abilities is essential for those who wish to interact positively with their peers. These skills are largely acquired during childhood and can be trained in different contexts, such as school, family or leisure. A team from…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their censored accounts back On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week.They are urgent pleas from people who have been banned from the Tencent-owned super app WeChat—begging representatives to restore their accounts on a service that has…

Within effective altruism’s framework, selecting one’s career is just as important as choosing where to make donations. EA defines a professional “fit” by whether a candidate has comparative advantages like exceptional intelligence or an entrepreneurial drive, and if an effective altruist qualifies for a high-paying path, the ethos encourages “earning to give,” or dedicating one’s life to building wealth in order to give it away to EA causes. Bankman-Fried has said that he’s earning to give, even founding the crypto…

Seven years ago, I was invited to my first EA Global, the flagship conference of the effective altruism movement. I was fascinated by effective altruism (EA), which defines itself as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible,” in large part because of the moral seriousness of its practitioners. My first piece on EA, from 2013, tracked three people who were “earning to give”: taking high-paying jobs in sectors like tech or finance for the express purpose of giving half or more…