Cy on Nostr: I love discussing the absurdity of Effective Altruism! It's so delightfully ...

I love discussing the absurdity of Effective Altruism! It's so delightfully subversive, if you ignore all the muppets flapping their jaws about spending your money on assholes. To be "effective" you have to be aware just what effect you're trying to effect. Altruism by itself is boring status quo maintenance, letting the assholes rob people even more, because the altruists are there to pick up the check. Sam Altman strides out the restaurant, and the waiter's standing there saying "Presumably you're the stop restaurants from going bankrupt charity, and that will be $300?"

But when you get into the connotations of "effective" it gets interesting. You're not just doing it out of the dumb, blind, goodness of your heart, trying to help billionaires mop up their messes. You're doing it to effect something. You could spend your money on thieves, to help them better rob the monied elites. You could spend your money on the black market, and pretend it vanished into thin air, taking power from the surveillance state who wants to track the path of every penny, so they can ensure you'll always be in debt and slavery. Heck, you could burn the money, and skip the country, if you got some assholes to put up venture capital for your brilliant idea of orbital bongs.

None of those help you individually, since there are places you could get more benefit from spending your money. But being altruistic in this fashion strategically can subvert the money system itself. You're effectively trying to destroy the reputation of money, so people won't trust it anymore, and the guys with billions of it won't be worth a plugged nickel.

Spending one's hard earned cash on lawbreaking, or getting yourself deliberately robbed in an insurance scheme isn't typically what said muppets talk about. But if you do talk about it, it's... much more interesting than just donating to your local homophobic Salvation Army.