Everybody's talking about Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism (EA), and the ideology known as "longtermism" that many effective altruists, including Bankman-Fried, accept. The tidal wave of bad press triggered by the catastrophic collapse of Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX comes at the worst time for the longtermist community: William MacAskill, the poster boy of longtermism and a moral "adviser" to Bankman-Fried, went on a media blitz after his book "What We Owe the Future" came out last summer, even making an appearance on "The Daily Show." The reputational damage to longtermism caused by recent events has been significant, and it's unclear whether the movement, which had become immensely powerful over the past few years, can bounce back.
Critics of longtermism, like myself, saw this coming from miles away. Not, specifically, the implosion of Bankman-Fried's empire, but something very bad — something that would cause serious harm to real people — in the name of longtermism. For years, I have been warning that longtermism could "justify" actions much worse than fraud, which Bankman-Fried appears to have committed in his effort to "get filthy rich, for charity's sake." Even some within or adjacent to the longtermist community have noted the ideology's potential dangers, yet none of the community's leaders have taken such warnings seriously. To the contrary, critics have been habitually dismissed as attacking a "straw man," or of putting forward their critiques in "bad faith." One hopes the FTX debacle will prompt some serious reflection on why, and how, the longtermist ideology is playing with fire.
