I can't imagine EA people supported the USAID decision specifically - but the silicon valley environment, the investing bubble, our entire tech culture is why Musk has the power he does, right?

And the rationalist community writ large is very much part of that. The whole idea that private individuals should get to decide whether or not to do charity, or where they can casually stop giving funds or etc, or that so much money needs to be tied up in speculative investments and so on, I find that all pretty distasteful. Should life or death matters be up to whims like this?

I apologize though, I've gotten kinda bitter about a lot of these things over the last year. It's certainly a well intentioned philosophy and it did produce results for a time - there's many worse communities than that.

> the silicon valley environment, the investing bubble, our entire tech culture is why Musk has the power he does, right?

For sure, not quibbling with any of that. The part I don't get is why it's EA's fault, at least more than it's many, many other people and organizations' fault. EA gets the flak because it wants to take money from rich people and use it to save poor people's lives. Not because it built the Silicon Valley environment / tech culture / investing bubble.

> Should life or death matters be up to whims like this?

Referring back to my earlier comment, can you sell me on the idea that they shouldn't? If you think aid should all come from taxes, sell me on the idea that USAID is less subject to the whims of the powerful than individual donations. Also sell me on the idea that overseas aid will naturally increase if individual donations fall. Or, sell me on the idea that the lives of the poor don't matter.

For decades things like usaid were bipartisan and basically untouchable, so that and higher taxes would have been a fairly secure way to do things. The question is can that be accomplished again, or do we need a thorough overhaul of who's in power in various parts of society?

None of this will happen naturally though. We need to make it happen. So ultimately my position is that we need to aim efforts at making these changes, possibly at a higher priority than individual giving - if you can swing elections or change systems of government the potential impact is very high in terms of policy change and amount of total aid, and also in terms of how much money we allow the rich to play and gamble with. None of these are natural states of affairs.

(Sincerely) good luck with that, but I don't see why it means we should be against saving the lives of poor people in the immediate term. At some point we might just have to put it down to irreconcilably different mental wiring.