What the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle can teach us about "longtermism"

Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creed

Tech billionaires seem intent on giving away a lot of money. But are those who support ‘longtermism’ and ‘effective altruism’ ignoring the very real problems of today?

Transcript of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Interview at the DealBook Summit (Published 2022)

In a discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, Sam Bankman-Fried blamed “huge management failures” and sloppy accounting for the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg

archived 12 Mar 2026 21:01:45 UTC

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial.

Can Longtermism Save Us All?

William MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future, and Robert Wright debate longtermism.

Towards a Weaker Longtermism

A key (new-ish) proposition in EA discussions is "Strong Longtermism," that the vast majority of the value in the universe is in the far future, and…

Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion

Will the idealist philosophy survive the conviction of its crypto king?

What Does Sam Bankman-Fried Have to Say for Himself?

An interview with the disgraced CEO.

Alex Mallen's Shortform — LessWrong

Comment by Alex Mallen - Some personal reflections in light of recent events, both on myself and on Constellation (of which I've been a part for a couple years). I think recent events somewhat vindicate a basic "optimization is scary" view more in line with my understanding of classic commentary by MIRI, Paul, etc, as compared to recent discourse about more contingent/specific threat models of "schemers" and "deception". In retrospect, my experience in the last couple years at Redwood (and the Constellation network more broadly) is that the discourse has focused somewhat too much on these more contingent stories for alignment risk and not enough on the basic "Goodharting" argument that misalignment is a convergent result of large-scale outcome-oriented optimization (at multiple levels: the agent, the RL process, and the developers iterating towards seemingly-safe superintelligence). For example, the Constellation view looks somewhat too focused on non-central inductive-bias questions around scheming; I think "the counting argument" was given too central a role when it wasn't a crux for whether superintelligence would take over. (Edit: I want to clarify that I think Redwood's project prioritization decisions look pretty reasonable and often excellent in hindsight, I far-from-regret working with Redwood as a whole, and that Ryan's/Buck's threat modeling looks pretty good too. I am focusing in this piece on the things we have to learn from recent events, which makes the overall mood seem more negative on my experience than I intend. I'm very grateful for being in a environment where I can openly have such reflections, and where these weedsy technical updates are productively received. Again, this is a personal reflection.) I think it was a priori unclear whether the misalignment resulting from of lots of imperfect optimization would result in the more MIRI-like kludge of proxies for fitness, or the more Paul-like explicit reward-seeking and measurement tampering (and reality looks somewhere

How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed (Published 2022)

Mr. Bankman-Fried said in an interview that he had expanded too fast and failed to see warning signs. But he shared few details about his handling of FTX customers’ funds.

Sam Bankman-Fried Draws From Vast Vocabulary of Weasel Words During Cross-Examination

During Sam Bankman-Fried's cross-examination on Monday, the disgraced FTX founder seemd to suffer from memory loss and evaded prosecutions questions.

Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried made effective altruism a punchline, but its philosophy of maximum do-gooding masks a thriving culture of predatory behavior.

Been sleeping on this thought. I’m surprised by how much people are willing to indulge SBF’s weird EA ideology/funky math ideas as some sort of meaningful mitigating factor that moves him from scammer bucket to good/well-intentioned. To me it puts him into the terrorist buck

Been sleeping on this thought. I’m surprised by how much people are willing to indulge SBF’s weird EA ideology/funky math ideas as some sort of meaningful mitigating factor that moves him from scammer bucket to good/well-intentioned. To me it puts him into the terrorist bucket.— Venkatesh Rao ☀️ (@vgr) November 15, 2022

Closing time for Sam Bankman-Fried

An underwhelming finale to a feeble defense.