Just finished watching Chube's latest and it was all over the place. Something to do with effective altruism but there really was no central topic. It went from his anecdote about speaking at a conference then to defining effective altruism, which Olly defines as where to best put your money to help people. He then brings up Sam Bankman-Fried, who was a prominent effective altruist, and talks about the FTX scam. Next he talks about longtermism, an ethical aspect of effective altruism which prioritizing efforts that target future existential risks to humanity. There's a brief review of books by the creators of effective altruism, along with a claim by Olly that if a woman wrote those books, she would have included something about reproductive rights. And as a personal aside, it says something about Olly that a crossdresser like F1nn5ter appears more feminine in a skirt than Olly does in a latex nun outfit (he looks like he's dressed up as a tube of toothpaste!).
There's talk about the concern of AI that goes nowhere. Olly brings up the issue of how can one exactly measure how effective altruism will decrease a future risk, a critique of effective altruism about 30 minutes into the 41 minute video. He brought the concerns of handing your money to people like Bankman early on but I don't really see that as a critique of effective altruism and more a common problem with handing your money to a charity.
The last section of the video brings up what Olly claims to be the central question of the video; how do we best use money to change the world? Do we reform within the system or smash the system? Olly passive aggressively leans towards the later as his preference. It ends with a shilling of his play (and the many awards it won) and the Nebula streaming service.
As I said at the beginning, the video goes all over the place. He seems to assume that the effectiveness aspect of effective altruism means to help more distant people, using a hypothetical of spending $40,000 to train a service dog for a blind person in the UK versus $50 to prevent a parasite that causes blindness from harming children in Africa. I assume cost-effectiveness is part of the effectiveness measure but not the only one. He also takes issue with the fact that effective altruists like to support projects that are focused on resolving a problem rather than the root of it. He should take a look at development theory as he would learn how difficult that is. Local political factors, social conditions, priorities of the community, and perhaps importantly, knowing what the root of the problem is!
There is no central theme. Given how Bankman, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk, and his play are brought up, it seems like he was trying to find a philosophical concept that could be strung across the headlines of the past few months.
TL;DR Philosophy Tube put out the video equivalent of C- college paper on effective altruism.
