I work somewhere between ML, physics, materials science, and information theory. MIT PhD student, opinions my own
I write mainly on Substack: https://bosoncutter.substack.com/
bosoncutter
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If you believe as Beff does (see his Substack) that capitalism is a highly intelligent form of organizing civilization, then the effectiveness is just the competition and other dynamics of capitalism as a distributed form of collective decision making that leans towards the most effective means of technological acceleration.
Also, as cesspool (lol) points out, e/acc seems to be philosophically indistinguishable from capitalists trying to make money investing in technological advancements (see “The Techno Optimist Manifesto”). Venture capital has power-law distributed returns which is where the EA idea of “hits-based giving” came from (or is commonly analogized to). If you believe “maximizing profit from technology == maximizing acceleration”, then a16z is the Coefficient Giving of e/acc.
I think this is a good way of putting it. Andreessen’s “Techno Optimist Manifesto” explicitly advocates for acceleration in a way that philosophically aligns with e/acc, even if it doesn’t use the exact phrase. The e/acc means of “effectiveness” seems to be just the existing machinery of capitalism/VC.
The “e/acc manifesto” as I understand it is basically just this substack post: https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-tenets
It puts itself in direct contrast to EA wrt utility maximization on AGI: “e/acc believes letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves… over-regulating technologies suppresses variance and hence slows down progress towards higher utility technologies and advancement of civilization, a contrast to anti-AGI factions of EA”
My impression of e/acc is that it’s taken the effectiveness and execution framework of EA and flipped the sign of the expected value of incredibly powerful AI to being positive, even without significant work on safety. In other words, if you don’t buy AI doom arguments, then I think it’s basically the same thing as EA. Last week I wrote about how I think e/acc and EA are similar to Ayn Rand, but for entirely different reasons—I think the appeal of EA is broader than is acknowledged and that it is often slowly unbundled by those who are exposed to it.
Musk is sort of interesting because when he explains why he doesn’t donate to charity, he justifies it by saying that building his companies will be a larger benefit to humanity. This would be an unacceptable to answer to Rand because she would say this implies he feels a kind of indebtedness to ‘humanity’ and he is not acting purely for his own “rational self-interest”. A Randian hero would say something like “because I want to”. I find it hard to pin him as either “maximalist-utilitarian-but-I-don’t-like-the-EA-causes-and-will-do-my-own-thing” or pure “rational self-interest” egoist.