Not everything is quantifiable, and even more, not any family of things (investments, in this case) admits a linear ordering (they may even not admit a total order).

There can be incomparable outcomes from actions, and they may be maximal in their suborder.

This is difficult until you stop measuring everything and dedicate a minute to think of ordered trees.

How to fix this problem?

It’s just last century’s Objectivism with an even more smoke-and-mirrors name.

Effective altruism should have been effectively killed by SBF’s take on consequentialism - that basically the ends justify the means, and the means are all fine because one has egotistically (and narcissistically) omnipotently computed the optimal end result therefore the steps between now and that end are all justified. The problem is the world is a complex messy place, and reason is the slave of the passions, so in the real world it just seems to result in fraud and manipulation and can justify basically any kind of behaviour while making the doer believe they’re acting morally.

If this new way of organizing is meant to address the problems of ivory-tower academia, why does it just seem to be reproducing it at (hyper)scale? All in the name of euphemized utilitarianism?

Is there any room here for healthy debate? For academic rigor? For looking to the past? Or is it all just vibes? Just imagining a world where they didn't happen to get all their money from like one guy, but still persevered in their thought. What could that look like? Is it even anything at all?