What is "EA" in this context? I see a lot of people using this initialism.
Effective Altruism I think
It’s rewarmed rhetoric from the late 19th/early 20th century, most effectively pilloried by Joseph Conrad in “Heart of Darkness” in the character of Mr. Kurtz:
> “ ‘He is a prodigy,’ he said at last. ‘He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,’ he began to declaim suddenly, ‘for the guidance of the cause entrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.’ . . .You are of the new gang - the gang of virtue. ”
The real underlying motivation is that you can more easily get away with shady business practices if you cloak them in the language of great moral works selflessly undertaken for the benefit of mankind. Historical evidence tends to show the opposite outcome, but still, new generations unfamiliar with history will repeat this stuff with starry-eyed enthusiasm.
> “There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.”
Now the horrid millions are users of LLMs who submit morally dubious prompts and who must be gently steered back into the path of correct thought by suitable backroom manipulation, rather than direct rejection of the request.
"crypto bros" to a first approximation
Effective altruism. A lot of the folks working on AI at large tech companies are disproportionately represented in the movement. There's a lot of overlap between EA and the rationalist community as well. The wikipedia page is a good place to start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism