I was surprised by the weakness of this article, regardless the potential absurdities of parts of EA.
Why does The Economist consider this the most important issue this week, in a world of complex problems, to splash its first leader on (and more than one page long too)?
Why would a movement which started as nerds buying mosquito nets to stop malaria be "a bunch [of] post hoc justifications for bad behaviour"? You say this like it's an established fact or at least a common argument, yet I've never heard it before.
A big part of EA is earning to give, i.e. making the big bucks at Torture Nexus, Inc. so you can buy more mosquito nets than you could as an EMT or whatever. It’s not hard to see how this can excuse some pretty terrible behavior, especially if you never actually get around to the buying mosquito nets part.
I don't know. Lots of movements lose their way. I just know that every time it comes up, the story is that some nerd with a lot of big ideas ended up getting carried away and causing a bunch of harm. The article brings up Sam Bankman-Fried, for instance. But you could also look at the obvious scam that WorldCoin was. Or look at all of the preventable respiratory illnesses which are being caused by the datacenter buildout, and the corresponding mantra re: we have to go fast so AI is smart enough to cure diseases.
If you wanna do good in the world, you can't just aim a bunch of money at a goal and expect the good to happen, you gotta get your hands dirty and course correct when your original plan turns out to be more harmful than helpful. I'm sure there are a lot of good intentions in there, but from the outside it's looking like the supposed rationality has been compromised by greed at the expense of the supposed altruism. As expressions of altruism go, EA just doesn't seem very effective.
I can't answer your question as to why, but the only person that has ever tried to convince me to consider effective altruism was in charge of marketing for the New Zealand Taxpayer's Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Taxpayers%27_Union). Even at the time (without knowing much about EA) it seemed immediately clear that this person was essentially 'ethics washing'.
The theory of effective altruism is fine. A sort of pragmatic utilitarianism that includes the future.
But the practice of effective altruism and the problematic influential figures who are vocal effective altruists is what is bringing all of the negative attention.
A definition is a lot to ask for. If you truly need somebody to define "bad" for you, you're asking in the wrong place.
But we don't need to define it to know it when we see it. Here are some examples of bad behavior which is encouraged by the way we currently practice economics:
- Operating generators in violation of local regulation such that the neighborhood around your new data center now has a smattering of new respiratory illnesses is bad behavior. The economic system we've built encouraged that outcome by focusing only on the consent of whatever banker granted the loan and not on the consent of the nearby community (relevant because the loan created the money which then bought the illegal generators). We further encourage abuses of this kind by letting irrational markets determine that it's admirable, because if the stock price went up then surly it must be so, and by doing so we subsequently increase the operator's ability to take out more loans of this kind. People are dying of lung cancer and economic indicators are saying "all systems go."
- Sending weapons to terrorists with the understanding that once they destabilize the regional government, they'll give you a favorable deal re: making off with whatever local resources you're after is bad behavior. That's basically US foreign policy in South America in the 80's, and we provided teams of economists to help draft the new dictators' constitutions to ensure that we could continue to exploit those countries long after.
- Charging $80k for enough Sovaldi to treat a Hepatitis C infection is bad behavior. It's not difficult to synthesize (people have done it in their garages for <$500), and the risk of spreading further infection because you can't afford to treat yourself is high. Society bears a tremendous cost because Gilead has decided that the economics of the situation justify the price they're setting.
Economists tell people that these bad things are unfortunate consequences of a system that for the most part is a good thing. But when they're pressed to support that claim they always do so against a meaningless background, something having to do with barter, as if it's not obvious that if we didn't have a system with this broken design, we wouldn't go back to the stone ages, we'd instead have a different system with a potentially less broken design.
Despite resting on such a feeble value proposition re: the current status quo, economists don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives either. They appear to be rather happily at work for powerful men who are hurting people, where they manufacture for those men justifications about why the pain is in fact an unavoidable consequence of the laws of physics, and no something that they should feel guilty about.
I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. It's just hard to look at history and come to any conclusion besides that they're not very good at resisting to attempts to corrupt those intentions.
I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning). But what circulates is troubling. E.g. statistically optimising for future even if it means harming current can be bad dressed in an excuse. Assigning value e.g. to lives (from prawns to humans) can also be a statistical way to do harm with an excuse. Overall, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…
Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world. That's obviously not a bad thing?
The article here goes on a grotesque witch hunt, claiming baselessly things like "polyamory" was widespread among "the movements" adherents.
You here postulate, Anthropic was a "final" manifestation of that movement. How? Why? Do they practice polyamory there?
Trying to apply rationality in domains where it's ineffective is obviously a bad thing. In the real world, only a limited subset of issues can be reduced to logic and calculations. To believe otherwise is pure hubris, and if you've read the classical tragedies you know the results.
> claiming baselessly things like "polyamory" was widespread among "the movements" adherents.
Which is especially weird to do in 2026. I mean, I get the salacious clickbait, but seriously, at this point does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?
I remember when outrage peddler Laura Loomer did a big pearl clutch on X about some other conservative being into consensual non-monagamy, and the collective response from everyone from all political stripes was a giant shrug.
> Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world. That's obviously not a bad thing?
To use the movement's own language: At the best EA's are paperclip maximizers. Why is it that in one context people recognize formula driven 'rational' utility maximizing as obviously dangerous and evil, but in another see it as the ultimate expression of good. It's a specious argument to go "my objectives good, clippies bad". It may well be true but the maximizing party never knows their goals are bad!
"Rational 'good' maximizing" is itself problematic, because it disregard the danger inherit in any utility function. The nazi campaign to cleanse their population was motivated and justified in part by the latest in eugenic science.
Absolutely central to the EA centered facets of "ai safety" is imposing controls on people development and use of AI-- or even more broadly on their behavior in order to prevent creation of any AI that doesn't follow their definition of 'good' (which they equate to the literal destruction of the universe). It isn't just crazy, it's evil, and it can be reliably predicted to end in harm at the scale of genocide if it doesn't fizzle on its own.
The weird sex cult crap is there, along with the embezzling, nepotism, and other dramacrap-- but I think these are just a common side effect of grifter driven cults rather than being integral to anything that need concern the public. AI doomerism would still be a dangerous cult even if they were all chaste monks.
How do you consider an article "good" when it's "argumentation" amounts to making baseless and reality-distorting smears against a proxy, with the real goal of libeling the opposition to unrestricted AI development?
The White House and "Effective Accelerationists" (e/acc) like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are behind that smear campaign. To each their own?
There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.
There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.
While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.
If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.
When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
When I talk about ineffective altruism I talk about accumulating capital and shutting everyone out of innovation in the name of regulatory protection. Nothing like a daddy to protect us sounds like altruism.
No, but they're too busy to notice stuff like that because they're so focused on trying to prevent a 0.01% chance of human extinction with error bars of +/- 0.01%.
What’s that thing pg said about a submarine? Somebody’s got a dossier of all the weirdest things about effective altruism they can find (not that it’s in short supply), and they’re out there convincing reporters who need to run articles about AI that this is the ideology of the AI guys, and wouldn’t your readers like to know all the lurid details?
While it’s probably something prosaic as “Anthropic pays the most lip service to EA, this makes them look bad” or “Our employees are leaning EA and it’s causing problems, things would be easier if they were too embarrassed to admit they were EA”, I do wonder - the board member who instigated the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI does happen to be a long-time effective altruist…
> There is an elusive quality to effective altruism. The movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only “EA adjacent”.
I think the fundamental problem with effective altruism is it assumes there is some absolute form of good to be maximised. In reality goodness is largely in the eye of the beholder and if you don't deal with that you get silly results. Do good but recognise there are limitations to the idea and common sense is the way to go?
Effective Altruism is helping each other be 'altruists'.
Why did I hire Caroline for Manifund?
Manifund needs talent. Leading AI labs warn about recursive self improvement; poverty and disease remain unsolved; billions of animals suffer hell on earth. I, my team, and many EAs I know, are often burning the midnight candle to address these wrongs. I don’t wish to sideline a pair of capable hands.
It's funny that if they had got over their cash flow shortfall, FTX would have been massively profitable now with it's holdings in btc and Anthropic. If only he hadn't pissed off the Binance guy it could have all been different.
I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up.
At best they are just people trying to donate money to effective charities like mosquito nets in Africa. At worst, some might be wasting their money on animal welfare or AI safety. This doesn't seem like enough to fuel the kind of backlash I see.
I can't speak to anyone else's sneers and disdain, but mine come from all the motivated reasoning surrounding them. One example:
'The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.'
There were a lot of explanations about why that was the most effective use of funds, but every single one reads like motivated reasoning to me.
The Sam Bankman-Fried debacle of pay off politicians and gamble the customer deposits to become very rich because EA probably falls in that category and gave it a bad name.
I think it's got two components - first, people don't actually understand the tenants of mainstream EA. For instance, some people think that one of the core principles of EA is "make as much money as possible at any cost", which is incorrect.
Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component.
EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)
Is it just me or is this a pattern that's been repeating throughout our society. Let me know if you see this too.
Step one somebody comes up with a philosophy that would be a big improvement on what we've all been doing.
Step two people start living it and it seems to work for them. It seems to make them happy and it seems to make the world a better place.
Step three dark tetrad types show up and hijack the good thing as cover for the bad things they're doing. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing type maneuver.
Step four people who have never engaged with the philosophy recognize that there's lots of dark tetrad people hiding under it and start using the philosophy as a heuristic for bad person.
Step five the authentic practitioners start to question whether the good thing was really good because people treat them like they're bad for it.
Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground. There are 3 possible responses:
1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground
2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first
3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.
I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
> Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground.
I think this is an unhealthy belief. More likely, people don't know what is or is not moral, because their decisions are plagued by self-interest, limited knowledge, and the influence of peer pressure and tradition that may or may not have gotten things right.
So it is more about people taking calculated bets, say on a share price. They don't know for sure if they think the price will go up or down, they are guessing, but not randomly guessing. There is an underlying investment thesis that may or may not be correct.
So a contrarian investor, may be a genius or a fool. Time will tell. Most people, when they see a contrarian investor, decide the prudent approach is "wait and see", because they have their own thesis about a different set of stocks.
Everyone is trying to figure this out as best as they can. To think that you have the moral high ground by holding some niche beliefs is a foolish way of living.
That's how I understand it: a movement encouraging people to donate their wealth to good causes which save and improve lives.
However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.
But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.
I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.
It's a way for the wealthy to feel like they're doing good by collecting money. They tend to twist the tenets to favor "what you're currently doing is good, actually" even if "what you're currently doing" is itself unethical, like modern adtech. The stated goals and principles of EA are one thing; the actual practice of it is another
In short it is because they have influence. There is a difference between sending $1 to Africa instead of America and sending millions. There is a difference between an AI safety researcher fantasizing about AI hacking everything on the planet and their AI models telling me I can't look for bugs in my code.
You may do that with honesty and just be a useful front for the heads behind the curtain. In their calculations you are still the value of 32 prawns or something.
I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force.
It's a fairly common talking point that EA is bad because it's too friendly with billionaires. I admit I would struggle to find an example of somebody openly celebrating preventable deaths of poor people, but the large numbers of lives saved by EA-funded interventions don't generally figure in these people's calculus.
Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him.
Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".
I've always been wary of effective altruism. Anything that geek and people want to "optimize out" by engineering has a risk of just being a "let's ride very fast towards that wall" kind of venture
If they had to show the results of the number of lives they saved, that would certainly get rid of the speculative longtermist bullshit or their focus on AI.
- their evidence is true (eg it's not just a too small sample size, in very particular conditions, etc)
- and MORE IMPORTANTLY that they haven't forgotten OTHER EVIDENCE which points to a much better way to do it
usually when you "see the world through metrics" you start to be very efficient at optimizing them... but then the first minute your metrics start pointing a different direction to the one it's "supposed" to (which happens to 100% of metrics since "all models are wrong but some are useful") and you go with the full speed of your optimization on the WRONG target, you start getting into issues quickly...
Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group. It makes more sense to me that way. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from moving forward.
EA people tend to be in favour of raising taxation. The "giving what we can" pledge is essentially a pledge to voluntarily increase your own taxes in lieu of government taxes.
I strongly agree, but I don't think the USA is capable of doing that. That sort of socialist communitarianism is at odds with the objectivist individualism that they commonly valorize, and underpins most of their heroic stories.
It’s another bubble that a handful of people invented for themselves to insulate them from the reality of the effect on the world. It’s one of the most genuinely pathetic “movements” I’ve ever seen.
That guy is a scammer who participated in the Alameda / FTX scam: he was SBF's mentor and fled the ship, like a rat, before SBF was sent to jail.
So far and as long as I know the ill-acquired mansion in England by MacAskill with 15 million GBP stolen by SBF hasn't been clawed back yet (but it may: in other fraud cases funds and properties have been clawed back as much as 20 years after the fact).
And he certainly didn't hand the mansion back without being asked: for thieves don't do that.
A despicable human being.
Now I know why he's given a voice in some publications: it's for the same reason SBF was presented as the 2nd coming of Christ before his scam came to light. These people have relations and splurge (corrupt) money on a lot of people.
The mansion in question (Wytham Abbey) was purchased as an event venue with funds from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna via Coefficient Giving. No funding from FTX was involved. (The Effective Ventures Foundation did receive unrelated funding from FTX, but that was returned in a settlement with the bankruptcy estate in 2023.)
This one's interesting in claiming to be first/early to worry about pandemics (prior to COVID) and AI existential dilemma (before ChatGPT) as, kind of, stakes in the ground justification for 'the value of the effective altruism movement'. I find that interesting in that I don't see much publicity from the big EA guns supporting the recommendations given by pandemic experts around the world. Can we hear from some of us powerful members in defence of Fauci? If not, the entire movement is a fucking scam full of cowards.
Feels like shaky justification for the validity of the 'movement'. But I'm suspicious of any belief system once it gets to a group size large enough to create a full-circle-jerk. Especially if many members have enough wealth to insulate themselves against the worries of your average human.
We will use our big brains to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
For our first bold conclusion we have determined that all of the world's money should be in the hands of people with big brains who intend to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
This concludes the planning phase. There will be an additional planning phase once we've collected all of the money, we promise.
That's the take away I get. It's a philosophical justification to being as greedy and heartless as possible because in the future the money you got from burning down the world could potentially be used to reverse that damage.
Very few billionaires are EAs. A few more have a generally EA approach to their giving. But billionaires are generally not that keen on EA because it would involve donating almost all their money.
If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
Basically EA operates as an insurance system for billionaires who want to gain enough wealth and power to collapse humanity until they need to insurance against the collapse of humanity so that they can keep extracting anyway.
"Sorry I can't it's unethical to give more to you just because you are closer to me, I need to do some excel sheets and maximize my mosquito net donations to africa."
That's definitely how it comes across now. Especially with all the TESCREAL weirdness that gets attached to it. But originally, EA really was extremely altruist. Early pioneers were practically Francis of Assissi-style vow of poverty people, giving away the majority of their income to the worthiest cause they could find.
But somewhere along the way it attracted the attention of tech bros, billionaires and AI believers, and the whole thing seems to have gotten corrupted way beyond recognition. I think it started by telling people that instead of becoming a volunteer, they could also become a stock trader and donate all of their income to fund a dozen volunteers. And once you've got that kind of money, well, isn't just donating 10% already pretty good? And then came the AI concerns, which mostly seem to have become a reason to hype up irresponsible AI use, rather than the opposite (note that both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded based on the concerns for the threat AI might pose to humanity), and then the Longtermist idea that the concerns of potentially trillions of humans in the very distant future should outweigh the concerns of the mere billions alive today, lead to basically an excuse not to help people today anymore. Also, all those millionaire and billionaire tech bros are still millionaires and billionaires. Is there any EA adherent who has given away that level of wealth?
So while the poverty and altruism of the early pioneers was extremely inspiring, the current visible public face of EA is exactly the opposite.
They define "altruism" as "don't actually do anything about the problems of today, so that you can do more about them tomorrow". But does tomorrow ever come?
Bluntly, I trust Jesus more than them. And in Luke 16:10, Jesus said, "One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much."
I think you got it backwards. Their motivation is this "I must look charitable, but if there are no problems, then there is no reason to donate, hence I must operate at both ends. I must create problems by earning money and then solve them by spending money."
That certainly seems to be the motivation of AI companies warning us about the threat of AI to humanity, while working as hard as possible to bring it about.
To me most representatives of EA resemble people that read about goodness in the book, formulated some notion of it solely through that reading, and then designed an approach to bring it to life. Purely intellectual, not something experienced and lived through, what is the case for the normal people. Very uncanny, like psychopaths learning about empathy from the lecture, and then deciding they would become empathetic based on the notes they took.
Their morality is like musicality of someone that learned how to read sheet music and learned how every note sounds like or even how whole chords sound like, but never heard any music being played. Music is not about computing harmonic formula, and goodness is not about solving utility equation.
‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.
EAs like Nick Bostrom argue that we have a greater moral obligation to hypothetical trillions of future persons--including an obligation to see to it that they come into existence--than to people who actually exist. Personally, I think that's insane sociopathy.
> The movement’s long-standing fears of an AI catastrophe make it a villain in the eyes of the Trump administration. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” is the Department of War’s attack line. The president’s allies are going after Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as a representative of effective altruism.
I'd wager that it's simply the government wanting absolute power (as it should) and going after misaligned oligarchs.
So, effectively, power struggles in circles beyond our reach.
Arguably a good thing that the government would eventually try to claw back power there, given that in theory, it's democratically elected and all.
Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource to the point where they steer society itself?
I've been scratching my head a bit lately about what EA seems to have turned into.
Originally, the idea seemed to be simply to spend your money to do the most effective good. Don't spend it on "charities" where most of it ends up in the pockets of their executives, don't spend it on issues that don't really accomplish much, etc. Their initial priorities seemed pretty decent. GiveWell type stuff.
But nowadays it seems to be completely corrupted by all that TESCREAL crap (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism). Most of those make no sense or seem to be utterly irrelevant to the goals of EA. The one that seems to try is Longtermism, but the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
I thought that was just a bunch of weirdos or corrupt rich people trying to leverage EA as PR for not actually having to do anything for real people. But it turns out that EA pioneers like Ord and MacAskill are also on board with that nonsense. The 80,000 hours jobs list is now all about AI. The whole thing seems to be just a massive grift with no redeemable value.
Is there still some angle from which EA makes sense? Was it always pure grift? Or did the founders get corrupted by proximity to too many billionaires?
All ideas are best in moderation. Danger rests into turning any one perspective into an organizing principle for your life (or worse, for many people's lives).
> the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
And as far as I can tell, that's one of the most coherent parts of the TESCREAL package. Apparently it also includes goals to transcend mortality or humanity, at which points you've definitely lost touch with any meaningful form of morality.
I don't pretend to understand everything that TESCREAL is about, but that's at least partially because much of it strikes me as utter SciFi bullshit that's completely unhinged from reality. And that's not even getting into some of the deeply racist eugenics stuff I've come across.
If there's any real meaningful value in EA, all the other stuff is distracting from it. Get back to fixing poverty, inequality and animal cruelty. But there seems to be so much billionaire grift involved in it by now, that anything that threatens their elevated position (which by itself is a threat to humanity) is unlikely to find approval with the big money that's now behind it.
What EA has turned into is analogous to what the US Government has turned into.
It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.
I'm pleasantly surprised how kind and charitable this article ends up being. I'm really used to shortcuts being used to ridicule EAs ("look, these morons think shrimps are an important problem!"), so I'm happy the article takes the time to present the object-level arguments (e.g. yes, it's kind of fucked up we torture tens of billions of small animals per year in ways that would make most people physically recoil if they had to look at it, just to produce a luxury good. Watch the Dominion documentary!).
I know I'm already late to the party and HN's libertarian techno-optimism means that lots of people have already made up their mind about EAs, but still, I'd like to make my case.
I've mets dozens of EAs in person and gone to a few events with hundreds of them. None of the people I met were billionaires and AFAICT most of them didn't especially hope to become millionaires. A lot of them were broke students, though obviously a lot also had comfortable tech jobs.
What they had in common was that they were the most driven, idealistic people I've ever met. All of them cared about something, whether it was animal welfare, climate change, global poverty or AI x-risk. They talked about these things not the way people talk on the internet, when they're trying to win an argument, they talked about them like they have stakes and making the right decision will impact lives.
Every step of my journey to becoming flexitarian, then vegetarian, then vegan-ish, has been spurred by an effective altruist talking to me about the moral outrage that is factory farming, and that it was something that mattered and that we can and must do something about.
Yes, they're often sexually open, yes, the cults (and all the problems that plague groups dominated by autistic white men) exist, yes SBF exists and Effective Altruism gave him way too much of a platform, yes, they bought a castle that one time, but these things shouldn't be treated as the only things worth knowing about the movement, the same way one shouldn't denounce feminism forever because [insert stupid thing some high-profile feminist did that one time]. No reformist movement looks good when presented through the lens of its detractors.
EA is a group of people that spend a lot of their time encouraging each other to do more, to believe that actions matter and every life has value. They're eager and sincere, they take abstract ideas seriously and consider their consequences even when it's uncomfortable or weird, and that makes them a target of ridicule (because people don't like their conclusions, and because cynical people like to take overly eager people down a notch).
So I'm really happy the Economist refrained from taking those cheap shots throughout. It's a good article.
Sure. I don't think EAs are magically unique. A lot of movements (feminists, socialists, churches, unions) produce driven, organized and kind-hearted people.
Fair point. Just take the good and discard the rest.
Churches and religions as a general rule want to 'do good', but also have a variable amount of crazy kinda irremovably attached to them, which is the bit that is generally focused on too.
The dangerous part is where the 'doing good together' part slowly turns into normalizing the crazy part by 'social infection'.
As long as you don't end up being able to rationalize some behavior that, before you joined the group, you'd never have participated in or condoned.
I grew up in a cult, too. They were very eager and sincere. I'm very familiar with "eager and sincere" hiding incoherent motivated reasoning and savior complexes that give their adherents cover to behave both stupidly and horridly -- with a smile.
I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.
Much of the world will be surprised to hear that they have been conquered by effective altruism. Seriously what kind of spheres does the person live in who wrote that article? I think they need to hire some people who spend less time in online blogs and on twitter and more time idk, traveling to China or India
Almost certainly a tech/venture-capitalist bubble like the SF bay area. They really seem to live in a different world from even the rest of California much less the wider US or the world.
I find increasingly that written words from organisations are trending worse. I tend to find particular authors are sometimes good writers, and sometimes they have blogs which I have always liked but more & more lately.
My national/public broadcaster/media organisation(ABC, Australia) is doubling down on fiddling all day with headlines & the pictures. They’re not selling any product, they don’t need to follow commercial trends.
Is it reasonable that less privileged people might have some hope? Does anyone want to live in a luxurious mansion surrounded by people who are just trying to make ends meet?
You might benefit from thinking critically about who and what you consider to be greedy. If you don't, it's easy to be tricked by various kinds of shell games, where certain kinds of work are never considered "greedy" or certain kinds of charity make the donor appear disproportionately generous. One game that's become pretty well known is how many "donations" to well-funded schools are in fact admissions payments for wealthy kids.
Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
I feel like there is this weird thing where people will criticize people who do charity work in not quite the right way (from the criticizers perspective), but are totally fine with people who just use their money to buy a yacht.
I'd much rather have people spend their money on feeding the hungry, even imperfectly then spending it on other pursuits.
I sometimes wonder what the critics of EA are doing to eradicate the ills of the world or even their local community. Is it more than what EA is doing? If not, i'd say those in glass houses should be wary of throwing stones.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.
> their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later
This is a very uncommon idea within EA. There are some people who support it ("patient philanthropy") but almost everyone within EA either thinks you should be working / donating to help people/animals (most "neartermists") or you should be working / donating to help reduce extinction risk (most "longtermists").
Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA. How prominent is it within the movement.
I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
> Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
Are they? To what degree are they? And to what degree are they not helping the hungry today, in order to amass more money so that they can in theory help the hungry more tomorrow?
I can respect someone like Bill Gates. He hasn't been perfect, not by a long shot, but he's put real money into really trying to help real problems. What's the track record of the effective altruists? (Genuine question - I haven't researched them enough to know.)
Feeding the hungry in particular is uncommon, but global poverty (usually malaria nets and other specific impactful + neglected interventions) is the largest cause area in EA, and something I've personally donated a lot to.
This isn't an indicator, to be part of a culture war something has to be accepted as normal by half. Culture wars are driven by the shock of someone telling you the most normal thing about your upbringing and parent's values is in fact a horrible deviance. The article here is closer to, "we found something we can publish bad news about, without offending our funders."
People need to learn to disassociate the 'cultural movement' from the ideology.
Read what Chomsky has to say about postmodernism.
Look at the evolution of 'String Theory'. Thousands of PhDs minted in something that likely has no relevance to anything. String Theory could not have achieved prominence merely as an idea - it only rose to the fore because it was a 'movement' - with all of the supporting accoutrements. It only has an arcane value, not as a leading premise. The 'movement' pushed it to the fore.
Look at Scientology / Dianetics (that one is pretty hard).
'Movements' are almost always about the 'Movement', and the ideology often seems to take a back seat.
The 'Movement' is something almost nominal to rally around, that helps create a 'form' for a loose consensus.
It inspires some people to act as though they are doing something for a 'greater good' (whether they are or not), and for leaders to dereference their apparent authority towards that greater ideal.
Imagine if all of these 'ideas' were just left as 'ideas' or maybe 'ideals' and that's that - and there were no groups, meetups, nobody really publicly 'aligned' with them or signalled their participation.
Then we'd have a better notion of what these ideas really are.
But in reality, these systems are 'social movements', groupings, ways for people to signal their special merit or alignment.
It's social politics. Red v Blue. Bloods v Crips. Insiders v Outsiders. Specials v Normies. Nobility v Plebes. Citizens v Slaves.
It gets problematic when the groups get power, people believe in their own gibberish, people place all of their faith in group leaders even when actions by the group defy the nature of the movement itself.
"We're breaking the rules of finance and stealing from people because 'we're the good guys', right? Everything we do is in the name of ... 'good' ... so we can do pretty much anything". is the story of FTX.
Look at it first through the lens of the social organization, then separately through the lens of ideals.
String theory birthed real and rigorous mathematics and generated amazing results in geometry. Regardless of what its physical status turns out to be, it has already contributed enough.
To compare it to maga or scientology is complete bullshit. Just ask geometers how they felt when string theory people started producing solid result after result in geometry. It is completely irrelevant whether string theory has any significance or meaning as a physical theory, it has completely paid its dues in the realm of mathematics. One of its major figures literally won the Fields medal in math, the only physicist to have won this award. Whatever happens of strings as a physical theory, the mathematics it produced stands completely solid.
I was surprised by the weakness of this article, regardless the potential absurdities of parts of EA.
Why does The Economist consider this the most important issue this week, in a world of complex problems, to splash its first leader on (and more than one page long too)?
Effective altruism, like economics, is mostly a bunch post hoc justifications for bad behavior.
> Actually, if you think real hard about it, we're the good guys
--the bad guys
The economist likes it because it resembles what their target audience tells themselves so they can sleep at night.
Why would a movement which started as nerds buying mosquito nets to stop malaria be "a bunch [of] post hoc justifications for bad behaviour"? You say this like it's an established fact or at least a common argument, yet I've never heard it before.
A big part of EA is earning to give, i.e. making the big bucks at Torture Nexus, Inc. so you can buy more mosquito nets than you could as an EMT or whatever. It’s not hard to see how this can excuse some pretty terrible behavior, especially if you never actually get around to the buying mosquito nets part.
I don't know. Lots of movements lose their way. I just know that every time it comes up, the story is that some nerd with a lot of big ideas ended up getting carried away and causing a bunch of harm. The article brings up Sam Bankman-Fried, for instance. But you could also look at the obvious scam that WorldCoin was. Or look at all of the preventable respiratory illnesses which are being caused by the datacenter buildout, and the corresponding mantra re: we have to go fast so AI is smart enough to cure diseases.
If you wanna do good in the world, you can't just aim a bunch of money at a goal and expect the good to happen, you gotta get your hands dirty and course correct when your original plan turns out to be more harmful than helpful. I'm sure there are a lot of good intentions in there, but from the outside it's looking like the supposed rationality has been compromised by greed at the expense of the supposed altruism. As expressions of altruism go, EA just doesn't seem very effective.
The article reads like a smear campaign and the actual target appears to be the opposition to unrestricted AI development.
The claims made there are beyond absurd and based on a remarkable absence of anything resembling reason.
That's echoed by a surprising amount of people here.
I can't answer your question as to why, but the only person that has ever tried to convince me to consider effective altruism was in charge of marketing for the New Zealand Taxpayer's Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Taxpayers%27_Union). Even at the time (without knowing much about EA) it seemed immediately clear that this person was essentially 'ethics washing'.
But the practice of effective altruism and the problematic influential figures who are vocal effective altruists is what is bringing all of the negative attention.
Read moar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Other_criti...
>economics, is mostly a bunch post hoc justifications for bad behavior
and your definitions of bad behavior are therefore not post hoc, so let me hear your definitions.
A definition is a lot to ask for. If you truly need somebody to define "bad" for you, you're asking in the wrong place.
But we don't need to define it to know it when we see it. Here are some examples of bad behavior which is encouraged by the way we currently practice economics:
- Operating generators in violation of local regulation such that the neighborhood around your new data center now has a smattering of new respiratory illnesses is bad behavior. The economic system we've built encouraged that outcome by focusing only on the consent of whatever banker granted the loan and not on the consent of the nearby community (relevant because the loan created the money which then bought the illegal generators). We further encourage abuses of this kind by letting irrational markets determine that it's admirable, because if the stock price went up then surly it must be so, and by doing so we subsequently increase the operator's ability to take out more loans of this kind. People are dying of lung cancer and economic indicators are saying "all systems go."
- Sending weapons to terrorists with the understanding that once they destabilize the regional government, they'll give you a favorable deal re: making off with whatever local resources you're after is bad behavior. That's basically US foreign policy in South America in the 80's, and we provided teams of economists to help draft the new dictators' constitutions to ensure that we could continue to exploit those countries long after.
- Charging $80k for enough Sovaldi to treat a Hepatitis C infection is bad behavior. It's not difficult to synthesize (people have done it in their garages for <$500), and the risk of spreading further infection because you can't afford to treat yourself is high. Society bears a tremendous cost because Gilead has decided that the economics of the situation justify the price they're setting.
Economists tell people that these bad things are unfortunate consequences of a system that for the most part is a good thing. But when they're pressed to support that claim they always do so against a meaningless background, something having to do with barter, as if it's not obvious that if we didn't have a system with this broken design, we wouldn't go back to the stone ages, we'd instead have a different system with a potentially less broken design.
Despite resting on such a feeble value proposition re: the current status quo, economists don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives either. They appear to be rather happily at work for powerful men who are hurting people, where they manufacture for those men justifications about why the pain is in fact an unavoidable consequence of the laws of physics, and no something that they should feel guilty about.
I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. It's just hard to look at history and come to any conclusion besides that they're not very good at resisting to attempts to corrupt those intentions.
The guys who were obsessed with maximizing efficacy of charitable giving, and then later AI risk, are "justifying bad behavior". Right.
I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning). But what circulates is troubling. E.g. statistically optimising for future even if it means harming current can be bad dressed in an excuse. Assigning value e.g. to lives (from prawns to humans) can also be a statistical way to do harm with an excuse. Overall, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…
Well... look at the behavior, it is bad. They use the things you say here to justify it, soo... yes.
Look up ‘earning to give’ and think about the implications of that when a few thousand worth of mosquito nets buys a human life.
Because Anthropic is the final manifestation of EA and is about to raise two trillion dollars.
This is beyond absurd.
Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world. That's obviously not a bad thing?
The article here goes on a grotesque witch hunt, claiming baselessly things like "polyamory" was widespread among "the movements" adherents.
You here postulate, Anthropic was a "final" manifestation of that movement. How? Why? Do they practice polyamory there?
Trying to apply rationality in domains where it's ineffective is obviously a bad thing. In the real world, only a limited subset of issues can be reduced to logic and calculations. To believe otherwise is pure hubris, and if you've read the classical tragedies you know the results.
> claiming baselessly things like "polyamory" was widespread among "the movements" adherents.
Which is especially weird to do in 2026. I mean, I get the salacious clickbait, but seriously, at this point does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?
I remember when outrage peddler Laura Loomer did a big pearl clutch on X about some other conservative being into consensual non-monagamy, and the collective response from everyone from all political stripes was a giant shrug.
>Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world.
Rationality tends to fail spectacularly when basing it on wrong assumptions. Which are subtly made.
> Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world. That's obviously not a bad thing?
To use the movement's own language: At the best EA's are paperclip maximizers. Why is it that in one context people recognize formula driven 'rational' utility maximizing as obviously dangerous and evil, but in another see it as the ultimate expression of good. It's a specious argument to go "my objectives good, clippies bad". It may well be true but the maximizing party never knows their goals are bad!
"Rational 'good' maximizing" is itself problematic, because it disregard the danger inherit in any utility function. The nazi campaign to cleanse their population was motivated and justified in part by the latest in eugenic science.
Absolutely central to the EA centered facets of "ai safety" is imposing controls on people development and use of AI-- or even more broadly on their behavior in order to prevent creation of any AI that doesn't follow their definition of 'good' (which they equate to the literal destruction of the universe). It isn't just crazy, it's evil, and it can be reliably predicted to end in harm at the scale of genocide if it doesn't fizzle on its own.
The weird sex cult crap is there, along with the embezzling, nepotism, and other dramacrap-- but I think these are just a common side effect of grifter driven cults rather than being integral to anything that need concern the public. AI doomerism would still be a dangerous cult even if they were all chaste monks.
I thought it was rather good. Each to their own opinion I guess. Topical too with recent AI stuff.
The Economist doesn't feature the most important issue each week so much as to try to focus on a different relevant topic each week.
How do you consider an article "good" when it's "argumentation" amounts to making baseless and reality-distorting smears against a proxy, with the real goal of libeling the opposition to unrestricted AI development?
The White House and "Effective Accelerationists" (e/acc) like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are behind that smear campaign. To each their own?
I guess I don't see it that way. What is the libel? Any evidence it's a Andreessen smear campaign? I don't think The Economist is usually like that.
It's the classic worrying about having the best security front door while having glass windows.
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There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.
There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.
While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.
If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.
When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
When I talk about ineffective altruism I talk about accumulating capital and shutting everyone out of innovation in the name of regulatory protection. Nothing like a daddy to protect us sounds like altruism.
No, but they're too busy to notice stuff like that because they're so focused on trying to prevent a 0.01% chance of human extinction with error bars of +/- 0.01%.
What’s that thing pg said about a submarine? Somebody’s got a dossier of all the weirdest things about effective altruism they can find (not that it’s in short supply), and they’re out there convincing reporters who need to run articles about AI that this is the ideology of the AI guys, and wouldn’t your readers like to know all the lurid details?
While it’s probably something prosaic as “Anthropic pays the most lip service to EA, this makes them look bad” or “Our employees are leaning EA and it’s causing problems, things would be easier if they were too embarrassed to admit they were EA”, I do wonder - the board member who instigated the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI does happen to be a long-time effective altruist…
To me, "effective altruism" is just painting a "God works in mysterious ways" colored lipstick on a "billionaires" pig:
"Silly pleb, you couldn't comprehend the many ways our near-infinite money could benefit humanity".
> There is an elusive quality to effective altruism. The movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only “EA adjacent”.
Oof, that one hit close to home.
If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
Likely a better read
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
I think the fundamental problem with effective altruism is it assumes there is some absolute form of good to be maximised. In reality goodness is largely in the eye of the beholder and if you don't deal with that you get silly results. Do good but recognise there are limitations to the idea and common sense is the way to go?
Fortunately, SBF had a secret weapon: the EA community. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”
https://paulromer.net/ea-ftx-sbf/
SBF Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too. The founder of FTX lives his life by a calculus of altruistic impact.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221110080531/https://www.sequo...
Effective Altruism is helping each other be 'altruists'.
Why did I hire Caroline for Manifund?
Manifund needs talent. Leading AI labs warn about recursive self improvement; poverty and disease remain unsolved; billions of animals suffer hell on earth. I, my team, and many EAs I know, are often burning the midnight candle to address these wrongs. I don’t wish to sideline a pair of capable hands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675377
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49682791
It's funny that if they had got over their cash flow shortfall, FTX would have been massively profitable now with it's holdings in btc and Anthropic. If only he hadn't pissed off the Binance guy it could have all been different.
I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up.
At best they are just people trying to donate money to effective charities like mosquito nets in Africa. At worst, some might be wasting their money on animal welfare or AI safety. This doesn't seem like enough to fuel the kind of backlash I see.
I can't speak to anyone else's sneers and disdain, but mine come from all the motivated reasoning surrounding them. One example:
'The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.'
There were a lot of explanations about why that was the most effective use of funds, but every single one reads like motivated reasoning to me.
Examples like this abound.
The Sam Bankman-Fried debacle of pay off politicians and gamble the customer deposits to become very rich because EA probably falls in that category and gave it a bad name.
I dont really see how SBF and FTX success and then failure was enabled by EA. Seems like people commit financial crime all the time.
Some SBF Quotes
> "This dumb shit I said—it's not true. Not really. Every soul-searching, virtue-signaling thing I said was just part of the game."
> "Fuck regulators. They make everything worse. They don't protect customers at all."
I think it's got two components - first, people don't actually understand the tenants of mainstream EA. For instance, some people think that one of the core principles of EA is "make as much money as possible at any cost", which is incorrect.
Second, EA is a small movement with an above average amount of crazy people (IE someone who does think you should make as much money as possible at any cost), who then basically monopolize the media attention. This then feeds into the first component.
EA is in a fairly bad spot where nobody seems to be really attempting to understand it or meaningfully engage with it's ideas, instead just parroting the same few talking points (SBF anyone?)
Is it just me or is this a pattern that's been repeating throughout our society. Let me know if you see this too.
Step one somebody comes up with a philosophy that would be a big improvement on what we've all been doing.
Step two people start living it and it seems to work for them. It seems to make them happy and it seems to make the world a better place.
Step three dark tetrad types show up and hijack the good thing as cover for the bad things they're doing. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing type maneuver.
Step four people who have never engaged with the philosophy recognize that there's lots of dark tetrad people hiding under it and start using the philosophy as a heuristic for bad person.
Step five the authentic practitioners start to question whether the good thing was really good because people treat them like they're bad for it.
Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground. There are 3 possible responses:
1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground
2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first
3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.
I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
> Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground.
I think this is an unhealthy belief. More likely, people don't know what is or is not moral, because their decisions are plagued by self-interest, limited knowledge, and the influence of peer pressure and tradition that may or may not have gotten things right.
So it is more about people taking calculated bets, say on a share price. They don't know for sure if they think the price will go up or down, they are guessing, but not randomly guessing. There is an underlying investment thesis that may or may not be correct.
So a contrarian investor, may be a genius or a fool. Time will tell. Most people, when they see a contrarian investor, decide the prudent approach is "wait and see", because they have their own thesis about a different set of stocks.
Everyone is trying to figure this out as best as they can. To think that you have the moral high ground by holding some niche beliefs is a foolish way of living.
I agree with your statement as advice, but I don't think it is very descriptive of how people are actually behaving.
It doesn't seem like most people are taking the agnostic "wait and see" approach when it comes to judging effective altruists (or vegans).
To accept that someone else might be right on a moral issue also means accepting that you might be morally wrong.
I don't send 10% of my income to charity or eat vegan, but it does seem to me that people feel threatened when they see others doing this
It's especially bad when it comes to parenting.
Me: "I don't let my kids have iPads."
Other parent: "YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME? FUCK YOU!"
That's how I understand it: a movement encouraging people to donate their wealth to good causes which save and improve lives.
However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.
But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.
I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.
It's a way for the wealthy to feel like they're doing good by collecting money. They tend to twist the tenets to favor "what you're currently doing is good, actually" even if "what you're currently doing" is itself unethical, like modern adtech. The stated goals and principles of EA are one thing; the actual practice of it is another
In short it is because they have influence. There is a difference between sending $1 to Africa instead of America and sending millions. There is a difference between an AI safety researcher fantasizing about AI hacking everything on the planet and their AI models telling me I can't look for bugs in my code.
It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.
It's because of the gap in what they say and what they do.
EAs have the lowest distance between what they think is the right thing to do and what they actually do of any group I've met.
(I donate 50%, and quit a high-paying tech job to work at a biosecurity nonprofit)
You may do that with honesty and just be a useful front for the heads behind the curtain. In their calculations you are still the value of 32 prawns or something.
That's the picture of them they want you to hold, the non-deepfake is different
I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force.
Edit: Also weird nerds.
> people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires
Can you give an example of this kind of person?
It's a fairly common talking point that EA is bad because it's too friendly with billionaires. I admit I would struggle to find an example of somebody openly celebrating preventable deaths of poor people, but the large numbers of lives saved by EA-funded interventions don't generally figure in these people's calculus.
Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him.
Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".
Effectively, it is very swlf serving.
I've always been wary of effective altruism. Anything that geek and people want to "optimize out" by engineering has a risk of just being a "let's ride very fast towards that wall" kind of venture
What about if it were called 'evidence-based altruism'?
The name always ends up being an umbrella for the craziness that groups of like minded rich-beyond-your-wildest-dreams folks will turn it into.
It's practically an axiom.
How do you turn a good idea into an existential threat to humanity? Let a like-minded group of very rich people commandeer it for a short while.
If they had to show the results of the number of lives they saved, that would certainly get rid of the speculative longtermist bullshit or their focus on AI.
”KPI based altruism" could be more accurate ?
But you'd have to believe in the fact that BOTH:
- their evidence is true (eg it's not just a too small sample size, in very particular conditions, etc)
- and MORE IMPORTANTLY that they haven't forgotten OTHER EVIDENCE which points to a much better way to do it
usually when you "see the world through metrics" you start to be very efficient at optimizing them... but then the first minute your metrics start pointing a different direction to the one it's "supposed" to (which happens to 100% of metrics since "all models are wrong but some are useful") and you go with the full speed of your optimization on the WRONG target, you start getting into issues quickly...
I do not think you can call it a social movement because it does not have any significant mass of people behind it and by its nature, never will.
Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group. It makes more sense to me that way. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from moving forward.
Social movements come in all sizes. Its a bunch of people who all agree on something. That is a social movement.
You can call it a subculture or philosophy or movement, but social movement to me implies something with broad appeal.
Agreed. If society is unmoved, it wasn't a social movement.
Man who refers to Heaven's Gate as a social movement
It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
You might call it a capital movement
> It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
We should tax the shit out of them, if only to reduce the unelected power their wealth buys.
Just like we should tax the shit out of the non-EA ultra wealthy.
We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.
EA people tend to be in favour of raising taxation. The "giving what we can" pledge is essentially a pledge to voluntarily increase your own taxes in lieu of government taxes.
I strongly agree, but I don't think the USA is capable of doing that. That sort of socialist communitarianism is at odds with the objectivist individualism that they commonly valorize, and underpins most of their heroic stories.
A better term would be an 'order'
you have to measure it like they do, a weighted net-worth average
the more you have, the more you matter
How about "conspiracy" then?
It’s another bubble that a handful of people invented for themselves to insulate them from the reality of the effect on the world. It’s one of the most genuinely pathetic “movements” I’ve ever seen.
Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
Added above. Thanks!
> Will MacAskill ...
That guy is a scammer who participated in the Alameda / FTX scam: he was SBF's mentor and fled the ship, like a rat, before SBF was sent to jail.
So far and as long as I know the ill-acquired mansion in England by MacAskill with 15 million GBP stolen by SBF hasn't been clawed back yet (but it may: in other fraud cases funds and properties have been clawed back as much as 20 years after the fact).
And he certainly didn't hand the mansion back without being asked: for thieves don't do that.
A despicable human being.
Now I know why he's given a voice in some publications: it's for the same reason SBF was presented as the 2nd coming of Christ before his scam came to light. These people have relations and splurge (corrupt) money on a lot of people.
What's not clear is why he's given a voice on HN.
The mansion in question (Wytham Abbey) was purchased as an event venue with funds from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna via Coefficient Giving. No funding from FTX was involved. (The Effective Ventures Foundation did receive unrelated funding from FTX, but that was returned in a settlement with the bankruptcy estate in 2023.)
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This one's interesting in claiming to be first/early to worry about pandemics (prior to COVID) and AI existential dilemma (before ChatGPT) as, kind of, stakes in the ground justification for 'the value of the effective altruism movement'. I find that interesting in that I don't see much publicity from the big EA guns supporting the recommendations given by pandemic experts around the world. Can we hear from some of us powerful members in defence of Fauci? If not, the entire movement is a fucking scam full of cowards.
Feels like shaky justification for the validity of the 'movement'. But I'm suspicious of any belief system once it gets to a group size large enough to create a full-circle-jerk. Especially if many members have enough wealth to insulate themselves against the worries of your average human.
EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
We will use our big brains to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
For our first bold conclusion we have determined that all of the world's money should be in the hands of people with big brains who intend to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
This concludes the planning phase. There will be an additional planning phase once we've collected all of the money, we promise.
That's the take away I get. It's a philosophical justification to being as greedy and heartless as possible because in the future the money you got from burning down the world could potentially be used to reverse that damage.
Very few billionaires are EAs. A few more have a generally EA approach to their giving. But billionaires are generally not that keen on EA because it would involve donating almost all their money.
I get the feeling that the current membership is not, in fact, donating almost all their money.
If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33708575
Basically EA operates as an insurance system for billionaires who want to gain enough wealth and power to collapse humanity until they need to insurance against the collapse of humanity so that they can keep extracting anyway.
"Can I have a dollar mister?"
"Sorry I can't it's unethical to give more to you just because you are closer to me, I need to do some excel sheets and maximize my mosquito net donations to africa."
That's definitely how it comes across now. Especially with all the TESCREAL weirdness that gets attached to it. But originally, EA really was extremely altruist. Early pioneers were practically Francis of Assissi-style vow of poverty people, giving away the majority of their income to the worthiest cause they could find.
But somewhere along the way it attracted the attention of tech bros, billionaires and AI believers, and the whole thing seems to have gotten corrupted way beyond recognition. I think it started by telling people that instead of becoming a volunteer, they could also become a stock trader and donate all of their income to fund a dozen volunteers. And once you've got that kind of money, well, isn't just donating 10% already pretty good? And then came the AI concerns, which mostly seem to have become a reason to hype up irresponsible AI use, rather than the opposite (note that both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded based on the concerns for the threat AI might pose to humanity), and then the Longtermist idea that the concerns of potentially trillions of humans in the very distant future should outweigh the concerns of the mere billions alive today, lead to basically an excuse not to help people today anymore. Also, all those millionaire and billionaire tech bros are still millionaires and billionaires. Is there any EA adherent who has given away that level of wealth?
So while the poverty and altruism of the early pioneers was extremely inspiring, the current visible public face of EA is exactly the opposite.
They define "altruism" as "don't actually do anything about the problems of today, so that you can do more about them tomorrow". But does tomorrow ever come?
Bluntly, I trust Jesus more than them. And in Luke 16:10, Jesus said, "One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much."
I think you got it backwards. Their motivation is this "I must look charitable, but if there are no problems, then there is no reason to donate, hence I must operate at both ends. I must create problems by earning money and then solve them by spending money."
That certainly seems to be the motivation of AI companies warning us about the threat of AI to humanity, while working as hard as possible to bring it about.
To me most representatives of EA resemble people that read about goodness in the book, formulated some notion of it solely through that reading, and then designed an approach to bring it to life. Purely intellectual, not something experienced and lived through, what is the case for the normal people. Very uncanny, like psychopaths learning about empathy from the lecture, and then deciding they would become empathetic based on the notes they took.
Their morality is like musicality of someone that learned how to read sheet music and learned how every note sounds like or even how whole chords sound like, but never heard any music being played. Music is not about computing harmonic formula, and goodness is not about solving utility equation.
‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Men, and they blink.
EAs like Nick Bostrom argue that we have a greater moral obligation to hypothetical trillions of future persons--including an obligation to see to it that they come into existence--than to people who actually exist. Personally, I think that's insane sociopathy.
Thinking that far into the future, such that it affects actions one takes in the present is a true detachment from reality.
If that's a motivating factor for how they live their life, then they need hospitalization for their own good.
Pretty much what I think of Anthropic's management, man. Dario, at least, needs serious psychiatric help.
Musk, Altman, Zuck...
> The movement’s long-standing fears of an AI catastrophe make it a villain in the eyes of the Trump administration. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” is the Department of War’s attack line. The president’s allies are going after Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as a representative of effective altruism.
I'd wager that it's simply the government wanting absolute power (as it should) and going after misaligned oligarchs.
So, effectively, power struggles in circles beyond our reach.
Arguably a good thing that the government would eventually try to claw back power there, given that in theory, it's democratically elected and all.
The purpose of the government is to serve the people, not "absolute power", unless you enjoy kings and fiefdoms.
Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource to the point where they steer society itself?
That's what is meant by "absolute power"
No, in a system of limited government, the government should not want absolute power. If it wants it, it should absolutely not get it.
Mind you, I don't want the effective altruists to have the kind of power they seem to want, either...
Frankly, with the EA folks I've met (only in the bay area btw), none of them seem well-read enough for me to trust them with a cent.
I've been scratching my head a bit lately about what EA seems to have turned into.
Originally, the idea seemed to be simply to spend your money to do the most effective good. Don't spend it on "charities" where most of it ends up in the pockets of their executives, don't spend it on issues that don't really accomplish much, etc. Their initial priorities seemed pretty decent. GiveWell type stuff.
But nowadays it seems to be completely corrupted by all that TESCREAL crap (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism). Most of those make no sense or seem to be utterly irrelevant to the goals of EA. The one that seems to try is Longtermism, but the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
I thought that was just a bunch of weirdos or corrupt rich people trying to leverage EA as PR for not actually having to do anything for real people. But it turns out that EA pioneers like Ord and MacAskill are also on board with that nonsense. The 80,000 hours jobs list is now all about AI. The whole thing seems to be just a massive grift with no redeemable value.
Is there still some angle from which EA makes sense? Was it always pure grift? Or did the founders get corrupted by proximity to too many billionaires?
All ideas are best in moderation. Danger rests into turning any one perspective into an organizing principle for your life (or worse, for many people's lives).
In what ways to you think the TESCREAL arguments are wrong?
As I said:
> the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
And as far as I can tell, that's one of the most coherent parts of the TESCREAL package. Apparently it also includes goals to transcend mortality or humanity, at which points you've definitely lost touch with any meaningful form of morality.
I don't pretend to understand everything that TESCREAL is about, but that's at least partially because much of it strikes me as utter SciFi bullshit that's completely unhinged from reality. And that's not even getting into some of the deeply racist eugenics stuff I've come across.
If there's any real meaningful value in EA, all the other stuff is distracting from it. Get back to fixing poverty, inequality and animal cruelty. But there seems to be so much billionaire grift involved in it by now, that anything that threatens their elevated position (which by itself is a threat to humanity) is unlikely to find approval with the big money that's now behind it.
What EA has turned into is analogous to what the US Government has turned into.
It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.
I'm pleasantly surprised how kind and charitable this article ends up being. I'm really used to shortcuts being used to ridicule EAs ("look, these morons think shrimps are an important problem!"), so I'm happy the article takes the time to present the object-level arguments (e.g. yes, it's kind of fucked up we torture tens of billions of small animals per year in ways that would make most people physically recoil if they had to look at it, just to produce a luxury good. Watch the Dominion documentary!).
I know I'm already late to the party and HN's libertarian techno-optimism means that lots of people have already made up their mind about EAs, but still, I'd like to make my case.
I've mets dozens of EAs in person and gone to a few events with hundreds of them. None of the people I met were billionaires and AFAICT most of them didn't especially hope to become millionaires. A lot of them were broke students, though obviously a lot also had comfortable tech jobs.
What they had in common was that they were the most driven, idealistic people I've ever met. All of them cared about something, whether it was animal welfare, climate change, global poverty or AI x-risk. They talked about these things not the way people talk on the internet, when they're trying to win an argument, they talked about them like they have stakes and making the right decision will impact lives.
Every step of my journey to becoming flexitarian, then vegetarian, then vegan-ish, has been spurred by an effective altruist talking to me about the moral outrage that is factory farming, and that it was something that mattered and that we can and must do something about.
Yes, they're often sexually open, yes, the cults (and all the problems that plague groups dominated by autistic white men) exist, yes SBF exists and Effective Altruism gave him way too much of a platform, yes, they bought a castle that one time, but these things shouldn't be treated as the only things worth knowing about the movement, the same way one shouldn't denounce feminism forever because [insert stupid thing some high-profile feminist did that one time]. No reformist movement looks good when presented through the lens of its detractors.
EA is a group of people that spend a lot of their time encouraging each other to do more, to believe that actions matter and every life has value. They're eager and sincere, they take abstract ideas seriously and consider their consequences even when it's uncomfortable or weird, and that makes them a target of ridicule (because people don't like their conclusions, and because cynical people like to take overly eager people down a notch).
So I'm really happy the Economist refrained from taking those cheap shots throughout. It's a good article.
I don’t have an opinion on EA, and have never run into one, in the wild.
However, what you have described, is pretty much exactly the organization that I've been involved in, my entire adult life.
I won't mention it, here, as we maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film.
Sure. I don't think EAs are magically unique. A lot of movements (feminists, socialists, churches, unions) produce driven, organized and kind-hearted people.
EAs happen to be the ones I know.
In my opinion they don't produce them, they attract them, and for different reasons.
Fair point. Just take the good and discard the rest.
Churches and religions as a general rule want to 'do good', but also have a variable amount of crazy kinda irremovably attached to them, which is the bit that is generally focused on too.
The dangerous part is where the 'doing good together' part slowly turns into normalizing the crazy part by 'social infection'.
As long as you don't end up being able to rationalize some behavior that, before you joined the group, you'd never have participated in or condoned.
Crazy justifies itself by small degrees.
I grew up in a cult, too. They were very eager and sincere. I'm very familiar with "eager and sincere" hiding incoherent motivated reasoning and savior complexes that give their adherents cover to behave both stupidly and horridly -- with a smile.
I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.
Much of the world will be surprised to hear that they have been conquered by effective altruism. Seriously what kind of spheres does the person live in who wrote that article? I think they need to hire some people who spend less time in online blogs and on twitter and more time idk, traveling to China or India
Almost certainly a tech/venture-capitalist bubble like the SF bay area. They really seem to live in a different world from even the rest of California much less the wider US or the world.
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Please recommend some worthy publications
I find increasingly that written words from organisations are trending worse. I tend to find particular authors are sometimes good writers, and sometimes they have blogs which I have always liked but more & more lately.
My national/public broadcaster/media organisation(ABC, Australia) is doubling down on fiddling all day with headlines & the pictures. They’re not selling any product, they don’t need to follow commercial trends.
https://rss.social/ has been a godsend for finding random articles of interesting content, A LOT than HN these days, especially when you don’t want to index on AI content. https://substack.com/@gurwinder/posts https://jmarriott.substack.com/archive
I like history podcasts, especially anything by Mike Duncan, and some of the pop culture stuff by the Ringer is ok.
Sorry, I don’t have any good recommendations for commercial publications.
Charmin
First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.
I've unconquered the title above and replaced it with something bland. Hopefully that will reduce the rush to inflammation in the thread.
Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.
The title alone is comical. "Here are ten reasons to continue to be greedy...".
It's greedy to donate a percentage of your income?
Is it reasonable that less privileged people might have some hope? Does anyone want to live in a luxurious mansion surrounded by people who are just trying to make ends meet?
You might benefit from thinking critically about who and what you consider to be greedy. If you don't, it's easy to be tricked by various kinds of shell games, where certain kinds of work are never considered "greedy" or certain kinds of charity make the donor appear disproportionately generous. One game that's become pretty well known is how many "donations" to well-funded schools are in fact admissions payments for wealthy kids.
Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
I feel like there is this weird thing where people will criticize people who do charity work in not quite the right way (from the criticizers perspective), but are totally fine with people who just use their money to buy a yacht.
I'd much rather have people spend their money on feeding the hungry, even imperfectly then spending it on other pursuits.
I sometimes wonder what the critics of EA are doing to eradicate the ills of the world or even their local community. Is it more than what EA is doing? If not, i'd say those in glass houses should be wary of throwing stones.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.
> their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later
This is a very uncommon idea within EA. There are some people who support it ("patient philanthropy") but almost everyone within EA either thinks you should be working / donating to help people/animals (most "neartermists") or you should be working / donating to help reduce extinction risk (most "longtermists").
Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA. How prominent is it within the movement.
I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
> Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
Are they? To what degree are they? And to what degree are they not helping the hungry today, in order to amass more money so that they can in theory help the hungry more tomorrow?
I can respect someone like Bill Gates. He hasn't been perfect, not by a long shot, but he's put real money into really trying to help real problems. What's the track record of the effective altruists? (Genuine question - I haven't researched them enough to know.)
Feeding the hungry in particular is uncommon, but global poverty (usually malaria nets and other specific impactful + neglected interventions) is the largest cause area in EA, and something I've personally donated a lot to.
Genuinely curious why you feel that way?
First, you can read about Sam Bankman-Fried; then you can say "oh, he's not _real_ effective altrusim...and do your backflips.
But that is one human, and not a very honest one.
Is that the standard you hold everything to?
probably the best description of EA that I've read so far.
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This isn't an indicator, to be part of a culture war something has to be accepted as normal by half. Culture wars are driven by the shock of someone telling you the most normal thing about your upbringing and parent's values is in fact a horrible deviance. The article here is closer to, "we found something we can publish bad news about, without offending our funders."
EA is a dynamic saviour complex cult that is devoid of reality and gave birth to the FTX fraud.
The whole concept of it is a scam.
It is almost surprising that it survived post-SBF's exposure as a massive (and that undersells it) fraud.
The reason it's not surprising is the size of the money bulwark of the people still behind it.
People need to learn to disassociate the 'cultural movement' from the ideology.
Read what Chomsky has to say about postmodernism.
Look at the evolution of 'String Theory'. Thousands of PhDs minted in something that likely has no relevance to anything. String Theory could not have achieved prominence merely as an idea - it only rose to the fore because it was a 'movement' - with all of the supporting accoutrements. It only has an arcane value, not as a leading premise. The 'movement' pushed it to the fore.
Look at Scientology / Dianetics (that one is pretty hard).
'Movements' are almost always about the 'Movement', and the ideology often seems to take a back seat.
The 'Movement' is something almost nominal to rally around, that helps create a 'form' for a loose consensus.
It inspires some people to act as though they are doing something for a 'greater good' (whether they are or not), and for leaders to dereference their apparent authority towards that greater ideal.
Imagine if all of these 'ideas' were just left as 'ideas' or maybe 'ideals' and that's that - and there were no groups, meetups, nobody really publicly 'aligned' with them or signalled their participation.
Then we'd have a better notion of what these ideas really are.
But in reality, these systems are 'social movements', groupings, ways for people to signal their special merit or alignment.
It's social politics. Red v Blue. Bloods v Crips. Insiders v Outsiders. Specials v Normies. Nobility v Plebes. Citizens v Slaves.
It gets problematic when the groups get power, people believe in their own gibberish, people place all of their faith in group leaders even when actions by the group defy the nature of the movement itself.
"We're breaking the rules of finance and stealing from people because 'we're the good guys', right? Everything we do is in the name of ... 'good' ... so we can do pretty much anything". is the story of FTX.
Look at it first through the lens of the social organization, then separately through the lens of ideals.
String theory birthed real and rigorous mathematics and generated amazing results in geometry. Regardless of what its physical status turns out to be, it has already contributed enough.
String Theory is the MAGA of Science.
This is almost like saying the Scientologists 'taught some kinds to read'.
String Theory is a borderline cult - a lie, kept alive to keep attention, funding, influence.
Science without the science.
It should be studied as a social failure, not some marginal contributions.
To compare it to maga or scientology is complete bullshit. Just ask geometers how they felt when string theory people started producing solid result after result in geometry. It is completely irrelevant whether string theory has any significance or meaning as a physical theory, it has completely paid its dues in the realm of mathematics. One of its major figures literally won the Fields medal in math, the only physicist to have won this award. Whatever happens of strings as a physical theory, the mathematics it produced stands completely solid.
Calling it "most important movement" is like calling national socialism "most important movement", just because it made history doesn't make it good
You are conflating "important" with "good", which I don't think the author was intending.
e.g. climate change will likely be very important in the coming century