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.
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.
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.
> especially if you never actually get around to the buying mosquito nets part
Or instead get brain-wormed into giving all your torment nexus dollars to "ai safety" cult that tells you that you're helping to prevent the endless torture of all sentient minds that could ever exist in the entire universe.
Hubbard proved that you can create an effective cult out of bad science fiction-- perhaps it should be surprising that it took so long for someone to improve on the design...
Also, all the bad things you did at Torment Nexus Inc... They get a head start on whatever good things you do with the money. Even if the cult is effective, it's playing catch-up.
Not to disagree about the dangers of dangling large amounts of money in front of people that comes with a promise it will be earmarked for (in this case) good causes, because that is exactly what went wrong in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, but:
In the past, the community made the mistake of becoming too closely associated with “earning to give”. Many people involved in effective altruism still think this is a good strategy for some people, particularly those who have a good personal fit for high-paying careers. But donating to charity is not the only way to have a large impact. Many people can do even better by using their careers to help others more directly. Many people in the community do both.
> Many people can do even better by using their careers to help others more directly.
This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate. That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
I was initially curious about effective altruism ~10 years ago, but fortunately i had enough political background to realize that this is essentially a movement of silicon valley sociopaths virtue-painting their bad behavior and their working for the most evil industries on earth in the name of a hypothetical future greater good that will never materialize because they keep supporting the capitalist system that's destroying our planet. It's like saying you're gonna work for Darth Vader because the pay is good so you'll provide good for the universe; it's entirely fucked up and does not hold any form of scrutiny from actually-rational people with a modest social sciences / political background.
> This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate.
And it is a debate they (or at least the ones around here, I'm in Europe, having turned down each opportunity to relocate to the USA) will encourage you to think about.
For the purposes of "FAQ to sell you on the difference with earn-to-give", when earn-to-give is also a complex topic with an entire debate, the sentence they wrote is an appropriate size of answer, even if I find their writing style to be "preach to the choir" rather than actually saying something that would convince an outsider.
(Regarding un-convincing writing style: look at how caveated that whole quotation is. This is typical nerd writing (and I say that as a nerd), not bold "written in primary colours" language that political, business, and charity slogans use).
> That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations, so I don't know what you have in mind here that makes them fail it. (Also, thanks to the way political language is a treadmill, when you say "conservative" I don't know if you mean "small government", "Trumpist", "pre-Trump Republican party", "Chesterton's fence", or something else; US use of the word has always been very different from European use of the term).
Don't get me wrong: I think EA is not particularly good at the "effective" part despite their attempts (and name), but you're not making a strong case here.
> And it is a debate they will encourage you to think about
I've never met EA people in person, but through their blogs i've never felt invited to think about anything beyond raw numbers and vague notions disconnected from any actual social structure and injustice i could see with my eyes. Maybe i've missed the most interesting bloggers out there?
> They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations
I would be interesting to know what you consider political. I've never seen anything resembling it. But maybe you'd call lobbying political activities? I'm thinking in terms of building collective power through union and non-electoral mobilizations. EDIT: for me warming up to this politician, that party, or taking a position in a corporation is not "politics"
> when you say "conservative"
I mean they don't appear to be revolutionaries. I can't see a better world through their writings, nothing significantly different about the power structures, merely green-coated capitalism where technology has magically solved every problem, which i thought to be naive wishful thinking that simply does away with centuries of revolutionary theory and praxis which did in fact bring social change. I personally find much more rationality, despite my disagreements, in Marx or Kropotkin (and their 21st century successors), than in the "rationalist" community online.
Lots of EA criticisms come from literal extremists who consider the mere aspect of earning money in free market itself to be evil. EA is fine and has issues but it needs critic from more normal people.
We don't have a free market and there never has been one: corruption and nepotism is the source of all great wealth in any capitalist society. Whether we should have one at all is a different debate.
Earning money is not the problem. Most of us have had (or still have) morally-questionable jobs to put food on the table. That's a reasonable trade-off until we have a better, more ethical society. But making it a moral argument to work for the most evil corporations on earth to do good just doesn't make sense. At which point do you become the bad guy you're trying to avoid being through effective altruism?
OK i'll byte. Microsoft? Or any other GAFAM? Agro-business? Med-tech? Plastic industry? Many sectors who claim to improve lives but have made everything quantifyingly worse on many counts despite incredible technological/efficiency gains which could lead to a life of abundance for all of humanity.
As for the most evil, the competition is fierce. Of course i don't think Backblaze or OVH is just as evil as Amazon or Google. Just like i don't think La Vache Qui Rit or Loué are as evil as Carrefour and Unilever. But in my view, if you're recruiting people and aiming for a better world, you should aim higher than "my employer is not actively supporting genocide". Otherwise, your utopian project has nothing very interesting nor moral about it.
No I don’t think these companies made everything quantifiable worse.
But you started with most evil corporations. What did you mean by it and why did you bring it up?
Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better? And you snide at them because of this?? And I have no idea what you mean about genocide.
This confirms my point that a lot of EA critiques come from literal extremists who think doing good within the system is “evil”.
> Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better?
I don't think they're making it better, that's the whole debate.
> I have no idea what you mean about genocide
That's just an example, referring to the Rohingya genocide or the Palestinian genocide, both of which have been more than facilitated by tech companies.
> think doing good within the system is “evil”
That's a misinterpretation of what i said. I think it's a valid goal on a personal level, but that it actually doesn't work (produces burnout or corruption of values). Therefore i think it's a wrong collective strategy that entirely misses the point (and centuries of experience) of how to change society for the better.
EDIT: for example, slavery abolition or women's right to vote in the Global North was not achieved by advocating to work for plantation owners and then giving away money to charity. And i don't know of a single historical example where that strategy worked.
Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
Your entire argument is a projection and strawman. You have no idea what you're talking about. The imperative popularized in EA circles is to work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible, and otherwise donate money you earn by providing value.
If you're going to argue that merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations then you're chastising a lot more people than just EA adherents.
Your whole thing I suspect is informed by the sentiment that making good money must categorically be evil, or some other leftist notion.
> Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
It's hard to find one that's not evil on this list, except maybe for reporter at MIT Tech Review? Some of these job titles sound good, but wield no power to make good things in practice (hence the turnover rate for many "ethicist" or QA roles). But i didn't have to scroll much to find unambigously evil corporations (eg. RAND, Google).
> work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible
I'm sensitive to this argument, but i'm not sure that's possible in practice. It might be possible in some public sector or non-profit jobs, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible when driven by market value and share prices. EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.
> merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations
No. Many people do the minimum that's asked of them to put food on the table, that's just human and we can't really blame them. Those who go above and beyond thinking they'll save the world through Silicon Valley startups and foundations actually destroying it are the ones in my view aiding "evil".
Many, in fact. What do we work on, and for whose benefits? How to make useful products without destroying the environment or negatively impacting our bodies and minds? Why, despite an over-abundance of resources and products, do we have such profound inequalities? How could we address them?
Small example: why fixate on AI safety and risk of human extinction when 1) AI problems run much deeper (loss of QA, more economic inequalities, insane resource extraction, etc) 2) human extinction is actually already on track due to pre-AI industrial activities, and addressing the problems we had before ChatGPT came out would de facto solve the problems posed by OpenAI and others in the field?
That's just a small overview, we can (and should) ask many more, and i think what you called class warfare definitely has a place in that list. I'm just as much fascinated by numbers as the next EA blogger, but i do believe being fixated on numbers prevents from asking deep moral and philosophical questions about our shared humanity. Maybe my feeling of the EA community is wrong, and i'd be interested in reading more radical EA-adjascent blogs if you have links to share.
On the 80000 website itself, the list of problems it presents is so wildly disconnected from actual problems people rationally face every day it's hard to read. All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.
Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational. Then notice how by removing the bad actors from the equation your scifi problems disappear too. That's rational. Telling the billions of people who suffer to shut up because AI extinction is the real problem and we need to throw money at it so that a hypothetical future might be better is just completely irrational, disrespectful, and anything but altruist or efficient.
Not sure what you’re talking about, most of the real criticism of EA came in the wake of SBF and that was across the political spectrum; if you look at the ‘Debate’ section of the Wikipedia entry the critics and their positions are very grounded. David Brooks is not a ‘literal extremist.’
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.
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…
The smear campaign will work if that’s all that’s out there. Are they public with their beliefs/principles or does someone need to go through levels of billions valuation to know the truth.
The article here pretty much debunks itself given the over-the-top absurdity and irrationality of its "arguments". But of course only when read critically in the first place.
When two opposing forces meet, you don’t get truth from either side, you get it by critically looking at what’s left between the lines. And it doesn’t look good for EA if I go by the discussion here. Lots of pushing problematic to crazies and anecdotal altruism that is not in any way related to EA principles specifically. I don’t judge. Everyone is entitled to do what they think is best. But we can also be concerned on our side on the impact EAs actions can have on us who are not in agreement with the vagueness of it. And we can say that it is looking as much about altruism as Scientology is about science.
> I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning)
That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.
Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.
You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.
I wouldn’t be against the co opt interpretation and I do believe people will be co opting something both with good and bad or crazy intentions. The thing is, if a fraction that co opts is so overwhelmingly outranks everyone else, then the original intent may end up the fringe. From my perspective the issue starts with the name. Why effective? The moment you introduce an optimisation problem you open the back door to biases. I would suggest blind altruism. Engineers can accept readily that random processes can optimise. Let the randomness optimise blindly and just be altruistic. You don’t have to publish an altruism balance sheet.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.
Ranking by influence. Claiming that adjacent personalities have influence that could even be compared to that of AI behemoths signing agreements with the President of the US is not going to convince anyone.
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.
one of the achievements of economics is showing that heartless rapacious capitalists, in a competitive market, will still arrive at the optimum solution for maximizing happiness.
for example, in a town with a lake, and two "rich" employers, a clothing company that pollutes the lake, and a food company that needs non-toxic water from the lake (and workers who work at the two companies and are the consumers of the food and clothing); it does not matter either of which company owns the lake: the two greedy businessmen will arrive at the same answer either way. And BTW, a socialist approach will not yield the optimum, having no basis to decide either way and relying on impulses not corrected by a market.
you very much need to rethink your notions of good and bad.
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.
What now? The main thing about rational (logical) arguments is to make explicit the domain of their applicability and ensure that fits the given situation.
The social myth of important social questions not being amenable to rational consideration is a political tool, not scientific truth. The classical literature doesn't help there.
Yes, I'm aware, I'm simply surprised to read that sentiment here.
Not everything is measurable though. There are (pretty unexpected) constraints on practicality, but also logical restrictions people tend to forget about.
As an interesting example in the context here, consider the question what constitutes history. There are many other things with great import you can't really measure the important part of.
Hehe, yes. I can relate, but I have to point out some points:
Making distinctions based on undetectable differences is just one kind of error in that category: people also make unreasonable distinctions based on detectable differences irrelevant to the decision space.
Point being, that actually all falls under motivated reasoning. People don't really care about the logic, they want their desired outcomes realized.
Not arguing with them might actually help them.
That "soul" concept is far more interesting than you give it credit for. Look into the gnostics and the difference to spirit for instance. People were far less stupid than they're framed as today, misinterpretation and misrepresentation go a long way and a lack of precise words can obscure a commendable intent.
I think even better approach is the way Terrence Mckenna goes through all of this in his book exploring the hermetic tradition
And I agree with you on motivated reasoning but that is arguably just how human intelligence works and in this case everybody in their current time was doing the best that they could with the tools that they had. So I don’t mean to diminish former practitioners of what they called science or epistemological reasoning, or natural philosophy.
At the same time as scientists were constantly identifying when new mechanisms that better describe natural phenomenon retire old social formations around them
In my view the main failure of humanity is not adapting social structures at the pace of epistemological change, this is Carl Sagan’s main complaint in the demon haunted world.
The issue with this stance is that rationality shouldn't be reduced to "logic" and efficiency. When it is, then bad things happen.
Another issue with EA is that it is yet another trendy thing among nerds and techbros that was iterated hundreds of times in philosophy under general debate on consequencialism/utilitarism. Of course nerds and techbros think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, so they don't bother engaging with that debate in honest manner.
> 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.
Some of the allegations involve minors, people whom are lured into economically dependent conditions, and group pressure situations where consent is not so easily defined (no matter how much motivated reasoning is abused to rationalize breaking with 'outmoded conventions' like not seducing subordinates).
But part of it is also a more general point: Their plan is to build an "AI God" constructed according to their own moral theory before anyone else, and that it will prevent anyone else from creating a competing god-- the absurdity of this plan doesn't prevent the effort from creating terrible harm (e.g. the corporate monopolization of AI, mass surveillance on unimaginable scale, etc). The AI safety faction sees itself as moral guardians of humanity's future-- and it's absolutely relevant that many people would consider them weird and that some would consider them (rightly or wrongly) outright morally repugnant.
You lose your right to have no one else worry about what you do in your private life when you start making plans to take over the world, even if you think it's in everyone's best interest. Every other modern authoritarian dictator also though their actions were in the public's interest.
> at this point does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?
Perhaps people in your circle are above that. But you don't have to cast your net very wide to find someone who thinks that same sex relationships are an abomination.
> 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.
Twitter was not representative of everyone and X is even less so.
Given that the halls of power are full of pedophiles blackmailing each other, it's generally worth worth a bit of suspicion that it's not actually adults and/or not actually consensual.
My point was not against rationality, rather to other necessary aspects which are, again, subtly ignored, or improperly dealt with. Filling in the gaps when you do not know what you do not know can be a dangerous thing.
> 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.
> "Rational 'good' maximizing" is itself problematic, because it disregard the danger inherit in any utility function.
It only gets so if you push beyond the model which you used to approximate "good", not so much when you're working at the margins.
When I've looked at what they do, while there are some huge blind spots (like Sam Bankman-Fried), they do also say "don't bother giving money to cause XYZ, they have more than they can spend already, donate skills to them or money somewhere else").
They also don't collectively have one single utility function, their big thing is telling other people how to maximise their own; in this regard, your criticism is essentially "all effective advice is evil".
> The nazi campaign to cleanse their population was motivated and justified in part by the latest in eugenic science.
I'm deeply suspicious of everyone who says "we've solved all the problems with eugenics, this time we can do it right and make everyone healthy!" for much the same reason I care about AI safety: humans are kinda idiots with this sort of power. Too many blind spots about the downsides, even for those involved who are not explicitly power-seeking.
That said, I'm sure some anti-car campaign has said a similar thing as you about Autobahns. It's a terrible argument.
> 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.
I think you misunderstand: Their (some of their) definition of 'good' in this context being 'do not destroy the universe' is due to how incredibly bad humanity currently is at aligning AI with literally any human intention. Like, our understanding of AI alignment simply isn't good enough today for us to be able to answer a question like "if you extrapolate current models to arbitrary skill level, do we get something closer to a Warhammer-40k-esque GrimDark future, or closer to Iain M. Bank's Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia?"
>I think you misunderstand: Their (some of their) definition of 'good' in this context being 'do not destroy the universe' is due to how incredibly bad humanity currently is at aligning AI with literally any human intention. Like, our understanding of AI alignment simply isn't good enough today for us to be able to answer a question like "if you extrapolate current models to arbitrary skill level, do we get something closer to a Warhammer-40k-esque GrimDark future, or closer to Iain M. Bank's Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia?"
As far as I am concerned? We're headed straight to Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia. The dumbest part about AI is that nobody is using it for societal critique. If people are already impressed by its coding abilities, they should check out what it can do for organizing people in a way that minimizes the need for public institutions.
I mean I asked the AI how to fund open source software using a financial analogy and it straight up told me. When you fund a non-exclusive good like a publicly available open source software, what you need to sell isn't the code but its continued maintenance and availability and the only way you can accomplish that is by guaranteeing that you will archive and shut down the project the moment the money runs out. Then you sell insurance against the shut down of the project. You don't beg for money, because that creates free-riding. The more secure the funding of the project is, the less incentive there is to fund it by buying the insurance. Hence, your project must always be at the brim of total collapse. The risk of the worst outcome needs to be near certain, and simultaneously never happen, because everyone is buying the insurance.
I actually updated my comment. There is the proof. Also after asking AI, it told me that strategy is literally 1:1 the EA strategy so no wonder they hate AI.
Edit:
The AI pointed out that it is effectively a protection racket, but then I pointed out that there can be competing protection rackets driving the cost down. You know what EA hates? Competition. For EA to continue to exist, humanity must suffer.
> The AI pointed out that it is effectively a protection racket, but then I pointed out that there can be competing protection rackets driving the cost down. You know what EA hates? Competition. For EA to continue to exist, humanity must suffer.
Likewise this is also not actually shaped like a proof, it's just rhetoric.
>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".
Actually, you're assuming their talking points when they talk negatively about AI.
What if AI will not bring about paper clip maximization? What if it will bring about something much worse? Like beating the effective altruists at their own game and putting them out of a job by being a superhuman rational effective altruist? No! That must never happen! AI is dangerous!
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?
The philosophical idea of "effective altruism" isn't "property" of some Silicon Valley cabal. It also is wildly misrepresented in that article in the first place.
There are indeed some people associated with an EA "group" (while they themselves don't really seem to identify themselves with it) that have done weird stuff, but to connect that with the AI opposition in general just because some of the former work at Anthropic is pure libel.
In other words, they pretend to see "connections" where logically none can be made. With libelous intent.
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”.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.
If you want a better understanding of what the AHA spends their money on I'd recommend checking their financial reports.
29% of their expenses go to paying education/training staff and the expenses involved with operating that but about the same amount comes back from their trainings in revenue. And that amount that comes back is actually near equal to all the donations they get.
Another ~31% goes to public health education staff.
~5% goes to operating various community services.
~18% goes to research.
and then overall management is ~8% with fundraising expenses making up the remaining ~9%.
For a group split between running various emergency training and certification programs (ex CPR), general public health awareness and education, advocacy, and research, those are pretty reasonable numbers.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Giving away your wealth in ways you think are the best for society is not the same as letting society decide for itself through democracy.
And they support raising taxes because it's a good way to signal that you're "for the people" and cheap if you care about power more than money. A billionaire CEO will stay a billionaire if their income tax is 90% and unrealized gains tax same as their portfolios growth, and stay a CEO even if they go broke.
The important part for them is power over other peoples lives because that's exactly what you need if you believe you're a special "rational agent" who is responsible for pushing humanity in the right direction. That power can come from shady think tanks, government jobs or controlling a trillion dollar company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any conspiracy has simple goals. Control, power, money sometimes as a means to the first two. It’s not even conspiratorial right now to assess that EA members go for these. Not all of them, but the ones that matter in this discussion.
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.
It doesn't have to just be "wait and see", although I do believe that all truth is revealed in the fullness of time, but it could just be humility, e.g. X believes Y is the way to go, I don't see why X believes that, and I could discuss this with X or even debate vigorously, but at the end of the day, we don't know who is more moral until much later.
One very interesting thing about the idea of "last judgment" in the gospels is that there are several parables devoted specifically to it, and the thing that unites all of them is that all groups of people are completely surprised at what they are judged by. The good don't know what good they did, and the bad don't know what bad they did. The group that has strong opinions about what good they did end up being completely wrong. The group that is praised for doing good don't even remember doing good.
You don't need to believe the parables, but there is another way to it. I don't know how old you are, but once you are of "mature age", you may well notice that the things you thought were important when you were 20 years younger were much, much less important than what you think of today. And 20 years later, the same holds true as well. So you can view these parables as extrapolations of human ignorance and the increasing recognition of that ignorance with age especially when it comes to moral matters.
Partly because we don't see all ends, since we can't tell the future, so we don't know what ends up in the long run being a good course of action, and partly since our judgments are tainted by self-seeking and a desire for self-elevation. It is not just some people that want to feel better than others. Everyone wants that, whether they admit it or not. That taints all of our moral beliefs.
So in that environment of pervasive ignorance and self-deception, what do you do? You go according to your own conscience, arguing that while you may be completely wrong, at least you are not trying to outsmart yourself. But expect, whether in the last judgment, or as time passes, to radically update your beliefs, especially about what is and is not moral. So you go with your own conscience but don't try to apply your judgment to others.
By the way, the first murder recorded in Genesis, of Cain killing Abel, was basically a beef between vegetarians and meat eaters. God commanded man to eat herbs and not meat -- it is only after Noah that God allows man to eat meat. But Abel gave a meat offering to God, a shelamin offering, or one in which you eat the meat and God gets the fat, and Cain saw that Abel was munching on meat, and then God praised Abel. Cain was absolutely certain that Abel was in the wrong, and that Cain was in the right. And he was absolutely certain that God was wrong for banning meat eating and then praising Abel. That festered and festered until one day Cain murdered Abel, effectively sacrificing Abel like Abel sacrificed the sheep. And then when God came to Cain to ask "Where is your brother?", Cain replied with "Am I my brother's shepherd?" -- the answer being a resounding yes, since he slaughtered Abel like a shepherd slaughtered sheep. This clearly shows that killing an animal is the same kind of thing as killing a man, and yet it also shows that God praises those who eat the meat offering, and also that whenever you judge someone for doing something, you end up guilty not only of the same thing, but the same thing enlarged. By the way, this first murder in Genesis 4 happened immediately after the fall in Genesis 3, which occurred when man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is, he is able to decide for himself what is good and what is evil. And immediately, that judging of good and evil leads to murder because of feelings of being wronged.
These are all hard lessons for how human beings approach morality, that is we use it as a mechanism to lift ourselves above others and to condemn others for wronging us, and we also completely misinterpret it. This is a universal thing, I am not trying to judge one group or another. If your conscience tells you not to eat, then don't eat.
Aha! I suspected you were religious from your first response, since it seemed to hinge on being granted perfect moral clarity in time. I don't personally believe that, but I agree that moral truth is difficult to find in our lifetimes, and it's well to constantly question and update one's beliefs, as well as respecting and maintaining an open mind towards others.
As an aside, I was raised Christian, and recently I tried re-reading Genesis as an adult atheist. There's a lot of poetic justice. The underlying theme seems to be "People do lots of terrible things, but you shouldn't punish them, because God will." I guess that Iron Age tribal shepherds were a pretty violent bunch and that's what they needed to hear.
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
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...
> 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?
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.
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?
> 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'.
That seems like a rather tribal take on your part. Are you not accounting for the indigenous people who were killed and displaced? What about slavery and Jim Crow? What about women not having the right to vote until 1920? What about the many wars? Only now you take issue with the current situation because your preferred party is not in power?
Good point. The US has always sacrificed people. That's not really a new thing.
But that we look at it differently today has nothing to do with any particular party or who is in power (that has little relation to the parties of today), but with the fact that we live today, and have a tendency to glorify the past. (And there's definitely an attempt to whitewash history, ignore all the terrible things the US has done and pretend the US was always great and perfect.)
But there's also the belief that over time, we should be learning and doing better, and we wouldn't do those terrible things of the past anymore. So the shock when they do happen is real. And the current US government is pretty explicit about wanting to bring back all the horrors of the past.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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").
What about this common stereotype: EA advocates that one should take the most lucrative job possible, regardless of any moral harm it may cause, as long as it enables you to do good which (perhaps barely) outweighs the moral harm your job caused in the first place? How fair or unfair is that stereotype?
This sounds close to a thing I've heard EAs argue for, though your version is missing important parts. A big one is that if the good the job allows you to do only barely outweighs the moral harm you caused by taking taking the job, then probably there was some other job where you'd have caused much greater net moral benefit.
I think the closest there is to a mainstream EA view on this is https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/ , which argues that "it's a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms".
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.
I'm not sure i see how that is really linked to effective alturism as a philosophy. Sounds like person famous for grifting did some grifting, but that happens all the time in normal philanthropy too.
I don't think EA is immune from grifters or people with bad intentions. It is after all a movement made up of humans. I think the question to be answered is does the philosophy encourage it in a way that other philosophies around philanthropy don't.
> 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.
I'm not really an expert on EA. I just want to understand the public sentiment because it is increasingly part of the political moment, to the point the president is tweeting about it and running a PR campaign against them.
According to AI, the biggest EA charity is GiveWell, which spends about 600 million per year. 95% of the money on low-cost high-impact global health programs like mosquito Nets and vitamins for children.
There is also open philanthropy, which gives about 500 million per year With a wider perspective. Roughly 50, 40 and 10% go to Global Health, Existential Risks, and then Animal Welfare in that order.
That said, I'm not really trying to argue the case. If the simple reason is that people have characterized EA based on SBF, and that's how they think about these things, then that is a complete answer.
I've been on HN about as long as I've been an EA, over which period I've donated more than half my income. I work at a biosecurity nonprofit, trying to reduce the risk we all die in a bioattack.
Then, I have some sincere questions. No, wait. First, my sincere compliments, both for your work and your giving.
Now, questions:
In your view (which I will listen to, because you're actually an EA), is the "wait until later to be more effective" actually a part of EA? Or is that a separate thing that calls itself by the same label?
If it's the same thing, it sounds like you don't act that way. Do you not buy the "later" logic? If not, why not?
EA is a bunch of people who have a similar way of looking at how to apply our resources and effort to making the world better, but even within EA there's still a ton of disagreement over what better means and how to go about getting there.
The idea of waiting until later is typically called "patient philanthropy". The argument is something like:
1. People matter equally regardless of when they exist.
2. Money you invest could be far more money in the future.
3. Giving opportunities will be about as good in the future as they are today.
4. Therefore if you save to donate later you can do a lot more good.
This often looks like putting money in a Donor Advised Fund to lock in the "this has to go to charity" while still letting it grow, and then later deciding where to donate it.
It's not a common position within EA, and isn't one I hold (so I may not be fully fair to it). The main objection is to point 3: there are actually a bunch of reasons to expect that money donated today will go further than money donated later. The big one, from my perspective, is that we are increasingly creating more powerful AI systems, and we're close to making ones that are smarter than almost everyone. This is very different from anything people have done before, and could have extremely long term consequences (extinction, loss of human control over the future, locking in values that on reflection aren't great, etc).
I could see a different argument against 3. Let's say you give some money now that lifts some people out of poverty. Those people don't raise their kids in poverty, which changes their kids' position, which means that their kids don't grow up in poverty, and so on. So money given now can have a compounding effect in peoples' lives, affecting more people in the future than just the people it affects today.
Yes! This sort of compounding effect is also a potential reason to prefer giving sooner. But it is important to be clear-eyed about the extent to which compounding is really happening: while it's a story we all want to believe, there's also substantial potential for regression to the mean.
By the way, in my harsh comments about EA, I think I was mainly arguing with the "patient philosophy" (and the people who hold it), which was my impression of all of EA.
I hang out with a lot of EA friends and I have never heard anyone advocate for it.
The concept is called "patient phlithoropy", apparently about 1% of EA donations go to such funds.
There is no pope of EA that sets doctrine, so anyone can do and say what they want.
I have heard a similar argument that you dont need to sell everything you own and donate it all, because a steady X% per year is better than a lump sum and then homelessness. Or that it makes sense to spend on a college degree so you can earn and donate more later. Both make sense to me.
That said, basically every philanthropic org makes some degegree of "wait until later to be more effective". The gates foundation or churches dont try to spend every penny they have in the current year.
> Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one.
The thousands who donate to charity like Against Malaria Foundation or direct cash transfers, and many who pledge to donate a large percentage of their income?
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.
"It is completely irrelevant whether string theory has any significance or meaning as a physical theory, "
You have to just re-read that statement and let it sink in, because that right there is the primary evidence the the depth of the delusion.
And you have it upside down: that 'some good can come from' it - is the 'irrelevant' part.
String Theory is a fraud.
It's literally a conspiracy theory.
Thousands of PhDs and absolutely gigantic scientific focus, decades of attention away from more plausible concepts.
Conferences, papers, Academic careers.
10's of thousands of Academics and an order of magnitude more students and others, sucked into the vortex of something that is not real.
Were all of that to have been prefaced and presented in a different way, were it not so self serious, were there not as much attention and investment - then that'db be totally fine. As an arcane pursuit, in all 'self awarenees' - then we can say 'it produced great math.'
Your comment is very strong evidence of the depth of the deception - that people would justify it in the same breadth as admitting it's likely total fabrication.
By far the most interesting thing about String Theory is the 'social pheomenon' - how charismatic movement leaders, loyal lieutenants, gullible followers, hapless adminstrators, people tryig to sell books and stories ... systematically collude to promote a constant falsehood.
This false under the 'Big Lie' type of misrepresentation - a lie that is so big nobody could fathom anyone would be so incredulous as to say it. Not a purposeful lie mind you, I'm sure everyone involved were 'believers', but where it has the same effect.
None of the 'math' that String Theory will ever be hugely important.
String Theory's 'contribution' is the breadth of the misrepresentation - it will be looked back upon for centuries as a phenomenon, not a theory.
>None of the 'math' that String Theory will ever be hugely important.
Geometers won't have said that when a team of string theorists beat them so soundly the physicists not only solve the general case, but they even showed an error in one of the values provided by the geometers.
If you are asking of alternative theories, among them from what I understand loop quantum gravity has exactly the same amount of experimental evidence as string theory: zero.
If you wish to understand my viewpoint, vortex theory, which we now know is wrong, also paid its due to mathematics and has completely shown its value. Moreover it was a valid step toward physics even if it was later shown as wrong. I see no reason unless some among current physical theories proves definitively better to elevate one or denigrate one over the other.
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.
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.
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.
> especially if you never actually get around to the buying mosquito nets part
Or instead get brain-wormed into giving all your torment nexus dollars to "ai safety" cult that tells you that you're helping to prevent the endless torture of all sentient minds that could ever exist in the entire universe.
Hubbard proved that you can create an effective cult out of bad science fiction-- perhaps it should be surprising that it took so long for someone to improve on the design...
Also, all the bad things you did at Torment Nexus Inc... They get a head start on whatever good things you do with the money. Even if the cult is effective, it's playing catch-up.
Not to disagree about the dangers of dangling large amounts of money in front of people that comes with a promise it will be earmarked for (in this case) good causes, because that is exactly what went wrong in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, but:
- https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs
> Many people can do even better by using their careers to help others more directly.
This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate. That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
I was initially curious about effective altruism ~10 years ago, but fortunately i had enough political background to realize that this is essentially a movement of silicon valley sociopaths virtue-painting their bad behavior and their working for the most evil industries on earth in the name of a hypothetical future greater good that will never materialize because they keep supporting the capitalist system that's destroying our planet. It's like saying you're gonna work for Darth Vader because the pay is good so you'll provide good for the universe; it's entirely fucked up and does not hold any form of scrutiny from actually-rational people with a modest social sciences / political background.
> This sentence is too short for such a complex topic. Whether you can (or should at all) mix your political projects with your career is an entire debate.
And it is a debate they (or at least the ones around here, I'm in Europe, having turned down each opportunity to relocate to the USA) will encourage you to think about.
For the purposes of "FAQ to sell you on the difference with earn-to-give", when earn-to-give is also a complex topic with an entire debate, the sentence they wrote is an appropriate size of answer, even if I find their writing style to be "preach to the choir" rather than actually saying something that would convince an outsider.
(Regarding un-convincing writing style: look at how caveated that whole quotation is. This is typical nerd writing (and I say that as a nerd), not bold "written in primary colours" language that political, business, and charity slogans use).
> That they throw it away entirely shows that they are very conservative: the entire idea of collective political action (which is not charity nor work) does not exist in their worldview.
They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations, so I don't know what you have in mind here that makes them fail it. (Also, thanks to the way political language is a treadmill, when you say "conservative" I don't know if you mean "small government", "Trumpist", "pre-Trump Republican party", "Chesterton's fence", or something else; US use of the word has always been very different from European use of the term).
Don't get me wrong: I think EA is not particularly good at the "effective" part despite their attempts (and name), but you're not making a strong case here.
> And it is a debate they will encourage you to think about
I've never met EA people in person, but through their blogs i've never felt invited to think about anything beyond raw numbers and vague notions disconnected from any actual social structure and injustice i could see with my eyes. Maybe i've missed the most interesting bloggers out there?
> They've definitely got political activities amongst their piles of recommendations
I would be interesting to know what you consider political. I've never seen anything resembling it. But maybe you'd call lobbying political activities? I'm thinking in terms of building collective power through union and non-electoral mobilizations. EDIT: for me warming up to this politician, that party, or taking a position in a corporation is not "politics"
> when you say "conservative"
I mean they don't appear to be revolutionaries. I can't see a better world through their writings, nothing significantly different about the power structures, merely green-coated capitalism where technology has magically solved every problem, which i thought to be naive wishful thinking that simply does away with centuries of revolutionary theory and praxis which did in fact bring social change. I personally find much more rationality, despite my disagreements, in Marx or Kropotkin (and their 21st century successors), than in the "rationalist" community online.
Lots of EA criticisms come from literal extremists who consider the mere aspect of earning money in free market itself to be evil. EA is fine and has issues but it needs critic from more normal people.
We don't have a free market and there never has been one: corruption and nepotism is the source of all great wealth in any capitalist society. Whether we should have one at all is a different debate.
Earning money is not the problem. Most of us have had (or still have) morally-questionable jobs to put food on the table. That's a reasonable trade-off until we have a better, more ethical society. But making it a moral argument to work for the most evil corporations on earth to do good just doesn't make sense. At which point do you become the bad guy you're trying to avoid being through effective altruism?
what is the most evil corporation? Microsoft?
Dupont, Purdue Pharma, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, Nestle...
It's not a competition, but it really feels like they're all trying to win that title.
Which EA works in Lockheed Martin?
I have a dossier, but it's not taken well when stuff like that gets posted.
OK i'll byte. Microsoft? Or any other GAFAM? Agro-business? Med-tech? Plastic industry? Many sectors who claim to improve lives but have made everything quantifyingly worse on many counts despite incredible technological/efficiency gains which could lead to a life of abundance for all of humanity.
As for the most evil, the competition is fierce. Of course i don't think Backblaze or OVH is just as evil as Amazon or Google. Just like i don't think La Vache Qui Rit or Loué are as evil as Carrefour and Unilever. But in my view, if you're recruiting people and aiming for a better world, you should aim higher than "my employer is not actively supporting genocide". Otherwise, your utopian project has nothing very interesting nor moral about it.
No I don’t think these companies made everything quantifiable worse.
But you started with most evil corporations. What did you mean by it and why did you bring it up?
Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better? And you snide at them because of this?? And I have no idea what you mean about genocide.
This confirms my point that a lot of EA critiques come from literal extremists who think doing good within the system is “evil”.
> Is your problem with EA that they work within the system and try to incrementally make it better?
I don't think they're making it better, that's the whole debate.
> I have no idea what you mean about genocide
That's just an example, referring to the Rohingya genocide or the Palestinian genocide, both of which have been more than facilitated by tech companies.
> think doing good within the system is “evil”
That's a misinterpretation of what i said. I think it's a valid goal on a personal level, but that it actually doesn't work (produces burnout or corruption of values). Therefore i think it's a wrong collective strategy that entirely misses the point (and centuries of experience) of how to change society for the better.
EDIT: for example, slavery abolition or women's right to vote in the Global North was not achieved by advocating to work for plantation owners and then giving away money to charity. And i don't know of a single historical example where that strategy worked.
> But making it a moral argument to work for the most evil corporations on earth to do good just doesn't make sense.
https://80000hours.org/
Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
Your entire argument is a projection and strawman. You have no idea what you're talking about. The imperative popularized in EA circles is to work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible, and otherwise donate money you earn by providing value.
If you're going to argue that merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations then you're chastising a lot more people than just EA adherents.
Your whole thing I suspect is informed by the sentiment that making good money must categorically be evil, or some other leftist notion.
> Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
It's hard to find one that's not evil on this list, except maybe for reporter at MIT Tech Review? Some of these job titles sound good, but wield no power to make good things in practice (hence the turnover rate for many "ethicist" or QA roles). But i didn't have to scroll much to find unambigously evil corporations (eg. RAND, Google).
> work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible
I'm sensitive to this argument, but i'm not sure that's possible in practice. It might be possible in some public sector or non-profit jobs, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible when driven by market value and share prices. EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.
> merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations
No. Many people do the minimum that's asked of them to put food on the table, that's just human and we can't really blame them. Those who go above and beyond thinking they'll save the world through Silicon Valley startups and foundations actually destroying it are the ones in my view aiding "evil".
What profound question do you want them to ask? I’m asking sincerely.
Please don’t suggest something like revolution or class warfare. Maybe you had something else in mind?
> What profound question do you want them to ask?
Many, in fact. What do we work on, and for whose benefits? How to make useful products without destroying the environment or negatively impacting our bodies and minds? Why, despite an over-abundance of resources and products, do we have such profound inequalities? How could we address them?
Small example: why fixate on AI safety and risk of human extinction when 1) AI problems run much deeper (loss of QA, more economic inequalities, insane resource extraction, etc) 2) human extinction is actually already on track due to pre-AI industrial activities, and addressing the problems we had before ChatGPT came out would de facto solve the problems posed by OpenAI and others in the field?
That's just a small overview, we can (and should) ask many more, and i think what you called class warfare definitely has a place in that list. I'm just as much fascinated by numbers as the next EA blogger, but i do believe being fixated on numbers prevents from asking deep moral and philosophical questions about our shared humanity. Maybe my feeling of the EA community is wrong, and i'd be interested in reading more radical EA-adjascent blogs if you have links to share.
On the 80000 website itself, the list of problems it presents is so wildly disconnected from actual problems people rationally face every day it's hard to read. All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.
Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational. Then notice how by removing the bad actors from the equation your scifi problems disappear too. That's rational. Telling the billions of people who suffer to shut up because AI extinction is the real problem and we need to throw money at it so that a hypothetical future might be better is just completely irrational, disrespectful, and anything but altruist or efficient.
Not sure what you’re talking about, most of the real criticism of EA came in the wake of SBF and that was across the political spectrum; if you look at the ‘Debate’ section of the Wikipedia entry the critics and their positions are very grounded. David Brooks is not a ‘literal extremist.’
There are good critics of EA but I’m speaking about the parent critique which is taking the extremist stance.
Read moar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Other_criti...
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.
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…
This reads more like an orchestrated proxy smear campaign to attack the actual thing they're after: the opposition to unrestricted AI.
The smear campaign will work if that’s all that’s out there. Are they public with their beliefs/principles or does someone need to go through levels of billions valuation to know the truth.
The article here pretty much debunks itself given the over-the-top absurdity and irrationality of its "arguments". But of course only when read critically in the first place.
When two opposing forces meet, you don’t get truth from either side, you get it by critically looking at what’s left between the lines. And it doesn’t look good for EA if I go by the discussion here. Lots of pushing problematic to crazies and anecdotal altruism that is not in any way related to EA principles specifically. I don’t judge. Everyone is entitled to do what they think is best. But we can also be concerned on our side on the impact EAs actions can have on us who are not in agreement with the vagueness of it. And we can say that it is looking as much about altruism as Scientology is about science.
> I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning)
That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.
Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.
You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.
I wouldn’t be against the co opt interpretation and I do believe people will be co opting something both with good and bad or crazy intentions. The thing is, if a fraction that co opts is so overwhelmingly outranks everyone else, then the original intent may end up the fringe. From my perspective the issue starts with the name. Why effective? The moment you introduce an optimisation problem you open the back door to biases. I would suggest blind altruism. Engineers can accept readily that random processes can optimise. Let the randomness optimise blindly and just be altruistic. You don’t have to publish an altruism balance sheet.
> overwhelmingly outranks
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.
Ranking by influence. Claiming that adjacent personalities have influence that could even be compared to that of AI behemoths signing agreements with the President of the US is not going to convince anyone.
Look up ‘earning to give’ and think about the implications of that when a few thousand worth of mosquito nets buys a human life.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Buying mosquito nets through e.g. the Against Malaria Foundation was popularized through EA!
Well... look at the behavior, it is bad. They use the things you say here to justify it, soo... yes.
What "behavior", and why are you cherry-picking some actors over others?
>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.
one of the achievements of economics is showing that heartless rapacious capitalists, in a competitive market, will still arrive at the optimum solution for maximizing happiness.
for example, in a town with a lake, and two "rich" employers, a clothing company that pollutes the lake, and a food company that needs non-toxic water from the lake (and workers who work at the two companies and are the consumers of the food and clothing); it does not matter either of which company owns the lake: the two greedy businessmen will arrive at the same answer either way. And BTW, a socialist approach will not yield the optimum, having no basis to decide either way and relying on impulses not corrected by a market.
you very much need to rethink your notions of good and bad.
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.
What now? The main thing about rational (logical) arguments is to make explicit the domain of their applicability and ensure that fits the given situation.
The social myth of important social questions not being amenable to rational consideration is a political tool, not scientific truth. The classical literature doesn't help there.
I suggest you read the 2 cultures, that will help you navigate this issue.
Most people do not believe that everything is measurable unfortunately
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Yes, I'm aware, I'm simply surprised to read that sentiment here.
Not everything is measurable though. There are (pretty unexpected) constraints on practicality, but also logical restrictions people tend to forget about.
As an interesting example in the context here, consider the question what constitutes history. There are many other things with great import you can't really measure the important part of.
Oh brother there is no space that isn’t filled with dualists.
To the point where I just send this to people when they try and argue with me:
https://kemendo.com/dualists.html
Hehe, yes. I can relate, but I have to point out some points:
Making distinctions based on undetectable differences is just one kind of error in that category: people also make unreasonable distinctions based on detectable differences irrelevant to the decision space.
Point being, that actually all falls under motivated reasoning. People don't really care about the logic, they want their desired outcomes realized.
Not arguing with them might actually help them.
That "soul" concept is far more interesting than you give it credit for. Look into the gnostics and the difference to spirit for instance. People were far less stupid than they're framed as today, misinterpretation and misrepresentation go a long way and a lack of precise words can obscure a commendable intent.
Extremely familiar with the gnostics
I think even better approach is the way Terrence Mckenna goes through all of this in his book exploring the hermetic tradition
And I agree with you on motivated reasoning but that is arguably just how human intelligence works and in this case everybody in their current time was doing the best that they could with the tools that they had. So I don’t mean to diminish former practitioners of what they called science or epistemological reasoning, or natural philosophy.
At the same time as scientists were constantly identifying when new mechanisms that better describe natural phenomenon retire old social formations around them
In my view the main failure of humanity is not adapting social structures at the pace of epistemological change, this is Carl Sagan’s main complaint in the demon haunted world.
The issue with this stance is that rationality shouldn't be reduced to "logic" and efficiency. When it is, then bad things happen.
Another issue with EA is that it is yet another trendy thing among nerds and techbros that was iterated hundreds of times in philosophy under general debate on consequencialism/utilitarism. Of course nerds and techbros think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, so they don't bother engaging with that debate in honest manner.
Wait till you hear about the rational arguments for eugenics based on metrics of moral worth.
We’ve been here before, many, many times.
See Hamlet, who famously lost everything after basing his charitable giving strategy on pure reason.
> 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.
Some of the allegations involve minors, people whom are lured into economically dependent conditions, and group pressure situations where consent is not so easily defined (no matter how much motivated reasoning is abused to rationalize breaking with 'outmoded conventions' like not seducing subordinates).
But part of it is also a more general point: Their plan is to build an "AI God" constructed according to their own moral theory before anyone else, and that it will prevent anyone else from creating a competing god-- the absurdity of this plan doesn't prevent the effort from creating terrible harm (e.g. the corporate monopolization of AI, mass surveillance on unimaginable scale, etc). The AI safety faction sees itself as moral guardians of humanity's future-- and it's absolutely relevant that many people would consider them weird and that some would consider them (rightly or wrongly) outright morally repugnant.
You lose your right to have no one else worry about what you do in your private life when you start making plans to take over the world, even if you think it's in everyone's best interest. Every other modern authoritarian dictator also though their actions were in the public's interest.
> does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?
Yes, we do this in 2026 as we did for millenia. That's called society. Glad to help you.
> at this point does anyone really give a shit what consenting adults do in their private lives?
Perhaps people in your circle are above that. But you don't have to cast your net very wide to find someone who thinks that same sex relationships are an abomination.
> 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.
Twitter was not representative of everyone and X is even less so.
Given that the halls of power are full of pedophiles blackmailing each other, it's generally worth worth a bit of suspicion that it's not actually adults and/or not actually consensual.
>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.
If so, why don't you point them out explicitly?
It's pretty wild how people denounce the very possibility of approaching that question rationally, while doing so in an obviously irrational way.
My point was not against rationality, rather to other necessary aspects which are, again, subtly ignored, or improperly dealt with. Filling in the gaps when you do not know what you do not know can be a dangerous thing.
> 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.
> "Rational 'good' maximizing" is itself problematic, because it disregard the danger inherit in any utility function.
It only gets so if you push beyond the model which you used to approximate "good", not so much when you're working at the margins.
When I've looked at what they do, while there are some huge blind spots (like Sam Bankman-Fried), they do also say "don't bother giving money to cause XYZ, they have more than they can spend already, donate skills to them or money somewhere else").
They also don't collectively have one single utility function, their big thing is telling other people how to maximise their own; in this regard, your criticism is essentially "all effective advice is evil".
> The nazi campaign to cleanse their population was motivated and justified in part by the latest in eugenic science.
I'm deeply suspicious of everyone who says "we've solved all the problems with eugenics, this time we can do it right and make everyone healthy!" for much the same reason I care about AI safety: humans are kinda idiots with this sort of power. Too many blind spots about the downsides, even for those involved who are not explicitly power-seeking.
That said, I'm sure some anti-car campaign has said a similar thing as you about Autobahns. It's a terrible argument.
> 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.
I think you misunderstand: Their (some of their) definition of 'good' in this context being 'do not destroy the universe' is due to how incredibly bad humanity currently is at aligning AI with literally any human intention. Like, our understanding of AI alignment simply isn't good enough today for us to be able to answer a question like "if you extrapolate current models to arbitrary skill level, do we get something closer to a Warhammer-40k-esque GrimDark future, or closer to Iain M. Bank's Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia?"
>I think you misunderstand: Their (some of their) definition of 'good' in this context being 'do not destroy the universe' is due to how incredibly bad humanity currently is at aligning AI with literally any human intention. Like, our understanding of AI alignment simply isn't good enough today for us to be able to answer a question like "if you extrapolate current models to arbitrary skill level, do we get something closer to a Warhammer-40k-esque GrimDark future, or closer to Iain M. Bank's Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia?"
As far as I am concerned? We're headed straight to Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia. The dumbest part about AI is that nobody is using it for societal critique. If people are already impressed by its coding abilities, they should check out what it can do for organizing people in a way that minimizes the need for public institutions.
I mean I asked the AI how to fund open source software using a financial analogy and it straight up told me. When you fund a non-exclusive good like a publicly available open source software, what you need to sell isn't the code but its continued maintenance and availability and the only way you can accomplish that is by guaranteeing that you will archive and shut down the project the moment the money runs out. Then you sell insurance against the shut down of the project. You don't beg for money, because that creates free-riding. The more secure the funding of the project is, the less incentive there is to fund it by buying the insurance. Hence, your project must always be at the brim of total collapse. The risk of the worst outcome needs to be near certain, and simultaneously never happen, because everyone is buying the insurance.
> As far as I am concerned? We're headed straight to Fully Automated Luxury Communism utopia.
If you can prove it, you'd make a lot of people sleep better at night.
If you can prove either of those is more likely than a paperclip optimiser, you'd still be doing pretty well.
(Not that a citation from fiction is worth much, but even Iain M. Bank's Culture series had hegemonising swarms).
I actually updated my comment. There is the proof. Also after asking AI, it told me that strategy is literally 1:1 the EA strategy so no wonder they hate AI.
Edit:
The AI pointed out that it is effectively a protection racket, but then I pointed out that there can be competing protection rackets driving the cost down. You know what EA hates? Competition. For EA to continue to exist, humanity must suffer.
That's not even shaped like a proof.
Of anything, let alone your specific claim.
> The AI pointed out that it is effectively a protection racket, but then I pointed out that there can be competing protection rackets driving the cost down. You know what EA hates? Competition. For EA to continue to exist, humanity must suffer.
Likewise this is also not actually shaped like a proof, it's just rhetoric.
>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".
Actually, you're assuming their talking points when they talk negatively about AI.
What if AI will not bring about paper clip maximization? What if it will bring about something much worse? Like beating the effective altruists at their own game and putting them out of a job by being a superhuman rational effective altruist? No! That must never happen! AI is dangerous!
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.
The philosophical idea of "effective altruism" isn't "property" of some Silicon Valley cabal. It also is wildly misrepresented in that article in the first place.
There are indeed some people associated with an EA "group" (while they themselves don't really seem to identify themselves with it) that have done weird stuff, but to connect that with the AI opposition in general just because some of the former work at Anthropic is pure libel.
In other words, they pretend to see "connections" where logically none can be made. With libelous intent.
Hmm...
Their cover story is "Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea" so they don't seem that anti. Text and discussion here https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/1wvara6/...
That's an older article, this post links to a very different one:
https://archive.ph/3gSCc
(Cached from https://www.economist.com/international/2026/10/01/how-effec...)
It's the classic worrying about having the best security front door while having glass windows.
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”.
Oof, that one hit close to home.
Likely a better read
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
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 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?
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.
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.
So.. government?
That too… are they building a government? Because that would be a much more honest name in that case.
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.
A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.
If you want a better understanding of what the AHA spends their money on I'd recommend checking their financial reports.
29% of their expenses go to paying education/training staff and the expenses involved with operating that but about the same amount comes back from their trainings in revenue. And that amount that comes back is actually near equal to all the donations they get.
Another ~31% goes to public health education staff.
~5% goes to operating various community services.
~18% goes to research.
and then overall management is ~8% with fundraising expenses making up the remaining ~9%.
For a group split between running various emergency training and certification programs (ex CPR), general public health awareness and education, advocacy, and research, those are pretty reasonable numbers.
https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association...
https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Ann...
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%.
If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
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.
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.
It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
> 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.
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.
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.
Giving away your wealth in ways you think are the best for society is not the same as letting society decide for itself through democracy.
And they support raising taxes because it's a good way to signal that you're "for the people" and cheap if you care about power more than money. A billionaire CEO will stay a billionaire if their income tax is 90% and unrealized gains tax same as their portfolios growth, and stay a CEO even if they go broke.
The important part for them is power over other peoples lives because that's exactly what you need if you believe you're a special "rational agent" who is responsible for pushing humanity in the right direction. That power can come from shady think tanks, government jobs or controlling a trillion dollar company.
You might call it a capital movement
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.
It sounds like you're saying social movements by definition can't fail, which doesn't seem like the most sensible definition to me
Man who refers to Heaven's Gate as a social movement
A better term would be an 'order'
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.
How about "conspiracy" then?
you have to measure it like they do, a weighted net-worth average
the more you have, the more you matter
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.)
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.
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 question is: is the system selecting for psycopaths, or creating them?
Selecting then distilling.
EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
I agree with that.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You mean like donating hundreds of millions of dollars to bednets, or cash grants to the world's poorest?
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.
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'm not sure it was but there was quite a lot of press coverage eg. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23500014/effective-altrui... which probabaly contributed to the sneer and disdain.
It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.
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.
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 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.
What does that mean? What is the real goal of the conspiracy?
Any conspiracy has simple goals. Control, power, money sometimes as a means to the first two. It’s not even conspiratorial right now to assess that EA members go for these. Not all of them, but the ones that matter in this discussion.
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 doesn't have to just be "wait and see", although I do believe that all truth is revealed in the fullness of time, but it could just be humility, e.g. X believes Y is the way to go, I don't see why X believes that, and I could discuss this with X or even debate vigorously, but at the end of the day, we don't know who is more moral until much later.
One very interesting thing about the idea of "last judgment" in the gospels is that there are several parables devoted specifically to it, and the thing that unites all of them is that all groups of people are completely surprised at what they are judged by. The good don't know what good they did, and the bad don't know what bad they did. The group that has strong opinions about what good they did end up being completely wrong. The group that is praised for doing good don't even remember doing good.
You don't need to believe the parables, but there is another way to it. I don't know how old you are, but once you are of "mature age", you may well notice that the things you thought were important when you were 20 years younger were much, much less important than what you think of today. And 20 years later, the same holds true as well. So you can view these parables as extrapolations of human ignorance and the increasing recognition of that ignorance with age especially when it comes to moral matters.
Partly because we don't see all ends, since we can't tell the future, so we don't know what ends up in the long run being a good course of action, and partly since our judgments are tainted by self-seeking and a desire for self-elevation. It is not just some people that want to feel better than others. Everyone wants that, whether they admit it or not. That taints all of our moral beliefs.
So in that environment of pervasive ignorance and self-deception, what do you do? You go according to your own conscience, arguing that while you may be completely wrong, at least you are not trying to outsmart yourself. But expect, whether in the last judgment, or as time passes, to radically update your beliefs, especially about what is and is not moral. So you go with your own conscience but don't try to apply your judgment to others.
By the way, the first murder recorded in Genesis, of Cain killing Abel, was basically a beef between vegetarians and meat eaters. God commanded man to eat herbs and not meat -- it is only after Noah that God allows man to eat meat. But Abel gave a meat offering to God, a shelamin offering, or one in which you eat the meat and God gets the fat, and Cain saw that Abel was munching on meat, and then God praised Abel. Cain was absolutely certain that Abel was in the wrong, and that Cain was in the right. And he was absolutely certain that God was wrong for banning meat eating and then praising Abel. That festered and festered until one day Cain murdered Abel, effectively sacrificing Abel like Abel sacrificed the sheep. And then when God came to Cain to ask "Where is your brother?", Cain replied with "Am I my brother's shepherd?" -- the answer being a resounding yes, since he slaughtered Abel like a shepherd slaughtered sheep. This clearly shows that killing an animal is the same kind of thing as killing a man, and yet it also shows that God praises those who eat the meat offering, and also that whenever you judge someone for doing something, you end up guilty not only of the same thing, but the same thing enlarged. By the way, this first murder in Genesis 4 happened immediately after the fall in Genesis 3, which occurred when man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is, he is able to decide for himself what is good and what is evil. And immediately, that judging of good and evil leads to murder because of feelings of being wronged.
These are all hard lessons for how human beings approach morality, that is we use it as a mechanism to lift ourselves above others and to condemn others for wronging us, and we also completely misinterpret it. This is a universal thing, I am not trying to judge one group or another. If your conscience tells you not to eat, then don't eat.
Aha! I suspected you were religious from your first response, since it seemed to hinge on being granted perfect moral clarity in time. I don't personally believe that, but I agree that moral truth is difficult to find in our lifetimes, and it's well to constantly question and update one's beliefs, as well as respecting and maintaining an open mind towards others.
As an aside, I was raised Christian, and recently I tried re-reading Genesis as an adult atheist. There's a lot of poetic justice. The underlying theme seems to be "People do lots of terrible things, but you shouldn't punish them, because God will." I guess that Iron Age tribal shepherds were a pretty violent bunch and that's what they needed to hear.
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 the picture of them they want you to hold, the non-deepfake is different
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
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'?
”KPI based altruism" could be more accurate ?
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.
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...
> 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...
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.
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?
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'.
Good perspective. Lots of good ideas get corruped over time. But EA managed to do it in record time while the founders are still around.
That seems like a rather tribal take on your part. Are you not accounting for the indigenous people who were killed and displaced? What about slavery and Jim Crow? What about women not having the right to vote until 1920? What about the many wars? Only now you take issue with the current situation because your preferred party is not in power?
There’s nothing new about ICE detention centers and you should read up on previous presidents and their relationship with journalists. In particular check out Obama. See https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-obama-administration-mos...
Good point. The US has always sacrificed people. That's not really a new thing.
But that we look at it differently today has nothing to do with any particular party or who is in power (that has little relation to the parties of today), but with the fact that we live today, and have a tendency to glorify the past. (And there's definitely an attempt to whitewash history, ignore all the terrible things the US has done and pretend the US was always great and perfect.)
But there's also the belief that over time, we should be learning and doing better, and we wouldn't do those terrible things of the past anymore. So the shock when they do happen is real. And the current US government is pretty explicit about wanting to bring back all the horrors of the past.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[flagged]
Please recommend some worthy publications
Charmin
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.
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.
Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.
probably the best description of EA that I've read so far.
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").
What about this common stereotype: EA advocates that one should take the most lucrative job possible, regardless of any moral harm it may cause, as long as it enables you to do good which (perhaps barely) outweighs the moral harm your job caused in the first place? How fair or unfair is that stereotype?
This sounds close to a thing I've heard EAs argue for, though your version is missing important parts. A big one is that if the good the job allows you to do only barely outweighs the moral harm you caused by taking taking the job, then probably there was some other job where you'd have caused much greater net moral benefit.
I think the closest there is to a mainstream EA view on this is https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/ , which argues that "it's a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms".
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.
> Effective Altruism-Linked Group Used Millions Donated By FTX To Buy A Czech Castle
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effecti...
(They are now selling said castle.)
I'm not sure i see how that is really linked to effective alturism as a philosophy. Sounds like person famous for grifting did some grifting, but that happens all the time in normal philanthropy too.
I don't think EA is immune from grifters or people with bad intentions. It is after all a movement made up of humans. I think the question to be answered is does the philosophy encourage it in a way that other philosophies around philanthropy don't.
> 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?
Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one. Someone who wears the EA label, and actually does things to help with real problems.
I'm not really an expert on EA. I just want to understand the public sentiment because it is increasingly part of the political moment, to the point the president is tweeting about it and running a PR campaign against them.
According to AI, the biggest EA charity is GiveWell, which spends about 600 million per year. 95% of the money on low-cost high-impact global health programs like mosquito Nets and vitamins for children.
There is also open philanthropy, which gives about 500 million per year With a wider perspective. Roughly 50, 40 and 10% go to Global Health, Existential Risks, and then Animal Welfare in that order.
That said, I'm not really trying to argue the case. If the simple reason is that people have characterized EA based on SBF, and that's how they think about these things, then that is a complete answer.
I've been on HN about as long as I've been an EA, over which period I've donated more than half my income. I work at a biosecurity nonprofit, trying to reduce the risk we all die in a bioattack.
Then, I have some sincere questions. No, wait. First, my sincere compliments, both for your work and your giving.
Now, questions:
In your view (which I will listen to, because you're actually an EA), is the "wait until later to be more effective" actually a part of EA? Or is that a separate thing that calls itself by the same label?
If it's the same thing, it sounds like you don't act that way. Do you not buy the "later" logic? If not, why not?
EA is a bunch of people who have a similar way of looking at how to apply our resources and effort to making the world better, but even within EA there's still a ton of disagreement over what better means and how to go about getting there.
The idea of waiting until later is typically called "patient philanthropy". The argument is something like:
1. People matter equally regardless of when they exist.
2. Money you invest could be far more money in the future.
3. Giving opportunities will be about as good in the future as they are today.
4. Therefore if you save to donate later you can do a lot more good.
This often looks like putting money in a Donor Advised Fund to lock in the "this has to go to charity" while still letting it grow, and then later deciding where to donate it.
It's not a common position within EA, and isn't one I hold (so I may not be fully fair to it). The main objection is to point 3: there are actually a bunch of reasons to expect that money donated today will go further than money donated later. The big one, from my perspective, is that we are increasingly creating more powerful AI systems, and we're close to making ones that are smarter than almost everyone. This is very different from anything people have done before, and could have extremely long term consequences (extinction, loss of human control over the future, locking in values that on reflection aren't great, etc).
I could see a different argument against 3. Let's say you give some money now that lifts some people out of poverty. Those people don't raise their kids in poverty, which changes their kids' position, which means that their kids don't grow up in poverty, and so on. So money given now can have a compounding effect in peoples' lives, affecting more people in the future than just the people it affects today.
Yes! This sort of compounding effect is also a potential reason to prefer giving sooner. But it is important to be clear-eyed about the extent to which compounding is really happening: while it's a story we all want to believe, there's also substantial potential for regression to the mean.
By the way, in my harsh comments about EA, I think I was mainly arguing with the "patient philosophy" (and the people who hold it), which was my impression of all of EA.
Thanks for the answers and the dialog!
I hang out with a lot of EA friends and I have never heard anyone advocate for it.
The concept is called "patient phlithoropy", apparently about 1% of EA donations go to such funds.
There is no pope of EA that sets doctrine, so anyone can do and say what they want.
I have heard a similar argument that you dont need to sell everything you own and donate it all, because a steady X% per year is better than a lump sum and then homelessness. Or that it makes sense to spend on a college degree so you can earn and donate more later. Both make sense to me.
That said, basically every philanthropic org makes some degegree of "wait until later to be more effective". The gates foundation or churches dont try to spend every penny they have in the current year.
> Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one.
The thousands who donate to charity like Against Malaria Foundation or direct cash transfers, and many who pledge to donate a large percentage of their income?
How about the 11,000+ people who have pledged to donate at least 10% of their income for life: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/members
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.
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
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.
Yes, I recommend googling "mirror symmetry" if you're unfamiliar.
"It is completely irrelevant whether string theory has any significance or meaning as a physical theory, "
You have to just re-read that statement and let it sink in, because that right there is the primary evidence the the depth of the delusion.
And you have it upside down: that 'some good can come from' it - is the 'irrelevant' part.
String Theory is a fraud.
It's literally a conspiracy theory.
Thousands of PhDs and absolutely gigantic scientific focus, decades of attention away from more plausible concepts.
Conferences, papers, Academic careers.
10's of thousands of Academics and an order of magnitude more students and others, sucked into the vortex of something that is not real.
Were all of that to have been prefaced and presented in a different way, were it not so self serious, were there not as much attention and investment - then that'db be totally fine. As an arcane pursuit, in all 'self awarenees' - then we can say 'it produced great math.'
Your comment is very strong evidence of the depth of the deception - that people would justify it in the same breadth as admitting it's likely total fabrication.
By far the most interesting thing about String Theory is the 'social pheomenon' - how charismatic movement leaders, loyal lieutenants, gullible followers, hapless adminstrators, people tryig to sell books and stories ... systematically collude to promote a constant falsehood.
This false under the 'Big Lie' type of misrepresentation - a lie that is so big nobody could fathom anyone would be so incredulous as to say it. Not a purposeful lie mind you, I'm sure everyone involved were 'believers', but where it has the same effect.
None of the 'math' that String Theory will ever be hugely important.
String Theory's 'contribution' is the breadth of the misrepresentation - it will be looked back upon for centuries as a phenomenon, not a theory.
>None of the 'math' that String Theory will ever be hugely important.
Geometers won't have said that when a team of string theorists beat them so soundly the physicists not only solve the general case, but they even showed an error in one of the values provided by the geometers.
If you are asking of alternative theories, among them from what I understand loop quantum gravity has exactly the same amount of experimental evidence as string theory: zero.
If you wish to understand my viewpoint, vortex theory, which we now know is wrong, also paid its due to mathematics and has completely shown its value. Moreover it was a valid step toward physics even if it was later shown as wrong. I see no reason unless some among current physical theories proves definitively better to elevate one or denigrate one over the other.