The evolution of effective altruism
economist.com
economist.com
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)?
> 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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
and your definitions of bad behavior are therefore not post hoc, so let me hear your definitions.
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.
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?
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.
Most people do not believe that everything is measurable unfortunately
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, we do this in 2026 as we did for millenia. That's called society. Glad to help you.
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.
Rationality tends to fail spectacularly when basing it on wrong assumptions. Which are subtly made.
It's pretty wild how people denounce the very possibility of approaching that question rationally, while doing so in an obviously irrational way.
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.
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?"
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Oof, that one hit close to home.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
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 something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
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.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
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...
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.
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.
the more you have, the more you matter
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
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.
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.
If that's a motivating factor for how they live their life, then they need hospitalization for their own good.
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 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.
Edit: Also weird nerds.
Can you give an example of this kind of person?
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?)
'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.
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.
(I donate 50%, and quit a high-paying tech job to work at a biosecurity nonprofit)
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Me: "I don't let my kids have iPads."
Other parent: "YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME? FUCK YOU!"
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.
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."
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."
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.
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'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.
That's what is meant by "absolute power"
Mind you, I don't want the effective altruists to have the kind of power they seem to want, either...
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.
It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.
I 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.
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.
EAs happen to be the ones I know.
I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.
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.
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.
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 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").
I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effecti...
(They are now selling said castle.)
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.
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.)
Is that the standard you hold everything to?
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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
The whole concept of it is a scam.
The reason it's not surprising is the size of the money bulwark of the people still behind it.
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.
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.
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...
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.