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)?
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.
The White House and "Effective Accelerationists" (e/acc) like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are behind that smear campaign. To each their own?
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.
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/...
> 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?
It's not a competition, but it really feels like they're all trying to win that title.
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.
started as
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.
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 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.
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.
To the point where I just send this to people when they try and argue with me:
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.
We’ve been here before, many, many times.
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!