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:
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.
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!
It's at least as credible that AI brings tremendous prosperity as it brings serious harm (the largest uncertainty in both comes from its ability to have a transformative impact).