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The evolution of effective altruism

63 points · 169 comments · bazzmt

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cyanydeez · 1791144443 · focus · HN ↗
Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.
1. seu · 1791144678 · focus · HN ↗
  probably the best description of EA that I've read so far.
2. karim79 · 1791144794 · focus · HN ↗
  The title alone is comical. "Here are ten reasons to continue to be greedy...".
3. SpicyLemonZest · 1791145890 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
4. bawolff · 1791146371 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. kylestanfield · 1791148196 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jefftk · 1791152695 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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").
    bawolff · 1791155519 · focus · HN ↗
    Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA.
    I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
    fragmede · 1791156115 · focus · HN ↗
    > Effective Altruism-Linked Group Used Millions Donated By FTX To Buy A Czech Castle
    <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effective-altruism-linked-group-used-millions-donated-by-ftx-to-buy-a-czech-castle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effecti...
    (They are now selling said castle.)
    bawolff · 1791168248 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. AnimalMuppet · 1791148650 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.)
    jefftk · 1791153219 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
5. s1artibartfast · 1791146608 · focus · HN ↗
  Genuinely curious why you feel that way?
  1. cyanydeez · 1791147076 · focus · HN ↗
    First, you can read about Sam Bankman-Fried; then you can say "oh, he's not _real_ effective altrusim...and do your backflips.
    s1artibartfast · 1791148194 · focus · HN ↗
    But that is one human, and not a very honest one.
    Is that the standard you hold everything to?
    AnimalMuppet · 1791148764 · focus · HN ↗
    Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one. Someone who wears the EA label, and actually does things to help with real problems.
    s1artibartfast · 1791152165 · focus · HN ↗
    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 to Global Health, Existential Risks, and then Animal Welfare in that order.
    jefftk · 1791153390 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    AnimalMuppet · 1791160144 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    jefftk · 1791161034 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
    AnimalMuppet · 1791161449 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jefftk · 1791163551 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    s1artibartfast · 1791162939 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lanfeust6 · 1791162405 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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?
williamcotton · 1791144875 · focus · HN ↗
Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism
<a href="https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-macaskill-responds-to-our-cover-story-on-effective-altruism" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
1. dang · 1791148311 · focus · HN ↗
  Added above. Thanks!
2. TacticalCoder · 1791154641 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. williamcotton · 1791161803 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. echthesia · 1791163961 · focus · 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.)
3. BLKNSLVR · 1791155708 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
4. aaron695 · 1791162811 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
PunchyHamster · 1791144906 · focus · HN ↗
Calling it "most important movement" is like calling national socialism "most important movement", just because it made history doesn't make it good
1. doctoboggan · 1791145200 · focus · HN ↗
  You are conflating "important" with "good", which I don't think the author was intending.
  1. jebarker · 1791146718 · focus · HN ↗
    e.g. climate change will likely be very important in the coming century
giacomoforte · 1791145225 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. EA-3167 · 1791145349 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
2. dleslie · 1791145394 · focus · HN ↗
  It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
  1. bayarearefugee · 1791146235 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    dleslie · 1791149714 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    throwawayk7h · 1791158142 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    tancop · 1791177863 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. throwaway27448 · 1791159241 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. bawolff · 1791145772 · focus · HN ↗
  Social movements come in all sizes. Its a bunch of people who all agree on something. That is a social movement.
  1. giacomoforte · 1791146519 · focus · HN ↗
    You can call it a subculture or philosophy or movement, but social movement to me implies something with broad appeal.
    __MatrixMan__ · 1791152244 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed. If society is unmoved, it wasn't a social movement.
    saghm · 1791157599 · focus · HN ↗
    It sounds like you're saying social movements by definition can't fail, which doesn't seem like the most sensible definition to me
  2. throwaway27448 · 1791159207 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
4. mohamedkoubaa · 1791147009 · focus · HN ↗
  A better term would be an 'order'
5. barbazoo · 1791147353 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group it makes more sense to me. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from getting better.
6. xg15 · 1791150327 · focus · HN ↗
  How about "conspiracy" then?
7. verdverm · 1791156254 · focus · HN ↗
  you have to measure it like they do, a weighted net-worth average
  the more you have, the more you matter
doctoboggan · 1791145349 · focus · HN ↗
Interesting, I wasn't aware that EA had made it into the American culture wars. There will be a ton of grist for the conspiracy mills with all the sex cults, murders, and high power democratic donations. Can't see it going well for the EA crowd, or democrats.
1. whatshisface · 1791154930 · focus · HN ↗
  This isn't an indicator, to be part of a culture war something has to be accepted as normal by half. Culture wars are driven by the shock of someone telling you the most normal thing about your upbringing and parent's values is in fact a horrible deviance.
oulipo · 1791145979 · focus · HN ↗
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
1. Angostura · 1791152279 · focus · HN ↗
  What about if it were called 'evidence-based altruism'?
  1. makeitdouble · 1791155331 · focus · HN ↗
    ”KPI based altruism" could be more accurate ?
  2. BLKNSLVR · 1791156821 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
hypfer · 1791146042 · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
1. SillyUsername · 1791147935 · focus · HN ↗
  The purpose of the government is to serve the people, not "absolute power", unless you enjoy kings and fiefdoms.
  1. hypfer · 1791148389 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource?
    That's what is meant by "absolute power"
2. AnimalMuppet · 1791148345 · focus · HN ↗
  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...
drywater2 · 1791146398 · focus · HN ↗
EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
1. cogman10 · 1791146848 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
2. furyofantares · 1791148055 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
3. TZubiri · 1791148108 · focus · HN ↗
  "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."
4. AnimalMuppet · 1791148145 · focus · HN ↗
  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."
5. jefftk · 1791152364 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. BLKNSLVR · 1791157385 · focus · HN ↗
    I get the feeling that the current membership is not, in fact, donating almost all their money.
    jefftk · 1791158508 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: 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 definitely should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
    BLKNSLVR · 1791158828 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with that.
wodow · 1791146665 · focus · HN ↗
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)?
1. Daishiman · 1791147933 · focus · HN ↗
  The Economist has been, for several years now, a cheap calque of what it might have been in the past. A combination of cope articles and hot takes padded by barely dinstinguished language.
2. __MatrixMan__ · 1791152676 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. strken · 1791156999 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Joeboy · 1791157240 · focus · HN ↗
    This is online EA discourse. You'll get used to it.
    __MatrixMan__ · 1791158414 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Loquebantur · 1791159619 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lux-lux-lux · 1791169326 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    nullc · 1791170304 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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...
    __MatrixMan__ · 1791173012 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    abathologist · 1791169933 · focus · HN ↗
    Read moar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Other_criticism_and_controversies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Other_criti...
    tmnvix · 1791175140 · focus · HN ↗
    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 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Taxpayers%27_Union" rel="nofollow">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'.
  2. lanfeust6 · 1791157677 · focus · HN ↗
    The guys who were obsessed with maximizing efficacy of charitable giving, and then later AI risk, are "justifying bad behavior". Right.
    cgio · 1791158088 · focus · HN ↗
    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…
    Loquebantur · 1791159289 · focus · HN ↗
    This reads more like an orchestrated proxy smear campaign to attack the actual thing they're after: the opposition to unrestricted AI.
    cgio · 1791161375 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Loquebantur · 1791168899 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    cgio · 1791169800 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lanfeust6 · 1791162775 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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. Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
    cgio · 1791166408 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lux-lux-lux · 1791169888 · focus · HN ↗
    Look up ‘earning to give’ and think about the implications of that when a few thousand worth of mosquito nets buys a human life.
    abathologist · 1791170296 · focus · HN ↗
    Well... look at the behavior, it is bad. They use the things you say here to justify it, soo... yes.
  3. fsckboy · 1791165600 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
    __MatrixMan__ · 1791177267 · focus · HN ↗
    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 this, they don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives, and seem quite happy to tolerate a status quo where their job is to work for powerful men who are hurting people, and manufacture for those men justifications for why it's ok that they continue to hurt people.
    I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. Not all of them are as active in encouraging bad behavior as I've described. But, like effective altruism, their ability to actually turn those good intentions into good outcomes is suspect because of compromises that typically get made along the way.
3. stefangordon · 1791155886 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
4. stefangordon · 1791155930 · focus · HN ↗
  Because Anthropic is the final manifestation of EA and is about to raise two trillion dollars.
  1. Loquebantur · 1791159144 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    nradov · 1791160532 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Loquebantur · 1791161167 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    AndrewKemendo · 1791162399 · focus · HN ↗
    I suggest you read the 2 cultures, that will help you navigate this issue.
    Most people do not believe that everything is measurable unfortunately
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
    Loquebantur · 1791168385 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jswelker · 1791163966 · focus · HN ↗
    See Hamlet, who famously lost everything after basing his charitable giving strategy on pure reason.
    claytongulick · 1791164032 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    nullc · 1791171669 · focus · HN ↗
    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').
    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 survailance on unimaginable scale, etc). The AI safety faction sees itself as moral guardians of humanity 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.
    Quartzium · 1791167421 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
    Loquebantur · 1791168579 · focus · HN ↗
    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 irrational way.
    nullc · 1791170995 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
5. abathologist · 1791169977 · focus · HN ↗
  I wonder if its the result efforts to run PR interference against new bubbling scandals? E.g., <a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse" rel="nofollow">https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th... and
mohamedkoubaa · 1791146761 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. SpicyLemonZest · 1791148677 · focus · HN ↗
  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 (<a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135613797" rel="nofollow">https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...) and uses the other half for vague purposes with no concrete goals. 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.
  1. mohamedkoubaa · 1791150278 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    cgio · 1791158354 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    mohamedkoubaa · 1791158691 · focus · HN ↗
    So.. government?
    cgio · 1791158836 · focus · HN ↗
    That too… are they building a government? Because that would be a much more honest name in that case.
  2. UncleMeat · 1791150447 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    SpicyLemonZest · 1791151310 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jefftk · 1791151963 · focus · HN ↗
    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.)
    SpicyLemonZest · 1791152406 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 1791158183 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association-financial-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association...
    <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Annual-Report-Files/FY-24-25-American-Heart-Association-Financial-Highlights.pdf?sc_lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Ann...
    OneDeuxTriSeiGo · 1791158318 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association-financial-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association...
    <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Annual-Report-Files/FY-24-25-American-Heart-Association-Financial-Highlights.pdf?sc_lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Ann...
  3. saghm · 1791157845 · focus · HN ↗
    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%.
  4. [deleted] · 1791159474 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
Barrin92 · 1791147077 · focus · HN ↗
I think 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?
1. grebc · 1791147599 · focus · HN ↗
  [flagged]
  1. mejutoco · 1791148115 · focus · HN ↗
    Please recommend some worthy publications
    DonHopkins · 1791148827 · focus · HN ↗
    Charmin
    grebc · 1791159018 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://rss.social/" rel="nofollow">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. <a href="https://substack.com/@gurwinder/posts" rel="nofollow">https://substack.com/@gurwinder/posts <a href="https://jmarriott.substack.com/archive" rel="nofollow">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.
  2. [deleted] · 1791148388 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
2. Revanche1367 · 1791157549 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
[deleted] · 1791147149 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
s1artibartfast · 1791147361 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. watwut · 1791147889 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
2. Joeboy · 1791147935 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. gentoo · 1791150188 · focus · HN ↗
    > people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires
    Can you give an example of this kind of person?
    Joeboy · 1791150832 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    SpicyLemonZest · 1791151991 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. cowthulhu · 1791148301 · focus · HN ↗
  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?)
4. compiler-guy · 1791148881 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
5. api · 1791149260 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.
6. cjpearson · 1791149800 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
7. charcircuit · 1791150241 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
8. Marazan · 1791151021 · focus · HN ↗
  It's because of the gap in what they say and what they do.
  1. jefftk · 1791152146 · focus · HN ↗
    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)
    cgio · 1791158718 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    s1artibartfast · 1791161023 · focus · HN ↗
    What does that mean? What is the real goal of the conspiracy?
    cgio · 1791166662 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
9. fwipsy · 1791153453 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  This is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
  1. carefree-bob · 1791154015 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    s1artibartfast · 1791160696 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    carefree-bob · 1791168124 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    fwipsy · 1791171485 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. jswelker · 1791164499 · focus · HN ↗
    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!"
10. verdverm · 1791156469 · focus · HN ↗
  That's the picture of them they want you to hold, the non-deepfake is different
11. ranger207 · 1791169248 · focus · HN ↗
  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
gushogg-blake · 1791147502 · focus · HN ↗
I've been thinking about this article recently: TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines[0].
(TESCREAL is Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and Longtermism.)
[0]: <a href="https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.xml" rel="nofollow">https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.x...
jiraiyasarutobi · 1791148113 · focus · HN ↗
First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.
1. dang · 1791148444 · focus · HN ↗
  I've unconquered the title above and replaced it with something bland. Hopefully that will reduce the rush to inflammation in the thread.
  1. [deleted] · 1791153381 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
fwlr · 1791149049 · focus · HN ↗
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…
rvz · 1791149138 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. BLKNSLVR · 1791157613 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
PoignardAzur · 1791149359 · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
smitty1e · 1791150389 · focus · HN ↗
If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
holaysuns · 1791150893 · focus · HN ↗
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 may have no relevance to anything. A 'nice try' but with a lot of budget.
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 hard.
But in reality, they 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 places 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". etc.
Look at it first through the lens of the social organization, then separately through the lens of ideals.
abhis3798 · 1791151924 · focus · HN ↗
Likely a better read
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
PoignardAzur · 1791152393 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. ChrisMarshallNY · 1791152604 · focus · HN ↗
  I've never had 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.
  1. PoignardAzur · 1791153207 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    BLKNSLVR · 1791158456 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm my opinion they don't produce them, they attract them, and for different reasons.
2. frumplestlatz · 1791157788 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
3. BLKNSLVR · 1791158183 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
mcv · 1791152598 · focus · HN ↗
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?
1. in-silico · 1791153714 · focus · HN ↗
  In what ways to you think the TESCREAL arguments are wrong?
  1. mcv · 1791154541 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    BLKNSLVR · 1791157234 · focus · HN ↗
    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'.
2. nullc · 1791172524 · focus · HN ↗
  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).
jibalt · 1791155286 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. BLKNSLVR · 1791156345 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. KerrAvon · 1791157346 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty much what I think of Anthropic's management, man. Dario, at least, needs serious psychiatric help.
    BLKNSLVR · 1791159085 · focus · HN ↗
    Musk, Altman, Zuck...
    __MatrixMan__ · 1791159944 · focus · HN ↗
    The question is: is the system selecting for psycopaths, or creating them?
    BLKNSLVR · 1791163218 · focus · HN ↗
    Selecting then distilling.
throwaway27448 · 1791159486 · focus · HN ↗
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.

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