I was surprised by the weakness of this article, regardless the potential absurdities of parts of EA.
Why does The Economist consider this the most important issue this week, in a world of complex problems, to splash its first leader on (and more than one page long too)?
Why would a movement which started as nerds buying mosquito nets to stop malaria be "a bunch [of] post hoc justifications for bad behaviour"? You say this like it's an established fact or at least a common argument, yet I've never heard it before.
I don't know. Lots of movements lose their way. I just know that every time it comes up, the story is that some nerd with a lot of big ideas ended up getting carried away and causing a bunch of harm. The article brings up Sam Bankman-Fried, for instance.
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…
> 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”.
Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group. It makes more sense to me that way. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from moving forward.
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.
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.
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.
There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.
There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
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%.
Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.
While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.
If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.
A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.
If you want a better understanding of what the AHA spends their money on I'd recommend checking their financial reports.
29% of their expenses go to paying education/training staff and the expenses involved with operating that but about the same amount comes back from their trainings in revenue. And that amount that comes back is actually near equal to all the donations they get.
Another ~31% goes to public health education staff.
~5% goes to operating various community services.
~18% goes to research.
and then overall management is ~8% with fundraising expenses making up the remaining ~9%.
For a group split between running various emergency training and certification programs (ex CPR), general public health awareness and education, advocacy, and research, those are pretty reasonable numbers.
When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
When I talk about ineffective altruism I talk about accumulating capital and shutting everyone out of innovation in the name of regulatory protection. Nothing like a daddy to protect us sounds like altruism.
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.
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.
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. The article here is closer to, "we found something we can publish bad news about, without offending our funders."
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.
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.
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.
Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground. There are 3 possible responses:
1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground
2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first
3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.
I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
> Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground.
I think this is an unhealthy belief. More likely, people don't know what is or is not moral, because their decisions are plagued by self-interest, limited knowledge, and the influence of peer pressure and tradition that may or may not have gotten things right.
So it is more about people taking calculated bets, say on a share price. They don't know for sure if they think the price will go up or down, they are guessing, but not randomly guessing. There is an underlying investment thesis that may or may not be correct.
So a contrarian investor, may be a genius or a fool. Time will tell. Most people, when they see a contrarian investor, decide the prudent approach is "wait and see", because they have their own thesis about a different set of stocks.
Everyone is trying to figure this out as best as they can. To think that you have the moral high ground by holding some niche beliefs is a foolish way of living.
I 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?)
That's how I understand it: a movement encouraging people to donate their wealth to good causes which save and improve lives.
However, there's some who predict an existential future risk such as an AI apocalypse. If that's the case, why save a child's life today when we'll all be killed by AI tomorrow? Critics would call this funding pet projects rather than altruism.
But you can even further down this line of thinking. If you're a billionaire and see yourself as the only hope of saving humanity from extinction, why donate any of your wealth? You should be doing the opposite, gathering as much wealth and power as possible. Taxes and laws that get in your way are impediments to the salvation of humanity.
I'm pretty sure most of the criticism is for folks in the latter groups. I wish there were different words to distinguish them better, because I like the idea of encouraging charity but somehow a handful of billionaires have poisoned the word altruism.
In short it is because they have influence. There is a difference between sending $1 to Africa instead of America and sending millions. There is a difference between an AI safety researcher fantasizing about AI hacking everything on the planet and their AI models telling me I can't look for bugs in my code.
Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him.
Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".
I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force.
It's a fairly common talking point that EA is bad because it's too friendly with billionaires. I admit I would struggle to find an example of somebody openly celebrating preventable deaths of poor people, but the large numbers of lives saved by EA-funded interventions don't generally figure in these people's calculus.
I'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
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.
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.
Very few billionaires are EAs. A few more have a generally EA approach to their giving. But billionaires are generally not that keen on EA because it would involve donating almost all their money.
If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
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."
"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."
> The movement’s long-standing fears of an AI catastrophe make it a villain in the eyes of the Trump administration. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” is the Department of War’s attack line. The president’s allies are going after Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as a representative of effective altruism.
I'd wager that it's simply the government wanting absolute power (as it should) and going after misaligned oligarchs.
So, effectively, power struggles in circles beyond our reach.
Arguably a good thing that the government would eventually try to claw back power there, given that in theory, it's democratically elected and all.
Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource to the point where they steer society itself?
I've been scratching my head a bit lately about what EA seems to have turned into.
Originally, the idea seemed to be simply to spend your money to do the most effective good. Don't spend it on "charities" where most of it ends up in the pockets of their executives, don't spend it on issues that don't really accomplish much, etc. Their initial priorities seemed pretty decent. GiveWell type stuff.
But nowadays it seems to be completely corrupted by all that TESCREAL crap (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism). Most of those make no sense or seem to be utterly irrelevant to the goals of EA. The one that seems to try is Longtermism, but the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
I thought that was just a bunch of weirdos or corrupt rich people trying to leverage EA as PR for not actually having to do anything for real people. But it turns out that EA pioneers like Ord and MacAskill are also on board with that nonsense. The 80,000 hours jobs list is now all about AI. The whole thing seems to be just a massive grift with no redeemable value.
Is there still some angle from which EA makes sense? Was it always pure grift? Or did the founders get corrupted by proximity to too many billionaires?
> the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
And as far as I can tell, that's one of the most coherent parts of the TESCREAL package. Apparently it also includes goals to transcend mortality or humanity, at which points you've definitely lost touch with any meaningful form of morality.
I don't pretend to understand everything that TESCREAL is about, but that's at least partially because much of it strikes me as utter SciFi bullshit that's completely unhinged from reality. And that's not even getting into some of the deeply racist eugenics stuff I've come across.
If there's any real meaningful value in EA, all the other stuff is distracting from it. Get back to fixing poverty, inequality and animal cruelty. But there seems to be so much billionaire grift involved in it by now, that anything that threatens their elevated position (which by itself is a threat to humanity) is unlikely to find approval with the big money that's now behind it.
What EA has turned into is analogous to what the US Government has turned into.
It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.
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.
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.
Sure. I don't think EAs are magically unique. A lot of movements (feminists, socialists, churches, unions) produce driven, organized and kind-hearted people.
I grew up in a cult, too. They were very eager and sincere. I'm very familiar with "eager and sincere" hiding incoherent motivated reasoning and savior complexes that give their adherents cover to behave both stupidly and horridly -- with a smile.
I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.
Much of the world will be surprised to hear that they have been conquered by effective altruism. Seriously what kind of spheres does the person live in who wrote that article? I think they need to hire some people who spend less time in online blogs and on twitter and more time idk, traveling to China or India
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.
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.
I'm not really an expert on EA. I just want to understand the public sentiment because it is increasingly part of the political moment, to the point the president is tweeting about it and running a PR campaign against them.
According to AI, the biggest EA charity is GiveWell, which spends about 600 million per year. 95% of the money on low-cost high-impact global health programs like mosquito Nets and vitamins for children.
There is also open philanthropy, which gives about 500 million per year With a wider perspective. Roughly 50, 40 and 10% go to Global Health, Existential Risks, and then Animal Welfare in that order.
That said, I'm not really trying to argue the case. If the simple reason is that people have characterized EA based on SBF, and that's how they think about these things, then that is a complete answer.
You might benefit from thinking critically about who and what you consider to be greedy. If you don't, it's easy to be tricked by various kinds of shell games, where certain kinds of work are never considered "greedy" or certain kinds of charity make the donor appear disproportionately generous. One game that's become pretty well known is how many "donations" to well-funded schools are in fact admissions payments for wealthy kids.
Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
I feel like there is this weird thing where people will criticize people who do charity work in not quite the right way (from the criticizers perspective), but are totally fine with people who just use their money to buy a yacht.
I'd much rather have people spend their money on feeding the hungry, even imperfectly then spending it on other pursuits.
I sometimes wonder what the critics of EA are doing to eradicate the ills of the world or even their local community. Is it more than what EA is doing? If not, i'd say those in glass houses should be wary of throwing stones.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.
Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA. How prominent is it within the movement.
I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
> 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").
> Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
Are they? To what degree are they? And to what degree are they not helping the hungry today, in order to amass more money so that they can in theory help the hungry more tomorrow?
I can respect someone like Bill Gates. He hasn't been perfect, not by a long shot, but he's put real money into really trying to help real problems. What's the track record of the effective altruists? (Genuine question - I haven't researched them enough to know.)
Feeding the hungry in particular is uncommon, but global poverty (usually malaria nets and other specific impactful + neglected interventions) is the largest cause area in EA, and something I've personally donated a lot to.
People need to learn to disassociate the 'cultural movement' from the ideology.
Read what Chomsky has to say about postmodernism.
Look at the evolution of 'String Theory'. Thousands of PhDs minted in something that likely has no relevance to anything. String Theory could not have achieved prominence merely as an idea - it only rose to the fore because it was a 'movement' - with all of the supporting accoutrements. It only has an arcane value, not as a leading premise. The 'movement' pushed it to the fore.
Look at Scientology / Dianetics (that one is pretty hard).
'Movements' are almost always about the 'Movement', and the ideology often seems to take a back seat.
The 'Movement' is something almost nominal to rally around, that helps create a 'form' for a loose consensus.
It inspires some people to act as though they are doing something for a 'greater good' (whether they are or not), and for leaders to dereference their apparent authority towards that greater ideal.
Imagine if all of these 'ideas' were just left as 'ideas' or maybe 'ideals' and that's that - and there were no groups, meetups, nobody really publicly 'aligned' with them or signalled their participation.
Then we'd have a better notion of what these ideas really are.
But in reality, these systems are 'social movements', groupings, ways for people to signal their special merit or alignment.
It's social politics. Red v Blue. Bloods v Crips. Insiders v Outsiders. Specials v Normies. Nobility v Plebes. Citizens v Slaves.
It gets problematic when the groups get power, people believe in their own gibberish, people place all of their faith in group leaders even when actions by the group defy the nature of the movement itself.
"We're breaking the rules of finance and stealing from people because 'we're the good guys', right? Everything we do is in the name of ... 'good' ... so we can do pretty much anything". is the story of FTX.
Look at it first through the lens of the social organization, then separately through the lens of ideals.
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…
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)?
Because Anthropic is the final manifestation of EA and is about to raise two trillion dollars.
Effective altruism, like economics, is mostly a bunch post hoc justifications for bad behavior.
> Actually, if you think real hard about it, we're the good guys
--the bad guys
The economist likes it because it resembles what their target audience tells themselves so they can sleep at night.
Why would a movement which started as nerds buying mosquito nets to stop malaria be "a bunch [of] post hoc justifications for bad behaviour"? You say this like it's an established fact or at least a common argument, yet I've never heard it before.
I don't know. Lots of movements lose their way. I just know that every time it comes up, the story is that some nerd with a lot of big ideas ended up getting carried away and causing a bunch of harm. The article brings up Sam Bankman-Fried, for instance.
The guys who were obsessed with maximizing efficacy of charitable giving, and then later AI risk, are "justifying bad behavior". Right.
I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning). But what circulates is troubling. E.g. statistically optimising for future even if it means harming current can be bad dressed in an excuse. Assigning value e.g. to lives (from prawns to humans) can also be a statistical way to do harm with an excuse. Overall, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…
> There is an elusive quality to effective altruism. The movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only “EA adjacent”.
Oof, that one hit close to home.
Likely a better read
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...
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.
Maybe if you consider the wealth of the in group vs out group. It makes more sense to me that way. Scary how few people it might need to keep the world from moving forward.
Social movements come in all sizes. Its a bunch of people who all agree on something. That is a social movement.
You can call it a subculture or philosophy or movement, but social movement to me implies something with broad appeal.
Agreed. If society is unmoved, it wasn't a social movement.
It sounds like you're saying social movements by definition can't fail, which doesn't seem like the most sensible definition to me
It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
> It is a social movement of note and importance because of the power wielded by its adherents.
We should tax the shit out of them, if only to reduce the unelected power their wealth buys.
Just like we should tax the shit out of the non-EA ultra wealthy.
We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.
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.
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.
A better term would be an 'order'
you have to measure it like they do, a weighted net-worth average
the more you have, the more you matter
How about "conspiracy" then?
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.
If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.
There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.
When people talk about ineffective altruism, they're generally talking about organizations like the American Heart Association, which spends over half of annual donations on payroll (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135...). I don't think many people in the effective altruist movement would complain about a targeted trust that successfully and reliably achieves some niche goal.
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%.
Imagine you have a charitable organization that receives funds and then pays its staff of doctors to provide free treatment to the poor. All of their donations would be spent on payroll and overhead. But this would not demonstrate that the organization is wasteful.
While that's true, the AHA does not perform medical treatments or have an in-house research lab.
If someone's really passionate about putting up healthy living posters and shifting the cost of CPR education from healthcare providers, more power to them! But my guess is that most AHA donors don't know or ask what exactly their donations are accomplishing.
A lot of what the AHA does runs via payroll: advocacy, training, writing guidelines, etc. The implication of "payroll" is that the money is all going to administration, but their programs involve a lot of staff time.
(I have a generally EA view of the world and I don't think the AHA is an especially valuable donation opportunity.)
That's fair. I personally was a bit put out when I discovered this, I had assumed most of the donations were going to research, but advocacy and training have some value and I could believe that other people fully expect that's what the AHA does.
If you want a better understanding of what the AHA spends their money on I'd recommend checking their financial reports.
29% of their expenses go to paying education/training staff and the expenses involved with operating that but about the same amount comes back from their trainings in revenue. And that amount that comes back is actually near equal to all the donations they get.
Another ~31% goes to public health education staff.
~5% goes to operating various community services.
~18% goes to research.
and then overall management is ~8% with fundraising expenses making up the remaining ~9%.
For a group split between running various emergency training and certification programs (ex CPR), general public health awareness and education, advocacy, and research, those are pretty reasonable numbers.
https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/american-heart-association...
https://www.heart.org/en/-/media/Annual-Report/2024-2025-Ann...
When effective altruists talk about ineffective altruism, they talk about AHA. When I talk about ineffective altruism, I talk about things like a targeted trust.
It's the EA people who generalize from AHA to make grand ethical claims that lead to absurdity.
When I talk about ineffective altruism I talk about accumulating capital and shutting everyone out of innovation in the name of regulatory protection. Nothing like a daddy to protect us sounds like altruism.
Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
Added above. Thanks!
> Will MacAskill ...
That guy is a scammer who participated in the Alameda / FTX scam: he was SBF's mentor and fled the ship, like a rat, before SBF was sent to jail.
So far and as long as I know the ill-acquired mansion in England by MacAskill with 15 million GBP stolen by SBF hasn't been clawed back yet (but it may: in other fraud cases funds and properties have been clawed back as much as 20 years after the fact).
And he certainly didn't hand the mansion back without being asked: for thieves don't do that.
A despicable human being.
Now I know why he's given a voice in some publications: it's for the same reason SBF was presented as the 2nd coming of Christ before his scam came to light. These people have relations and splurge (corrupt) money on a lot of people.
What's not clear is why he's given a voice on HN.
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.
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. The article here is closer to, "we found something we can publish bad news about, without offending our funders."
EAs like Nick Bostrom argue that we have a greater moral obligation to hypothetical trillions of future persons--including an obligation to see to it that they come into existence--than to people who actually exist. Personally, I think that's insane sociopathy.
Thinking that far into the future, such that it affects actions one takes in the present is a true detachment from reality.
If that's a motivating factor for how they live their life, then they need hospitalization for their own good.
Pretty much what I think of Anthropic's management, man. Dario, at least, needs serious psychiatric help.
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.
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.
Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground. There are 3 possible responses:
1. Take no action -- but if they're right, you cede the moral high ground
2. Imitate them -- which also cedes the moral high ground, since they got there first
3. Undermine their claim; prove they're actually acting in self-interest.
I believe this is why so many people love(d) to hate on vegans.
> Anytime someone takes any (supposedly) moral action which is not part of the status quo, they are implicitly claiming the moral high ground.
I think this is an unhealthy belief. More likely, people don't know what is or is not moral, because their decisions are plagued by self-interest, limited knowledge, and the influence of peer pressure and tradition that may or may not have gotten things right.
So it is more about people taking calculated bets, say on a share price. They don't know for sure if they think the price will go up or down, they are guessing, but not randomly guessing. There is an underlying investment thesis that may or may not be correct.
So a contrarian investor, may be a genius or a fool. Time will tell. Most people, when they see a contrarian investor, decide the prudent approach is "wait and see", because they have their own thesis about a different set of stocks.
Everyone is trying to figure this out as best as they can. To think that you have the moral high ground by holding some niche beliefs is a foolish way of living.
I 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?)
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.
That's the picture of them they want you to hold, the non-deepfake is different
It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.
It's because of the gap in what they say and what they do.
EAs have the lowest distance between what they think is the right thing to do and what they actually do of any group I've met.
(I donate 50%, and quit a high-paying tech job to work at a biosecurity nonprofit)
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.
Cause they produced Dam Bankman Friedman and people like him.
Cause somehow their idea of best altruism ends up amounting to "earn as much money and power with little regard to how, because so that you can use them for good in the future in a very top down way".
Effectively, it is very swlf serving.
I think a possible explanation is, they support billionaires giving away money. So you get a rare alignment of people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires, and people who'd rather see poor people die than see billionaires have fewer superyachts. United they're a powerful force.
Edit: Also weird nerds.
> people who'd rather see poor people die than see support for billionaires
Can you give an example of this kind of person?
It's a fairly common talking point that EA is bad because it's too friendly with billionaires. I admit I would struggle to find an example of somebody openly celebrating preventable deaths of poor people, but the large numbers of lives saved by EA-funded interventions don't generally figure in these people's calculus.
I've always been wary of effective altruism. Anything that geek and people want to "optimize out" by engineering has a risk of just being a "let's ride very fast towards that wall" kind of venture
What about if it were called 'evidence-based altruism'?
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.
”KPI based altruism" could be more accurate ?
EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
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.
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.
Very few billionaires are EAs. A few more have a generally EA approach to their giving. But billionaires are generally not that keen on EA because it would involve donating almost all their money.
I get the feeling that the current membership is not, in fact, donating almost all their money.
If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
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."
"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."
> The movement’s long-standing fears of an AI catastrophe make it a villain in the eyes of the Trump administration. “Americanism, not effective altruism,” is the Department of War’s attack line. The president’s allies are going after Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as a representative of effective altruism.
I'd wager that it's simply the government wanting absolute power (as it should) and going after misaligned oligarchs.
So, effectively, power struggles in circles beyond our reach.
Arguably a good thing that the government would eventually try to claw back power there, given that in theory, it's democratically elected and all.
The purpose of the government is to serve the people, not "absolute power", unless you enjoy kings and fiefdoms.
Yes, and how does it do that if random people without a democratic mandate can just hold power over some important resource to the point where they steer society itself?
That's what is meant by "absolute power"
No, in a system of limited government, the government should not want absolute power. If it wants it, it should absolutely not get it.
Mind you, I don't want the effective altruists to have the kind of power they seem to want, either...
I've been scratching my head a bit lately about what EA seems to have turned into.
Originally, the idea seemed to be simply to spend your money to do the most effective good. Don't spend it on "charities" where most of it ends up in the pockets of their executives, don't spend it on issues that don't really accomplish much, etc. Their initial priorities seemed pretty decent. GiveWell type stuff.
But nowadays it seems to be completely corrupted by all that TESCREAL crap (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism). Most of those make no sense or seem to be utterly irrelevant to the goals of EA. The one that seems to try is Longtermism, but the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
I thought that was just a bunch of weirdos or corrupt rich people trying to leverage EA as PR for not actually having to do anything for real people. But it turns out that EA pioneers like Ord and MacAskill are also on board with that nonsense. The 80,000 hours jobs list is now all about AI. The whole thing seems to be just a massive grift with no redeemable value.
Is there still some angle from which EA makes sense? Was it always pure grift? Or did the founders get corrupted by proximity to too many billionaires?
In what ways to you think the TESCREAL arguments are wrong?
As I said:
> the notion that the needs of non-existant people in a possible distant future we know nothing about, somehow outranks the needs of real people today, is utterly absurd.
And as far as I can tell, that's one of the most coherent parts of the TESCREAL package. Apparently it also includes goals to transcend mortality or humanity, at which points you've definitely lost touch with any meaningful form of morality.
I don't pretend to understand everything that TESCREAL is about, but that's at least partially because much of it strikes me as utter SciFi bullshit that's completely unhinged from reality. And that's not even getting into some of the deeply racist eugenics stuff I've come across.
If there's any real meaningful value in EA, all the other stuff is distracting from it. Get back to fixing poverty, inequality and animal cruelty. But there seems to be so much billionaire grift involved in it by now, that anything that threatens their elevated position (which by itself is a threat to humanity) is unlikely to find approval with the big money that's now behind it.
What EA has turned into is analogous to what the US Government has turned into.
It took 250 years for the US to go from the constitution to ICE detention centers and banned journalists, but it only took EA 15 years to go from 'donating to the poor' to 'sacrificing real present humans for the sake of future theoretical humans'.
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.
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.
I don’t have an opinion on EA, and have never run into one, in the wild.
However, what you have described, is pretty much exactly the organization that I've been involved in, my entire adult life.
I won't mention it, here, as we maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film.
Sure. I don't think EAs are magically unique. A lot of movements (feminists, socialists, churches, unions) produce driven, organized and kind-hearted people.
EAs happen to be the ones I know.
I'm my opinion they don't produce them, they attract them, and for different reasons.
I grew up in a cult, too. They were very eager and sincere. I'm very familiar with "eager and sincere" hiding incoherent motivated reasoning and savior complexes that give their adherents cover to behave both stupidly and horridly -- with a smile.
I'm not going to ignore the weird sex cults, the arrogance, the bizarre arguments, or the bad actors.
First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.
I've unconquered the title above and replaced it with something bland. Hopefully that will reduce the rush to inflammation in the thread.
Much of the world will be surprised to hear that they have been conquered by effective altruism. Seriously what kind of spheres does the person live in who wrote that article? I think they need to hire some people who spend less time in online blogs and on twitter and more time idk, traveling to China or India
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.
[flagged]
Please recommend some worthy publications
Charmin
Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.
The title alone is comical. "Here are ten reasons to continue to be greedy...".
probably the best description of EA that I've read so far.
Genuinely curious why you feel that way?
First, you can read about Sam Bankman-Fried; then you can say "oh, he's not _real_ effective altrusim...and do your backflips.
But that is one human, and not a very honest one.
Is that the standard you hold everything to?
Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one. Someone who wears the EA label, and actually does things to help with real problems.
I'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.
I'm not really an expert on EA. I just want to understand the public sentiment because it is increasingly part of the political moment, to the point the president is tweeting about it and running a PR campaign against them.
According to AI, the biggest EA charity is GiveWell, which spends about 600 million per year. 95% of the money on low-cost high-impact global health programs like mosquito Nets and vitamins for children.
There is also open philanthropy, which gives about 500 million per year With a wider perspective. Roughly 50, 40 and 10% go to Global Health, Existential Risks, and then Animal Welfare in that order.
That said, I'm not really trying to argue the case. If the simple reason is that people have characterized EA based on SBF, and that's how they think about these things, then that is a complete answer.
You might benefit from thinking critically about who and what you consider to be greedy. If you don't, it's easy to be tricked by various kinds of shell games, where certain kinds of work are never considered "greedy" or certain kinds of charity make the donor appear disproportionately generous. One game that's become pretty well known is how many "donations" to well-funded schools are in fact admissions payments for wealthy kids.
Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
I feel like there is this weird thing where people will criticize people who do charity work in not quite the right way (from the criticizers perspective), but are totally fine with people who just use their money to buy a yacht.
I'd much rather have people spend their money on feeding the hungry, even imperfectly then spending it on other pursuits.
I sometimes wonder what the critics of EA are doing to eradicate the ills of the world or even their local community. Is it more than what EA is doing? If not, i'd say those in glass houses should be wary of throwing stones.
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. I don’t think many people take issue with feeding the hungry. However the longtermist sect and their idea that enriching yourself as much as people so you can do more good later leads to the actual controversial actions especially when taken to its logical extremes. And the AI fanaticism got mixed in there somehow.
Are there examples of these "controversial actions". Are they actions that wouldn't have happened without the ideology of EA. How prominent is it within the movement.
I'm opened to having my mind changed, but i'm going to need more than that.
> Effective Altruism-Linked Group Used Millions Donated By FTX To Buy A Czech Castle
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2023/02/28/effecti...
(They are now selling said castle.)
> 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").
> Meh, they have some beliefs i disagree with, but ultimately they are spending money on things like feeding the hungry.
Are they? To what degree are they? And to what degree are they not helping the hungry today, in order to amass more money so that they can in theory help the hungry more tomorrow?
I can respect someone like Bill Gates. He hasn't been perfect, not by a long shot, but he's put real money into really trying to help real problems. What's the track record of the effective altruists? (Genuine question - I haven't researched them enough to know.)
Feeding the hungry in particular is uncommon, but global poverty (usually malaria nets and other specific impactful + neglected interventions) is the largest cause area in EA, and something I've personally donated a lot to.
EA is a dynamic saviour complex cult that is devoid of reality and gave birth to the FTX fraud.
The whole concept of it is a scam.
It is almost surprising that it survived post-SBF's exposure as a massive (and that undersells it) fraud.
The reason it's not surprising is the size of the money bulwark of the people still behind it.
Calling it "most important movement" is like calling national socialism "most important movement", just because it made history doesn't make it good
You are conflating "important" with "good", which I don't think the author was intending.
e.g. climate change will likely be very important in the coming century
People need to learn to disassociate the 'cultural movement' from the ideology.
Read what Chomsky has to say about postmodernism.
Look at the evolution of 'String Theory'. Thousands of PhDs minted in something that likely has no relevance to anything. String Theory could not have achieved prominence merely as an idea - it only rose to the fore because it was a 'movement' - with all of the supporting accoutrements. It only has an arcane value, not as a leading premise. The 'movement' pushed it to the fore.
Look at Scientology / Dianetics (that one is pretty hard).
'Movements' are almost always about the 'Movement', and the ideology often seems to take a back seat.
The 'Movement' is something almost nominal to rally around, that helps create a 'form' for a loose consensus.
It inspires some people to act as though they are doing something for a 'greater good' (whether they are or not), and for leaders to dereference their apparent authority towards that greater ideal.
Imagine if all of these 'ideas' were just left as 'ideas' or maybe 'ideals' and that's that - and there were no groups, meetups, nobody really publicly 'aligned' with them or signalled their participation.
Then we'd have a better notion of what these ideas really are.
But in reality, these systems are 'social movements', groupings, ways for people to signal their special merit or alignment.
It's social politics. Red v Blue. Bloods v Crips. Insiders v Outsiders. Specials v Normies. Nobility v Plebes. Citizens v Slaves.
It gets problematic when the groups get power, people believe in their own gibberish, people place all of their faith in group leaders even when actions by the group defy the nature of the movement itself.
"We're breaking the rules of finance and stealing from people because 'we're the good guys', right? Everything we do is in the name of ... 'good' ... so we can do pretty much anything". is the story of FTX.
Look at it first through the lens of the social organization, then separately through the lens of ideals.
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…