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The evolution of effective altruism

The evolution of effective altruism

bazzmt

Comments (107)

  • wodow
    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)?
  • PoignardAzur
    > 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.
  • abhis3798
  • giacomoforte
    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.
  • williamcotton
    Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruismhttps://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
  • smitty1e
    If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
  • mohamedkoubaa
    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.
  • jibalt
    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.
  • anon
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  • doctoboggan
    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.
  • anon
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  • oulipo
    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
  • mcv
    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?
  • drywater2
    EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.
  • PoignardAzur
    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.
  • jiraiyasarutobi
    First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.
  • Barrin92
    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
  • cyanydeez
    Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.
  • rvz
    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.
  • PunchyHamster
    Calling it "most important movement" is like calling national socialism "most important movement", just because it made history doesn't make it good
  • hypfer
    > 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.
  • s1artibartfast
    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.
  • holaysuns
    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.
  • fwlr
    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…