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)?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up.
My 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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."
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."
> 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?
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
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.
> 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.)
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.
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…
62 comments:
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)?
> 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.
Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...
Added above. Thanks!
If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about "conspiracy" then?
A better term would be an 'order'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm always curious why effective altruists attract so much sneer and disdain when the topic comes up.
My 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.
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.
It’s one of those things that sounds fantastic on the surface. Then you dig.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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."
> 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...
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
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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...".
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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
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…