The evolution of effective altruism

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...

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

EA sounds like an excuse for billionaires to continue being the opposite of altruist.

> 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.

First time hearing the term. I dont know about conquering the world.

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

Just a magical mental gymnastics for someone who got the message that greed is bad, but wanted to continue being greedy.

Calling it "most important movement" is like calling national socialism "most important movement", just because it made history doesn't make it good

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…