For me it’s always been a way to donate based on reason rather than emotions. I never quite figured out why it has this dark, cultish reputation among the people who for some reason oppose it.

I like the all-lowercase concept of effective altruism (making the most out of limited resources) but the organizations claiming that name are shady af

It’s just rich people lying to themselves to justify doing whatever they wanted to do anyway and pretend it’s somehow in humanity’s long term interests. It’s not, and nothing the rich do ever is.

This is worth a listen for some background on how EA thinking has been influencing the AI world:

https://podcastaddict.com/better-offline/episode/235206311

Short version is that it’s a cult that believes that they are about to bring about a god, and need to ensure they are the ones in control.

It’s a shallow, pointless ideology for super-rich motherfuckers who need a way to morally justify their tax evasion and the effects of the poverty that their lifestyles and business practices create.

It’s just capitalism and econ101 duct-taped and stapled to utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham is crying.

It’s for psychopath tech bros who’ve got spiders in their brainz.

For example, imagine a myopic billionaire who imagines himself “saving” humanity. If his contributions happen to cause suffering to people alive today, so what? He’s saving “trillions” of people, just in the future. Obviously this means that of all people alive, this billionaire is the only one who really matters. Certainly not Ukrainians who die because he turned off their battlefield communication… hypothetically.

The modern Effective Altruism movement is a quasi cult loosely connected to another quasi cult called the “rationalist movement,” and all of this is loosely organized around the Bay Area.

Don’t get me wrong. Rationalism has a long intellectual and scholarly history. Effective Altruism is based on the philosophy of utilitarianism, with its own long scholarly history. Subscribing to these ideas alone doesn’t put you into a cult.

But there definitely is a loose, quasi cult system, originating out of the Bay Area, using these names and ostensibly claiming to promote the ideas.

These people also go pretty hard on AI doomerism, and AI singularity as a coming end times sort of event. They’ve been taking this position since long before LLMs ascended to where they are now.

Lesswrong is the pen name and Internet handle of one Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is also the name of an Internet “community blog” where I think a lot of the rationality side of the group got organised, and maybe where they still organise. I don’t really keep up with the goings on.

!sneerclub@awful.systems is/was a Lemmy community dedicated to critiques and criticism of the rationality / EA system or nexus or whatever. (I have a hard time coming up with names for this. It’s definitely not organised like the Mormons or Scientologists or so on.)

https://morewrong.lol/?post=my-daughters-chemo-has-a-worse-cost-effectiveness-ratio-than-shrimp-welfare

A spoonful of it helps you get perspective on where you should be spending the most effort. A bucket of it turns you into Sam Bankman-Fried.

I read that as effective autism and was very confused.

I think it’s a scam built on the premise that effective altruists somehow know the future, which they don’t.

It’s complicated, but first things first you need to differentiate between the philosophy and the EA “movement”, led by Giving What We Can and others. The latter is shill bullshit and rich people power plays.

The former, set out mostly by Will MacAskill, is an application of future conscious utilitarianism within a capitalist system.

Or in a less wanky way, given you as a poor schmuck can only afford to give a few quid to charities each month, how can you “help the most”.

At the simplest level, giving £5/m to a local soup kitchen ran by volunteers who spend all of that money on food is probably more effective than giving the same amount to a major charity with hundreds of employees.

I hope that example also suggests how it itself is not actually straight forward. The local charity with volunteers may just objectively be shit at what they are trying to do, and all the money is wasted.

Point being, you, nor EA, know that unless you do the work to find out. While the principal of harm reduction is absolutely valid, it does not replace advocating for changes to the underlying system.

It’s not a bad idea to consider the ways your charity can go further by donating abroad. I definitely want a world where we help people have mosquito nets and vaccines. It just got weird because cult-minded individuals and the mentally unwell got involved with it.

The base concept of trying to do the most good with your charity dollars by researching the causes you want to give to and doing the math on what will have the most impact per dollar spent, that makes sense.

The problem is when it turns into a paperclip-maximizing scenario where if mosquito nets are deemed to be the most efficient cause, all other causes are seen as ‘wrong’ and should be ignored. Or the extra stupid answer where the most efficient cause is developing the super AI that will someday solve infinite problems, because hey if it works it will become infinite expected value per dollar and the math says that’s good even if the probability is low… all while accomplishing nothing now with no guarantee that it ever actually will work.

A big part of the premise EA people seem to be working with is that earning a lot of money is itself beneficial or at least morally neutral, so what makes the most sense is to spend your time and energy earning as much money as possible so you can spend that money to enable and compel other people to do charity work, the good of which will supposedly outweigh anything you can do yourself directly.

Personally I see this as a catastrophic underestimation of how evil capitalism is. Anything you do to contribute to the economy is harmful, and you can’t make up for that with more structuring other people’s lives in employment arrangements. The best thing you can do morally with respect to money is to both earn and spend as little of it as possible. Other people’s actions do not count as your own just because you paid for them, if you want to do good you have to do it yourself. What the world needs the most is de-financialization of our lives, and doing the most good should involve contributing to that with your own life and also helping others move away from being ruled by money.