How Effective Altruism Lost Its Way

Matt Johnson · 21 Dec 2023

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Making humanity's long-term potential the overriding priority licenses imposing real costs on people who are alive today.

Their wordsThe problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.

Also said by Émile P. Torres

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Making humanity's long-term potential the overriding priority licenses imposing real costs on people who are alive today.

Their wordsThe problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.
Our reading
Moving money out of global health and into existential risk is a gamble paid for with lives that could have been saved now.
Mental modelTrade-offs

Their wordsDiverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.
Our reading
A movement that has decided its job is to save humanity is uniquely prone to hubris, dogma and motivated reasoning.

Their wordsThis is a worldview that’s uniquely susceptible to hubris, dogma, and motivated reasoning.
Our reading
Spending on existential risk cannot be held accountable, because there is no measurement that would ever show it failing.

Their wordsUnlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
Our reading
Effective altruism demands hard evidence of effectiveness in some of its causes while accepting abstract conjecture in others, and never justifies the split.

Their wordsWhile there are interesting theoretical arguments for these causes, there’s a disconnect between an almost-neurotic focus on hard evidence of effectiveness in some areas of EA and a willingness to accept extremely abstract and conjectural “evidence” in others.
Our reading
The more effective altruism has absorbed itself in saving humanity, the less humanistic it has become.

Their wordsStrangely enough, as EA becomes more absorbed in the task of saving humanity, the movement is becoming less humanistic.

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