effective altruism

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer  · 1 Jan 2015  · 197pp  · 59,656 words

Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singer, Peter, 1946– The most good you can do: how effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically / Peter Singer. pages cm. — (Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-

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requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface Acknowledgments ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1What Is Effective Altruism? 2A Movement Emerges TWO HOW TO DO THE MOST GOOD 3Living Modestly to Give More 4Earning to Give 5Other Ethical Careers 6Giving a Part

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12Difficult Comparisons 13Reducing Animal Suffering and Protecting Nature 14Choosing the Best Organization 15Preventing Human Extinction Afterword Notes Index Preface An exciting new movement is emerging: effective altruism. Student organizations are forming around it, and there are lively discussions on social media pages and websites as well as in the pages of the

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before it had a name or was a movement. The branch of philosophy known as practical ethics has played an important role in effective altruism’s development, and effective altruism in turn vindicates the importance of philosophy, showing that it changes, sometimes quite dramatically, the lives of those who take courses in it.

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significant to make the world a better place. Many of them like to challenge themselves, to do a little better this year than last year. Effective altruism is notable from several perspectives, each of which I will explore in the following pages. First, and most important, it is making a difference

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of that $300 billion is given on the basis of emotional responses to images of the people, animals, or forests that the charity is helping. Effective altruism seeks to change that by providing incentives for charities to demonstrate their effectiveness. Already the movement is directing millions of dollars to charities that are

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effectively reducing the suffering and death caused by extreme poverty. Second, effective altruism is a way of giving meaning to our own lives and finding fulfillment in what we do. Many effective altruists say that in doing good

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, they feel good. Effective altruists directly benefit others, but indirectly they often benefit themselves. Third, effective altruism sheds new light on an old philosophical and psychological question: Are we fundamentally driven by our innate needs and emotional responses, with our rational capacities

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look beyond our own interests and the interests of those we love to the interests of strangers, future generations, and animals? Finally, the emergence of effective altruism and the evident enthusiasm and intelligence with which many millennials at the outset of their careers are embracing it offer grounds for optimism about our

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11, 2013. Chapter 15 includes material that was previously published in “Preventing Human Extinction,” coauthored with Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage and available at: www.effective-altruism.com/preventing-human-extinction. A fuller statement of the argument about the roles of reason and emotion in motivating altruism can be found in chapter

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University Press, 2014). Peter Singer University Center for Human Values, Princeton University & School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne PART ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1 What Is Effective Altruism? I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University. In the readings relating to global poverty and

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a stranger. In the following chapters, we will meet people who have done these things. What unites all these acts under the banner of effective altruism? The definition now becoming standard is “a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve

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its name, these omissions may seem odd. Altruism is contrasted with egoism, which is concern only for oneself, but we should not think of effective altruism as requiring self-sacrifice, in the sense of something necessarily contrary to one’s own interests. If doing the most you can for others means

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lectures you gave at Yale University, thanks to the generous gift of a Yale alumnus. Do you deny that giving to such institutions counts as effective altruism? I count myself fortunate to be teaching at one of the finest educational institutions in the world. This gives me the opportunity to teach

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they will continue to be outstanding educational institutions, and the money you donate to one of them could probably do more good elsewhere. If effective altruism ever becomes so popular that these educational institutions are no longer able to do important research at a high level, it will be time to

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to change the world for the better.9 (Curious about the careers 80,000 Hours recommends? Wait for chapters 4 and 5.) The term effective altruism was born when Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to apply for charitable status under a common umbrella organization. The umbrella organization

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name. After tossing around some names, including High Impact Alliance and Evidence-based Charity Association, the group took a vote, and Centre for Effective Altruism was the clear winner. Effective altruism soon caught on and became the term for the entire movement.10 While these developments were taking place, I continued to write about

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enjoyment that cost little or nothing: “Cooking, walking, playing board games, and making music with family and friends.” Julia and Jeff began leading an effective altruism discussion group, and the development of a community of effective altruists in the Boston area has given them a new source of pleasure: meeting people

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basis for my subsequent exploration, in chapters 6, 7, and 8, of what motivates effective altruists and how they feel about the change that effective altruism has brought to their lives. Rhema Hokama demonstrates what it is like to be an effective altruist on a very modest income. She heard of

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holds fund-raising events, and devises strategies to make it easier for them to fulfill their pledges. Celso is an example of the spread of effective altruism beyond its origins in the United Kingdom and the United States. His unusual personality also affords insights that improve our understanding of the motives of

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political initiatives is difficult to determine, she believes that by working to better any one society we increase the chance of betterment for all societies. Effective altruism is something for people of many divergent backgrounds and for people who, while living in affluent societies, earn no more and sometimes even less than

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you earn, the more you can donate. That idea, which led Matt Wage to his current career, must have occurred to many people before the effective altruism movement existed. In the eighteenth century John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, told his congregations to “earn all you can, give all you can,

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of the relevant facts, at least some of the guards at Auschwitz were not acting wrongly. It is possible to combine general support for effective altruism with acceptance of rule-utilitarianism or with another notion of complicity that is not consequentialist at all. If one did so and also held that

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payoff from those skills is likely to be high. Will’s understanding of ethics, his argumentative skills, his experience with the effective altruism movement, his knowledge of the facts that underpin effective altruism, and his personal connections in the movement make him extremely difficult to replace. The Bureaucrat In the 1990s someone I will

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research area that offers the possibility of important outcomes. And it is one that is particularly likely to come to mind among people interested in effective altruism. There must be many other neglected research opportunities where the chances of making a valuable breakthrough are good enough to make a career in

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to find demonstrably effective charities. He also donates about 15–20 percent of his income to these charities. Chris Croy also has an interest in effective altruism that goes beyond his kidney donation. He has become a vegan, on ethical grounds, but because his aim is to reduce suffering, he is

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in the majority of cases serves the same function as bone marrow donation. Blood, bone marrow, and stem cell donations are relatively simple forms of effective altruism, and as the cells soon regenerate, they can become a regular part of an altruistic life. The donation of a nonregenerative organ has long

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with thousands of children, but it is very hard to feel emotional empathy for so many people whom we cannot even identify as individuals. Effective altruism does not require the kind of strong emotional empathy that people feel for identifiable individuals and can even lead to a conclusion opposed to that

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possibility that our capacity to reason can play a critical role in a decision to live ethically offers a solution to the perplexing problem that effective altruism would otherwise pose for evolutionary theory. There is no difficulty in explaining why evolution would select for a capacity to reason: that capacity enables

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many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with.”4 Critics of effective altruism often suggest, as Brooks is doing here, that there is something odd or unnatural about being moved by the “strictly intellectual” understanding that a

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sufficient proof that he has a strong grasp of probabilities. Celso Vieira excels in tasks requiring analytic reasoning. My favorite example of the combination of effective altruism and numeracy is the website Counting Animals, which has the subtitle “A place for people who love animals and numbers” and a home page

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people with a high level of abstract reasoning ability are more likely to take the kind of approach to helping others that is characteristic of effective altruism. This speculation gains some support from research into how donors to a charity respond to information about the effectiveness of the charity. Dean Karlan

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effective altruists are, in order to act as rationally as possible, suppressing their passions. That, he insists, isn’t the case. Instead, he writes, “Effective altruism is what we are passionate about. We’re excited by the idea of making the most of our resources and helping others as much as

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make the biggest possible reduction in the suffering in that larger universe of suffering. If a high level of abstract reasoning ability is conducive to effective altruism, we can ask why it has emerged as a movement only now. Have people’s abstract reasoning abilities suddenly improved? Several factors are likely

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about economic security. In these circumstances, the need to find meaning and fulfillment in life comes to the fore, and many people turn to effective altruism as a way of giving their lives a purpose it would not otherwise have. Moreover, substantial wealth is now coming to a new generation of

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. The establishment of GiveWell has eased the difficulty of knowing where best to give. These developments might well be sufficient triggers for the emergence of effective altruism, even if our reasoning abilities had remained static. Surprisingly, however, these abilities really have improved measurably in the relatively short time span of the

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moral Flynn effect.”16 If he is right, this effect could have led more people to the kind of ethical views that are characteristic of effective altruism. Who knows what changes the twenty-first century, with its enormous expansion of personal communications and thus of contacts with others both near and far

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the cause we decide to support, there may be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of organizations working for it. One key factor that has made effective altruism a practical possibility is the development of metacharities, organizations that evaluate other charities. I’ve mentioned two of these already: GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators

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. What they are attempting to do is critical to the success of effective altruism, but the field is still at an early stage, and some aspects of it are controversial. Most gifts to charities are emotionally based. Two-

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their nationalist or religious goals. The headlines are full of the consequences of actions that are at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from effective altruism. Separatists in Ukraine have taken up arms against the national government, and the resulting conflict has killed hundreds of civilians on the ground as

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large-scale deaths from preventable diseases no longer occur. In describing the lives of a few effective altruists, I have emphasized what is distinctive about effective altruism and sought to show how the new movement broadens the range of possibilities for ethical living. As a result, I may have left the

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October 23, 2013. The class was recorded and is part of “Practical Ethics,” first offered on Coursera in March–June 2014. 2. “Effective Altruism,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism, April 15, 2014. 3. Dean Karlan and Daniel Wood, “The Effect of Effectiveness: Donor Response to Aid Effectiveness in a Direct Mail

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givingwhatwecan.org (October 25, 2014). 9. http://80000hours.org/about-us. 10. William MacAskill, “The History of the Term ‘Effective Altruism,”’ March 10, 2014, http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/. 11. http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/AboutUs/ImpactReport.aspx. Chapter 3. Living Modestly to Give More 1. Julia Wise, “It Doesn

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Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology 21 (2007): 293–308; I owe this reference to Bernadette Young. 14. Bernadette Young, “Parenthood and Effective Altruism,” April 13, 2014, http://www.effective-altruism.com/parenthood-and-effective-altruism. 15. http://www.givinggladly.com/2014/03/the-other-mother.html. 16. Rhema takes her ranking from Giving What We Can

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political advocacy affluent vs. poor countries, (i), (ii), (iii) Against Malaria Foundation, (i), (ii) AI (artificial intelligence), (i), (ii) Aknin, Lara, (i) altruism, effective. See effective altruism altruistic arbitrage, (i) Ambrose, archbishop of Milan, (i) Angola, corruption in, (i) Animal Activists’ Handbook, The (Ball and Friedrich), (i) Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), (i

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); Matt Wage and, (i), (ii); millennials and, (i), (ii); Philipp Gruissem and, (i); psychology of, (i); Simon Knutson and, (i) education, donating for, (i), (ii) effective altruism: characteristics of, (i), (ii), (iii); definition, (i); as emerging movement, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi); origin of term, (i) egoism, (i) 80,000

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

by William MacAskill  · 27 Jul 2015  · 293pp  · 81,183 words

is a grand vision to make giving, volunteering, spending, and working more worthwhile.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take “Effective altruism—efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off—is one of the great new ideas of the

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Harvard University and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature “Doing Good Better is a superb achievement. Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement and a rising star in philosophy, now displays his talent for telling stories that pack a punch. This must-read book will lead people

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on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them. If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good

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Better.” —Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, Kazaa, and MetaMed “MacAskill leads his readers on a witty, incisive tour through the ideas and applications of effective altruism, which seems increasingly poised to become a dominant social movement of the twenty-first century.” —Julia Galef, cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality “This

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“This is a challenging and thought-provoking book. We are encouraged first to ask ourselves whether we are altruistic enough, and second whether we practice effective altruism, a much tougher and more contested ask. This book will guarantee lively debates and should encourage us all to ask searching questions.” —Fiona Reynolds,

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Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA MacAskill, William. Doing good better : how effective altruism can help you make a difference / William MacAskill. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-698-19110-5 1. Altruism. 2.

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can you do the most good? ONE You Are the 1 Percent: Just how much can you achieve? PART ONE THE FIVE KEY QUESTIONS OF EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM TWO Hard Trade-offs: Question #1: How many people benefit, and by how much? THREE How You Can Save Hundreds of Lives: Question #2:

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Voting Is Like Donating Thousands of Dollars to Charity: Question #5: What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? PART TWO EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IN ACTION SEVEN Overhead Costs, CEO Pay, and Other Confusions: Which charities make the most difference? EIGHT The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods: How

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are most important? CONCLUSION Becoming an Effective Altruist: What should you do right now? APPENDIX Thinking Like an Effective Altruist: The five key questions of effective altruism. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX INTRODUCTION Worms and Water Pumps How can you do the most good? Until 1989, Trevor Field was a typical middle-aged South

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was emotionally appealing, they produced outstanding results, significantly improving the lives of millions of people. Kremer and Glennerster exemplify a way of thinking I call effective altruism. Effective altruism is about asking, “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It

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of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best,

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happy to call that altruism. The second part is effectiveness, by which I mean doing the most good with whatever resources you have. Importantly, effective altruism is not just about making a difference, or doing some amount of good. It’s about trying to make the most difference you can. Determining

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is crucial because, as we’ll discuss, the best ways of doing good are very good indeed. I helped to develop the idea of effective altruism while a graduate student at the University of Oxford. I had begun donating to charity and wanted to ensure that my donations did as much

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in-depth research to work out which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive. From there, a community developed. We realized that effective altruism could be applied to all areas of our lives—choosing a charity, certainly, but also choosing a career, volunteering, and choosing what we buy

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on how to choose a career that will allow you to make the most difference. In this book, I’ll present in more depth effective altruism’s approach to making a difference. What I hope to convey is not a series of facts but a new way of thinking about helping

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others, which you can take with you and apply in your own life. The first part of this book outlines effective altruism’s way of thinking, enabling us, in the second part of the book, to apply that way of thinking to specific issues. In the

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first part, I dedicate each chapter to exploring one of effective altruism’s five key questions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing you can do? Is this area

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about the issue, a checklist of questions to help you ensure that you think through all the most important considerations. I hope to show how effective altruism can help us to have a greater impact in all aspects of our lives. For ease of reference, the frameworks and the five key

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’t alter in any way the fact that, if we choose, we can transform the lives of thousands of people. THE FIVE KEY QUESTIONS OF EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM TWO HARD TRADE-OFFS Question #1: How many people benefit, and by how much? June 21, 1994. Kigali, Rwanda. Two months into one of

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by our actions. We therefore need to make decisions about whom we choose to help, because failure to decide is the worst decision of all. Effective altruism, at its core, is about confronting Orbinski’s dilemma and trying our best to make hard trade-offs. Of all the ways in which

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order to make comparisons between actions, we need to ask: How many people benefit, and by how much? This is the first key question of effective altruism. • • • To begin to answer this question, we need to know the consequences of our actions. To illustrate, let’s think about choosing which charity

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involve improving global health. We’ve also got much better data for health programs than for many other sorts of activity. Since the goal of effective altruism is to do the most good we can, health is a good place to start. Moreover, in principle, the same methods that were used

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(a charity evaluation service that I’ll discuss in chapter seven), Ken Berger, and his colleague Robert M. Penna wrote a critical piece on effective altruism for the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog. They objected that the comparing of one cause to another “amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby

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advice on choosing a vocation that does good. Even Oprah Winfrey, on her website, provides examples of “jobs that make a difference.” But since effective altruism holds that we should test our assumptions about how to do good before putting them into action, we should look at this more critically. Are

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how he could best make a difference in the world. To explain the reasoning behind that view, we need to look at the third of effective altruism’s key questions: Is this area neglected? • • • Which is more valuable: water or diamonds? I imagine this question has divided my readership into two

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why earning to give is merely one path and not always the most effective career choice, we need to look at another key question of effective altruism. SIX WHY VOTING IS LIKE DONATING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO CHARITY Question #5: What are the chances of success, and how good would success

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of activities in an attempt to work out how effective donations in these areas can be. • • • From the previous chapters, you might have felt that effective altruism is limited only to those activities with comparatively easy-to-quantify benefits, like deworming schoolchildren or distributing antimalarial bed nets. I hope that this discussion

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caveats out of the way, let’s look at some extremely cost-effective charities, as judged by GiveWell (accurate as of January 2015), the leading effective altruism charity evaluator. I’ll rate each charity along four dimensions: estimated cost-effectiveness, robustness of evidence, implementation, and room for more funding. These ratings

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well, thereby using their purchasing power to, hopefully, make the world a better place. This chapter will look at ethical consumerism through the lens of effective altruism, trying to figure out if it’s an effective way of doing good. I’ll talk about sweatshops, fair-trade, low-carbon living, and

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working for an organization that does good directly. At worst, you’ve built up good work experience. Second, if you involve yourself in the effective altruism community, then you can mitigate this concern: if you have many friends who are pursuing a similar path to you, and you’ve publicly stated

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economics.” By giving us a better understanding of human behavior, this field has improved our ability to cause desirable behavior change, including in development. Similarly, effective altruism has made the progress it has by combining concepts from moral philosophy and economics. Combining fields can be especially useful when one moves from a

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an effective advocate through journalism, or by pursuing an early career in academia and then moving to become a “public intellectual.” Someone from the effective altruism community who’s pursued this path is Dylan Matthews. He studied moral and political philosophy at Harvard. He considered continuing his studies at graduate school

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thinking about the question and then use that framework to suggest some causes that, on the basis of research at GiveWell and the Centre for Effective Altruism, I think should be given high priority. Again, bear in mind that decisions about cause selection involve value judgments to an even greater degree

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of the other issues I’ve covered in this book, so the conclusions you reach might be quite different from the ones I reach. Though effective altruism aims to take a scientific approach to doing good, it’s not exactly physics: there is plenty of room for differences of opinion. This

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go shopping and wonder whether to buy ethically produced goods, I hope you will bear this perspective in mind. We’ve seen that, by employing effective altruism’s way of thinking, we each have the power to do a tremendous amount of good. A donation of $3,400 can provide bed

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a relatively small monthly donation to these charities will have a big impact. 2: Write down a plan for how you’re going to incorporate effective altruism into your life. Get a pen and paper, or open up a document, and make some notes about the changes you plan to make.

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this book, like whether to give now or invest and give later, or the impact of giving on your personal happiness. 4: Tell others about effective altruism. Go on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your blog, and write some of your thoughts about what you’ve read. If you found the arguments

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donations to a highly effective charity, creating a webpage on Causevox.com; Charity Science, a fund-raising website set up by two people in the effective altruism community, helps you to do this on their Take Action page. If it’s the holiday giving season, you could offer to match any

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Hours, or apply for one-on-one career coaching there. Or you might wish to set up a local meet-up group, starting discussions about effective altruism in your area, with your friends or through your church or university. Further information on all these things is available at effectivealtruism.org. Whatever

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you to do so and given you the tools you need to get there. APPENDIX THINKING LIKE AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST The five key questions of effective altruism. 1. How many people benefit, and by how much? Like James Orbinski, the doctor who engaged in triage during the Rwandan genocide, we need

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for providing volumes of online discussion of the key ideas that I present in this book, I thank everyone in the effective altruism community, and especially everyone at the Centre for Effective Altruism; I also particularly thank the staff at GiveWell, whose research underpins substantial parts of this book. For very helpful feedback

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is rapidly becoming part of my extended mind. I thank Roxanne Heston, Mihnea Maftei, and Robin Raven for providing interview transcriptions. For financial support toward effective altruism outreach, of which this book is a project, I’m grateful to Markus Anderljung, Ryan Carey, Austen Forrester, Tom Greenway, Sam Hilton, George McGowan,

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. “deworming is probably the least sexy development program there is”: Private conversation with Grace Hollister, June 2014. I helped to develop the idea of effective altruism: Toby and I were both heavily influenced by Peter Singer’s arguments for the moral importance of giving to fight poverty, made in “Famine, Affluence

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, the importance of spending that money as effectively as possible seemed imperative. Peter Singer has since become a powerful advocate for effective altruism: see The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2015). (the number of hours you typically work in

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, roughly speaking, that one is always required to do whatever will maximize the sum total of well-being, no matter what. The similarity between effective altruism and utilitarianism is that they both focus on improving people’s lives, but this is a part of any reasonable moral view. In other respects

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, effective altruism can depart significantly from utilitarianism. Effective altruism doesn’t claim that you are morally required to do as much good as you can, only that you should use at least

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9 cash transfers to aid recipients, 106, 111, 113, 115–16, 122 cattle, 141–42 Causevox.com, 198 Center for Global Development, 189 Centre for Effective Altruism, 180 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 194 CEOs of charities, 106, 107–8 Charity Navigator, 40, 105–7 Charity Science, 198–99 CheatNeutral

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51, 51 best programs for, 50 and deworming programs, 8–9, 51, 51 testing effectiveness of programs benefiting, 7–9 and textbook availability, 7, 108 effective altruism and choosing causes to support, 32–33 community of, 198 definition of, 11–12 five key questions of, 13 telling others about, 198–99 effectiveness

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

by John Fabian Witt  · 14 Oct 2025  · 735pp  · 279,360 words

lopsided economy today have turned their wealth to bending the world toward their own vision of the good. Pursuing buzzy new models like “philanthrocapitalism” or “effective altruism,” the wealthy have already begun to deliver basic public goods that were long, though not always, the province of government. From space exploration to public

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

by Zoë Schiffer  · 13 Feb 2024  · 343pp  · 92,693 words

accounts voted, with 70 percent saying no. Musk’s free speech poll piqued the interest of William MacAskill, a Scottish philosopher and architect of the effective altruism movement, which takes a utilitarian approach to philanthropy in an effort to maximize the benefit of every donation. “I’m not sure what’s on

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

crypto’s implosion. As the millennial founder of FTX, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, SBF presented himself as a mogul guided by a philosophical movement called effective altruism. FTX gained mainstream appeal through stadium naming rights, high-profile endorsements from Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, and even a Larry David Super Bowl commercial

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

, not quite fitting in with the rest of the country. The clearest manifestations of Upriver today are in two related intellectual movements, rationalism and effective altruism. I will define these terms more fully in chapter 7, because they are the subject of a lot of argument—rationalists and EAs (effective

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data-driven approach toward altruism and philanthropy, in practice both EAs and rationalists have a catholic appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of controversies. Effective altruism came under substantial scrutiny in 2022 following the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder—who I spoke with

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I described in the introduction as decoupling, meaning the propensity to analyze an issue divorced from its larger context. So then: What is effective altruism, exactly? In one sense, effective altruism is just a brand name, created by MacAskill and another Oxford philosopher, Toby Ord, in 2011. It’s a good brand name,

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can be quite outspoken on subjects ranging from bestiality to eugenics. He is not a typical polite EA. *10 I would argue, however, that effective altruism has a blind spot in not spending more time considering how the government (as opposed to private charity) could use its resources more effectively. Total

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. *24 Some critics of EA like Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru use the term “TESCREAL” to describe this, for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. No, there won’t be a pop quiz. 8 Miscalculation Act 5: Lower Manhattan, October–November 2023 Sam Bankman-Fried, at least by

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, he was also a poor trader and an incompetent manager of risk who was entrusted with too much power. He also used utilitarianism and effective altruism to rationalize extremely risky bets—no matter what harm they might cause to himself and others. SBF, like other young CEOs who suddenly became rich

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inevitably lose if they take enough spins. Edge case: An example occurring in extreme or unusual circumstances that might not be suitable for generalization. Effective altruism: A movement founded by Will MacAskill and Toby Ord that advocates for using rigorous analysis to determine how to do the most good. Originally focused

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A loosely defined intellectual movement associated with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson with a broad goal of promoting more rational, less biased decision-making. Like effective altruism, rationalism often advocates for the use of quantitative methods, but applied to lots of problems and not just charitable giving. It is often more

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” Decrypt, February 28, 2022, decrypt.co/94045/ftx-1-billion-philanthropic-future-fund-improve-humanity. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT cost-effective intervention: “Malaria,” Effective Altruism Forum, forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/malaria. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT One friend calls: Matt Glassman, a government professor at Georgetown University. GO TO

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eleven-madison-park-first-vegan-restaurant-awarded-three-michelin-stars. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “using evidence and”: “CEA’s Guiding Principles,” Centre for Effective Altruism, centreforeffectivealtruism.org/ceas-guiding-principles. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT $335 a person: The $335 price is for the full tasting menu; we

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TEXT off about $30,000: Nanina Bajekal, “Inside the Growing Movement to Do the Most Good Possible,” Time, August 10, 2022, time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT hosted by Sam Bankman-Fried: SBF was described as the host in the invitation that

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ftxfuturefund.org/announcing-the-future-fund. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The actual amount: Thalia Beaty and Glenn Gamboa, “Facebook Cofounder Blames SBF’s ‘Effective Altruism’ Mindset for FTX Troubles,” Fortune, November 14, 2022, fortune.com/2022/11/14/ftx-bankruptcy-puts-charitable-donations-in-doubt-and-some-blame-sam-

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bankman-frieds-effective-altruism-mindset-for-troubles. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT SBF thought this: Kelsey Piper, “Sam Bankman-Fried Tries to Explain Himself,” Vox, November 16,

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2022, vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Bankman-Fried had worked: Benjamin Wallace, “The Mysterious Cryptocurrency Magnate Who Became One of Biden’s

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“Carrick Flynn May Be 2022’s Unlikeliest Congressional Candidate. Here’s Why He’s Running,” Vox, May 14, 2022, vox.com/23066877/carrick-flynn-effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-congress-house-election-2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Flynn had never: Coordinating with a super PAC would have been illegal

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and Uncertainty 27, no. 1 (2003): 5–76, doi.org/10.1023/A:1025598106257. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Definition of Effective Altruism”: William MacAskill, “The Definition of Effective Altruism,” in Effective Altruism, ed. Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 10–28, doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841364.003.0001.

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,” Double Up Drive, doubleupdrive.org/about. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT emotionally laden societal conventions: Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, Kindle ed. (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2015), 78.

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Singer has pointed out: Singer, The Life You Can Save, 25. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT people a thousand years: Hartree, “Tyler Cowen on Effective Altruism.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT MacAskill have answers: Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Krister Bykvist, “About the Book: Moral Uncertainty,” William MacAskill, williammacaskill

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of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/util-a-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT even their planet: Tyler Cowen and Will MacAskill, “William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation (Ep. 156),” Conversations with Tyler, July 7, 2018, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT have sometimes complained: Scott Alexander, “In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism,” Astral Codex Ten (blog), November 17, 2021, astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT among non

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bias and, 440n breakthrough in, 414–15 commercial applications, 452–53 culture wars and, 273 decels, 477 defined, 478 economic growth and, 407n, 463–64 effective altruism and, 21, 344, 348, 355, 359, 380 engineers and, 411–12 excitement about, 409–10 impartiality and, 359, 366 moral hazard and, 261 New

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441 arguments against, 458–60 Bid-Ask spread and, 444–46 commercial applications and, 452–53 Cromwell’s law and, 415–16 determinism and, 297 effective altruism/rationalism and, 21, 355, 456 EV maximizing and, 457 excitement about AI and, 410 expert statement on, 409, 539n Hyper-Commodified Casino Capitalism and, 

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74 cryptocurrency business model and, 308–9 cults of personality and, 31, 338–39 culture wars and, 341n as dangerous, 403–4 disagreeability and, 280 effective altruism and, 20, 340–42, 343, 374, 397–98, 401 as focal point, 334 fraud and, 124, 374 Kelly criterion and, 397–98 moral hazard

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(sports betting), 482 COVID-19, 6–9 Boredom Markets Hypothesis, 310, 480 casinos and, 7–8, 10, 10 cryptocurrency and, 6, 310, 312–13 effective altruism and, 360, 534n expertise and, 271 prisoner’s dilemma and, 507–8n probabilistic thinking and, 16 quantification and, 348–50 raise-or-fold attitude and

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12, 483 earning to give, 341–42 economist brain, 483 edge, 13, 21–22, 63, 86, 158, 396n, 483 edge cases, 484 Edwards, Paul, 424n effective altruism (EA) AI and, 21, 344, 348, 355, 359, 380 AI existential risk and, 21, 456, 457 bednets, 479 defined, 352, 484 earning to give

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–60 evolutionary theory, 368, 428, 429, 430 excess returns (finance), 484 existential risk, 401–3 biotechnology and, 457n defined, 484 definitions of, 442–44 effective altruism/rationalism and, 355, 380 futurism and, 380 game theory and, 421–22 hedonism and, 376–77 nanotechnology and, 457n von Neumann on, 419–20 See

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Andrew, 230–31 luck, 114–16 Luck Factor, The (Wiseman), 116 Luszczyszyn, Dom, 214 M Ma, Jeff, 131, 134, 135–37, 158, 180 MacAskill, Will effective altruism brand and, 352 futurism and, 380 impartiality and, 359 longtermism and, 488 Elon Musk and, 344 on prediction markets, 373–74 quantification and, 347–48

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value proposal, 469–72 moral parliament, 364, 470 overfitting/underfitting and, 362–68 rationality, 372–73, 495 River-Village conflict and, 30–31 See also effective altruism; rationalism; utilitarianism Morgenstern, Oskar, 22, 50–51 Moritz, Michael, 247, 248, 258, 259, 265–66, 271 Moskovitz, Dustin, 338–39 Motte-and-bailey fallacy

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Sam Altman and, 406 autism and, 282, 284 competitiveness and, 25–26 cryptocurrency and, 314–15 cults of personality and, 31 culture wars and, 29 effective altruism and, 344 luck and, 278, 280 megalothymia and, 468 OpenAI founding and, 406 poker and, 251 politics and, 267n resentment and, 277, 278 risk

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learning and, 432 corporatization of, 43–44 courage and, 222–23 deception and, 60 degens and nits, 9, 114, 482 edge and, 22, 63, 86 effective altruism and, 347–48, 367 estimation ability and, 237–38 fictional portrayals of, 45, 112, 134, 333, 487 game theory development and, 22, 50–51

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. condensed ranges (poker), 493 politics, 14–17 AI existential risk and, 458, 541n analytics and, 254 contrarianism and, 242, 254n decoupling and, 25, 27 effective altruism/rationalism and, 377–78 election forecasting, 13–14, 16–17, 27, 137, 182n, 433, 448n EV maximizing and, 14–15 expertise and, 272 gambling and

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probabilistic thinking AI and, 439 AI existential risk and, 445–46 asymmetric odds and, 255 vs. determinism, 253–55, 264, 482 distribution, 9, 491 effective altruism and, 367 importance of, 15–16 poker and, 41, 104–5, 127, 154n, 237 politics and, 15, 17 prediction markets, 369–75, 493, 535n slots

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249–50 concrete learning and, 432n cultural domination of, 137–38 decoupling and, 24–25, 26, 27, 352, 505n defined, 495 demographics of, 29, 506n effective altruism and, 343 fictional portrayals of, 112 gender and, 29, 117, 506n Las Vegas veneration of, 139 map of, 18, 19, 20–26 megalothymia and, 

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Test, 499 trolley problem, 345–46, 346, 357, 400, 499 Truman, Harry S., 409 Trump, Donald casinos and, 142, 145, 146, 150–52, 514n effective altruism on, 378 NFTs and, 326 prediction markets and, 373, 375, 535n River and, 299 River-Village conflict and, 267–68 Silicon Valley and, 272 Peter

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Act (UIGEA), 13 update (Bayes’ theorem), 499 Upriver, 20–21, 500 Urban, Tim, 273 Urschel, John, 231 utilitarianism Sam Altman and, 408 defined, 500 effective altruism and, 359–61, 362–63, 378, 533n futurism and, 379 hedonistic, 363n overfitting/underfitting and, 362–65, 368 rule utilitarianism, 368, 500 SBF and, 360

The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

by Tom Chivers  · 12 Jun 2019  · 289pp  · 92,714 words

two organisations run on Rationalist lines that look at the most effective ways to donate money to charity. They’re central to something called the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which is strongly linked to the Rationalist community. OpenPhil in particular has donated millions of dollars to AI safety organisations, and MIRI in

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rather than reject. And, having investigated for a decade or more, the Rationalists are pretty confident in their numbers – which is why they, and the Effective Altruism movement which is closely aligned with them, are concerned about AI risk. They see the reward of surviving the next century or so as potentially

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the world drops by one point.’7 But this book isn’t about the risks of biotech, and it’s not what these communities, the Effective Altruism movement, the Rationalists etc. are famous for worrying about. The headline-grabber, the risk that everyone talks about, and according to all of them either

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not to become a cult, they asked themselves if they were being cultish, which was the right thing to do, but it happened anyway.’ The Effective Altruism movement is part of it, he says, insofar as it wants you to give money to prevent AI apocalypse. ‘Some charities are more effective than

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an awful read. But as far as I can tell, the allegations had already been properly investigated by people appointed to safeguarding roles in the Effective Altruism community. Some of the allegations were found to have a basis in fact, and some people were barred from, or had already been barred from

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be jealous, but he’s just not. Dr Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist herself at the University of Portsmouth and a prominent member of the Effective Altruism movement, thinks that this can come across as really weird to other people. ‘To the general public, it can seem like realigning your evolved motivation

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Effective Altruist and Rationalist communities are heavily gender-biased: they’re mainly men. ‘Polyamory fixes the numbers problem,’ she said. ‘I made this joke once: Effective Altruism is like 75 per cent male, but the 25 per cent of women all have three boyfriends.’ I asked her whether it was a sex

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have [those social deficits] but are kind of arseholes, and the people who kind of have that but are good.’ The latter make up the Effective Altruism crowd; the former, the Neoreactionaries. I don’t want to make it sound as if there’s an equivalence here. About 20 per cent of

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are. Part Eight Doing Good Better Chapter 38 The Effective Altruists It’s impossible to talk about the Rationalists without mentioning their conjoined twin, the Effective Altruism movement. They’re so intertwined that I have a bad habit of using the terms synonymously, but they are in fact distinct

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. Effective Altruism is based on the idea that we should do the most good we can with our resources. If we give to charity, we should give

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donations go to ‘international affairs’, which is to say 94 per cent of American charitable donations stay within American borders.4 The idea of the Effective Altruism movement is that we are not, generally, dealing in subtle distinctions: if you want to do the most good with your money, rather than just

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Bostrom at Oxford in 2003, and Ord says: ‘I was heavily influenced by Nick in my work on existential risk. I’m pretty sure [the Effective Altruism movement] wouldn’t have had such a strong strand on existential risk if I hadn’t been influenced by Nick.’ It’s not that one

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is mostly one of mutual influence of people exploring related ideas and gaining from their interactions’. Certainly, the LessWrong Rationalists provide a large proportion of Effective Altruism’s support. In 2014, 31 per cent of survey respondents said that they had first heard of the movement through LessWrong;5 by 2017, that

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figure had dropped to 15 per cent, presumably partly because LessWrong had shrunk while Effective Altruism had grown, but a further 7 per cent had heard of it through Slate Star Codex.6 And a large fraction of LessWrongers are Effective

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LessWrong diaspora survey, 20 per cent of respondents identified as Effective Altruists, and 22 per cent had made ‘donations they otherwise wouldn’t’ because of Effective Altruism.7 Two other OpenPhil employees, Helen Toner and Ajeya Cotra – whom you’ll meet shortly – told me that they’d either come to

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Effective Altruism through LessWrong or found the two at the same time. One Effective Altruist blog, ‘The Unit of Caring’, is named after a Yudkowsky blog post (‘

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Money: The Unit of Caring’). Scott Alexander has written repeatedly about Effective Altruism, including an extremely powerful blog post8 backing the Giving What We Can ‘pledge’ to donate 10 per cent of your income to effective charities. Effective

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.) But we can all get behind the idea that factory farming is a real problem and realise that we have a moral responsibility for it. Effective Altruism gets much weirder than that, in its niche areas. There are, for instance, Effective Altruists who worry about the suffering of wild animals. They make

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, so if you start worrying about that, you end up in a very odd place indeed.11) I shouldn’t overplay the ‘weirdness’ element. Most Effective Altruism comes down to the eminently sensible idea that if you want the shiny pound in your pocket to do the most good it can, it

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say that it is hard to explain to people what you do for a living. ‘When I was in high school, I discovered GiveWell and Effective Altruism, and I also discovered LessWrong and the Rationalist community,’ Cotra tells me. At first she was interested in global poverty reduction – ‘I was trying to

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my parents to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation’ – and not focusing on AI. But at college in Berkeley she taught a seminar series on Effective Altruism. ‘That was really when I had to force myself to think through all the arguments for [existential risk]. I started to transition to doing more

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AI was the thing to be working on.’ There are three key elements that make a cause worth donating to, according to the tenets of Effective Altruism. One is its importance: the scale of the problem, how much better the world would be if the problem were solved. A second is tractability

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science research.’6 (It reminds me of a story that the Rationalist and Effective Altruist Ben Kuhn told on his blog. He went to an Effective Altruism summit with his partner, who was new to EA; she asked an attendee what sort of people were there. ‘“Oh, all different kinds!”’ he replied

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is the director of Giving Evidence, a group which encourages and enables giving based on sound evidence. She has known GiveWell and others in the Effective Altruism movement for a long time – she is on the board of The Life You Can Save, Singer’s charity – and doesn’t want to belittle

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less attention, in the press and public sphere, than OpenPhil’s concentration on AI. That may or may not be OpenPhil’s (and the wider Effective Altruism community’s) fault, depending on your point of view. You could say that they simply need to focus on what they think are the most

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ones. But there is a risk, he said, that ‘an excessive focus on these speculative causes runs the risk of undermining the Effective Altruism movement’. If people look at Effective Altruism and see a bunch of people worrying about what seems to them to be some sci-fi stuff, they might then not donate

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seem normal it’s better for our ideas.’ If you spend your weirdness points on polyamory, you don’t have them left to spend on Effective Altruism or the importance of Bayes’ theorem. And, it must be said, AI safety spends a lot of weirdness points. If you think it’s the

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thing by miles, then it is worth spending those points on. If you don’t, you could reasonably argue that it’s just making the Effective Altruism movement look weird and making it harder to get bed-nets to children in sub-Saharan Africa. So it comes down, really, to whether we

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Matthews of Vox had, in the piece I mentioned previously. He raises the possibility of ‘Pascal’s mugging’, which we discussed before. People at the Effective Altruism conference he attended gave him the standard expected-value argument: ‘Infinitesimally increasing the odds that 1052 people in the future exist saves way more lives

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it’s worth, I think Fiennes’ criticisms are worth taking on board. They should make you wary of going along too happily with what these Effective Altruism organisations recommend; and, as we’ve discussed before, if something seems completely weird, but the numbers check out, you should pay some attention to the

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of that in the next few years’.11) It is not that AI risk is crowding out all other charity; it’s not even monopolising Effective Altruism. It accounted for about 30 per cent of total OpenPhil grants in 2017, but OpenPhil is only one of several organisations. And Peter Singer, who

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debate means that their places on the internet are full of pretty unpleasant people. So the things they care about, such as AI risk and effective altruism, are in danger of getting smeared by association. ‘The singularity? Isn’t that the thing that racist sex-cult website is into?’ But you can

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-400-billion-mark-for-the-first-time/ 5. The 2014 survey of Effective Altruists, Centre for Effective Altruism http://effective-altruism.com/ea/gb/the_2014_survey_of_effective_altruists_results/ 6. EA 2017 survey, Centre for Effective Altruism https://rtcharity.org/tag/ea-survey-2017/ 7. LessWrong diaspora survey 2016 http://www.jdpressman.com/public

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a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away . . . worried’, Vox, 10 August 2015 https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai 7. Ben Kuhn, ‘Some stories about comparative advantage’, December 2014 https://www.benkuhn.net/advantage 8. Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, ‘Worms: Identifying

Willful: How We Choose What We Do

by Richard Robb  · 12 Nov 2019  · 202pp  · 58,823 words

be modeled in terms of her preferences. The Rotten Kid Theorem involves observed care for a limited number of people. Another type of observed care, effective altruism, encompasses multitudes. It stems from concern over the well-being of everyone in the world, often including animals. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, a prominent

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advocate of effective altruism, abides by the principle that people who live in rich countries are morally obligated to support charities that aid the global poor. He equates spending

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last dollar directed to their own consumption equals the marginal value they attribute to one more dollar donated to the poor. The largesse required for effective altruism of course depends on wealth and preferences. The test is whether a person gives enough to significantly affect her lifestyle and whether she gives to

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on equal footing with the rest of humanity, asking, “Do I need this more than a faraway stranger?” The significant income transfer required makes extreme effective altruism very rare. It’s an exceptional person whose well-being depends so intensely on the well-being of strangers.6 UNOBSERVED CARE To become observable

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no one would ever suspect that I was the culprit. Yet I can’t conceive of doing something so deranged. And finally, the reverse of effective altruism would be monstrous: except in cases of mental illness, no one has a general desire to harm strangers. A disturbed person who feels wronged by

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hyperbolic, 158, 201 disjunction effect, 174–176 diversification, 64–65 divestment, 65–66 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 18 drowning husband problem, 6–7, 110, 116, 123–125 effective altruism, 110–112, 126, 130, 135–136 efficient market hypothesis, 69–74, 81–82, 96 Empire State Building, 211–212n12 endowment effect, 4 endowments, of universities

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

think it’s fair to say it’s still a lively discussion.”63 The discussion isn’t only theoretical, either. Among the twenty-first-century “effective altruism” movement, for instance, opinions vary about how much of a sacrifice someone ought to make in order to maximally help others.64 Princeton philosopher Peter

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devoted members of the “EA” movement, including Singer himself, are not such perfect people. Julia Wise, a leader in the effective altruism community and the community liaison at the Centre for Effective Altruism, has made impressive commitments in her own life—giving 50% of her income to charity, for instance—but she emphasizes the

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idea of being a vegan . . . who eats ice cream. That was something she could stick with. Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill, cofounder of the Centre for Effective Altruism, doesn’t mince words on the question. “We should be actualists,” he says. “If you give away all of your savings at once today—which

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consequential friendships in twenty-first-century ethics. The two would go on to become founders of the social movement that’s come to be called “effective altruism,” which we discussed briefly in Chapter 7 and which has become arguably the most significant ethical social movement in the early twenty-first century.78

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our moral views today as barbaric.” I note that there’s a certain amount of irony here. MacAskill is one of the leaders of the effective altruism movement, and one of the things that has struck me is the degree to which the movement has created a kind of consensus. There is

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AI is vital, in turn, to that long-term future. Says MacAskill, “The convergence is both really good but also worrying.” I had attended the Effective Altruism Global conference in the fall of 2017 in London. MacAskill closed the conference with a bit of a warning. He had been preoccupied, he said

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said, “but yet I think it’s extremely hard to create a culture in which that’s not the case.” I also attended the next Effective Altruism Global conference, in the spring of 2018 in San Francisco. MacAskill gave the opening address. He seemed to pick up where he had left off

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, if on a more upbeat note. The theme was “How can effective altruism stay curious?” Walking around the Christ Church Meadow with MacAskill, on a bright spring day, I turn from these questions back to the matter of

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an existential risk.”86 He pauses. “I even think of it as the most likely existential risk, actually.” Down the hall from the Centre for Effective Altruism, where MacAskill works, is Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, founded by philosopher Nick Bostrom. One of Bostrom’s most influential early essays is

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to Joe Carlsmith for helpful discussions of this and related topics. Some recent philosophical literature explicitly discusses the links between possibilism, actualism, and effective altruism. See, e.g., Timmerman, “Effective Altruism’s Underspecification Problem.” 65. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”; see also Singer, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” 66. Julia Wise, “Aim

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.givinggladly.com/2014/10/aim-high-even-if-you-fall-short.html. 67. Will MacAskill, “The Best Books on Effective Altruism,” interview by Edouard Mathieu, Five Books, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/effective-altruism-will-macaskill/. See also the organization Giving What We Can, founded by MacAskill and his colleague Toby Ord after Ord

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, and Singer, The Most Good You Can Do. For more on the history of the term “effective altruism,” see MacAskill’s “The History of the Term ‘Effective Altruism,’” Effective Altruism Forum, http://effective-altruism.com/ea/5w/the_history_of_the_term_effective_altruism/. 79. MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord, Moral Uncertainty. See also the earlier book by Lockhart: Moral Uncertainty

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C. Keil. “The Hidden Structure of Overimitation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 50 (2007): 19751–56. MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. Guardian Faber, 2015. MacAskill, William, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord. Moral Uncertainty. Oxford University Press, 2020

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.” New Internationalist 289 (1997). ———. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1972): 229–43. ———. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. Yale University Press, 2015. Singh, Satinder Pal. “Transfer of Learning by Composing Solutions of Elemental Sequential Tasks.” Machine Learning

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Yarin Gal. “Robust Imitative Planning: Planning from Demonstrations Under Uncertainty.” In NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving. 2019. Timmerman, Travis. “Effective Altruism’s Underspecification Problem.” In Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, edited by Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer. Oxford University Press, 2019. Timmerman, Travis, and Yishai Cohen. “Actualism and Possibilism in Ethics

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3CosAdd algorithm, 316, 397n13 Abbeel, Pieter, 257, 258–59, 267–68, 297 Ackley, Dave, 171–72 actor-critic architecture, 138 actualism vs. possibilism, 234–40 effective altruism and, 237–38 imitation and, 235, 239–40, 379n71 Professor Procrastinate problem, 236–37, 379n61 actuarial models, 92–93 addiction, 135, 153, 205–08, 374n65

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cascading errors, 229–34, 322 Case Western University, 189–90, 370n26 Catholicism, 302–03, 304 causation, 352n8 CBOW (continuous bag-of-words), 341n54 Centre for Effective Altruism, 237–38, 309 CHA2DS2-VASc, 100–01 CHADS2, 100–01 Chang, Ruth, 131, 360–61n28 checkers, 126–27, 240–41, 242–43 check processing, 21

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, 216 Duke University, 98–102, 116, 251 Durfee, Edmund, 390n29 Dwork, Cynthia, 61–63, 65, 73, 347n33 EA. See effective altruism early stopping, 395n4 Edison, Thomas, 156 Edwards, Harrison, 199–200, 201, 206 effective altruism (EA), 237–38, 305, 306–07, 379n67 Egan, Greg, 213 ε-greedy learning, 156, 158, 184–85, 373n62 Einhorn

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker  · 14 Jun 2025  · 381pp  · 119,533 words

techno-capital machine” to conquer the cosmos with AI and the power of entrepreneurship.9 Other tech billionaires have provided millions of dollars to the effective altruism community, which is doing academic work to provide a moral argument in favor of this kind of future. They’ve also given comparable sums to

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over between two students, one older, the other in their first year. The former was trying to sell the latter on a student group promoting effective altruism, a new approach to charitable giving. The older student described it as a fun way to socialize with other students while doing something worthwhile,

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the shit out of things.” I chuckled quietly, and then had to explain to the others at my table why, and what I knew about effective altruism. What I didn’t know was that several years earlier, in 2012, a similar conversation had happened on the other side of the country,

…

out what to do with his life, and at an Au Bon Pain next to Harvard Square, Will pitched him on a central concept of effective altruism: “Earn to give,” the idea, roughly, that one of the best ways to make the world a better place is to make a large

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people.1 Sam nodded, saying simply, “Yep. That makes sense.” He took Will’s advice—and his philosophy—and ran with it. He adopted effective altruism wholeheartedly, taking it with him to a job at Jane Street, a Wall Street firm specializing in high-frequency trading. After a few years working

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about half of his salary there to charity), Sam left to take a job alongside Will, as director of business development for the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA).2 Shortly after that, Sam’s career really took off. Sadly, today Will and Sam aren’t as friendly as they used to

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give a good explanation of what happened between Will and Sam—and what Sam did that angered Will (and many, many others)—without first explaining effective altruism. Effective altruism seems relatively straightforward on the face of it: evaluate the best ways to make the world a better place, and then devote as much money

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might save even more lives for each dollar spent.9 MacAskill, Ord, and several others would later dub this data-driven approach to charitable giving “effective altruism,” or EA; even before settling on a name, MacAskill and Ord set about evangelizing for the idea, asking friends and colleagues to sign the

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the book came out, the New Yorker published a ten-thousand-word profile of MacAskill, with a headline dubbing him the “reluctant prophet of effective altruism.”25 The next day, the New York Times posted an interview with MacAskill conducted by Ezra Klein.26 And the day after that, Time ran

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a cover story on effective altruism and MacAskill, concluding that “if the future could be as vast and good as MacAskill thinks, it seems worth trying.”27 Once What We

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the right-wing media, because it’s in their interest to further the narrative that global warming either isn’t real or doesn’t matter. Effective altruism and longtermism aren’t nearly as insidious or destructive as climate denial. But like climate denial, EA has a great deal of corporate money

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. But as it turned out, MacAskill was right: sometimes, the ends don’t justify the means. * * * While Sam was working at the Centre for Effective Altruism, he started thinking about ways to earn very large amounts of money so he could make a bigger impact on the world (or so he

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to a host of EA organizations. The FTX Future Fund, an arm of FTX’s philanthropic organization with a team composed of MacAskill and other effective altruism luminaries, had given grants to typical EA and longtermist causes such as AI alignment research and pandemic preparedness. They gave to MacAskill’s own

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and recommended investments to promote longtermist and rationalist ideas, including $400,000 “to support the creation of animated videos on topics related to rationality and effective altruism to explain these topics for a broader audience.”64 SBF’s family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, had also made donations to news organizations focused

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references to a foundational text in the rationalist community, and the name of the Tumblr itself, “worldoptimization,” is a direct reference to it.71 While effective altruism is theoretically independent of rationalism, the two groups have so much overlap in people—so many effective altruists are rationalists and vice versa—that in

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found new funders. Since 2016, MIRI has received nearly $15 million from Open Philanthropy, the effective altruist philanthropic fund.70 Rationalists have deep connections to effective altruism: Bostrom and Siskind are central figures in both movements. The rationalist group houses of the Bay Area are often EA houses too. And the overlap

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industry and the wider San Francisco Bay area. But reports from people formerly in the rationalist community suggest something darker at work too. “LessWrong and Effective Altruism are cults,” claims game designer Jacqueline Bryk.162 She’s not alone. “It was stated by multiple people [at MIRI] that we wouldn’t

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a writer and data scientist in training, alleged that multiple members of the rationalist and EA communities had sexually abused her. “I could leave rationality, effective altruism and programming to escape the male-dominated environments that increase my sexual violence risk so much. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be myself,” she

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making these deeply sexist and racist claims is Siskind—because despite his unethical behavior in making such claims, Siskind is also a major figure in effective altruism. “I think he is a central voice” in EA, says Stanford political scientist and philosopher Rob Reich. “He is someone who is explaining to

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because they look like a cult; it’s that they’re wrong and they look like a cult. “A fun fact about the Rationality and effective altruism communities is that they attract a lot of ex-evangelicals,” writes Yuan. “They have this whole thing about losing their faith but still retaining

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try (pretend to try?) to solve them again, and derive meaning from that. This building, Trajan House, is the academic home of the Centre for Effective Altruism. It’s also the home of the Global Priorities Institute, Effective Ventures, the Centre for the Governance of AI, and the Future of Humanity Institute

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face of his blithe unconcern with the scientific implausibility of the futures he’s describing. Down the hall from Sandberg is another major figure in effective altruism, the ethicist Toby Ord. Ord cofounded Giving What We Can and the CEA with MacAskill; Ord and MacAskill also jointly coined “longtermism” and helped

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choose the name “effective altruism.” Ord’s not around that day, but we talk a few weeks later over video chat. Compared to Sandberg, he comes across as less speculative

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policy.37 Under Matheny’s leadership, RAND’s influence on US AI policy has grown. “Many key personnel at top AI companies are advocates of effective altruism,” wrote Brendan Bordelon in Politico in late 2023. “Now RAND, an influential, decades-old think tank, is serving as a powerful vehicle through which

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’s influence at the highest levels of politics is arguably stronger in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Dominic Cummings, an advocate of effective altruism, was cofounder and head of the 2016 Vote Leave campaign in the UK, supporting Brexit.46 When Boris Johnson, another Brexiteer, became prime minister

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was a research fellow there at the time. Working there, he found himself in the unexpected role of a kind of in-house critic of effective altruism. He hastened to point out that the effective altruists were very welcoming of thoughtful arguments criticizing their viewpoints, as long as they weren’t

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finance, debt, nationalism, imperialism, racial and gender-based subordination, war, environmental degradation, corruption, exploitation of labour—or the forces that ensure its reproduction,” she wrote. “Effective altruism doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it. In this sense it leaves everything just as it is

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2019, during which time that organization helped to launch Open Philanthropy. “I consider myself a kind of friendly critic of much, although not all, effective altruism,” he says. And they’re right about some things. “It’s true that much philanthropy or charity in the United States and in other countries

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does not go to address disadvantage, or repair [or] ameliorate poverty,” he says. But, he continues, “to put it really, really bluntly, effective altruism, when it comes to longtermism, ditches the effectiveness and is only about the altruism for future generations.” Echoing Srinivasan, Reich thinks that EA has a

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well. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have dubbed this set of related ideologies (traced throughout this book) the TESCREAL bundle: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres have done extensive work linking these ideologies to each other and to the core of racist logic they share. While

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.org/stable/24671242. 8 Lewis-Kraus, “Reluctant Prophet.” 9 Rob Mather, “Against Malaria Foundation: What We Do, How We Do It, and the Challenges,” Effective Altruism, accessed June 12, 2024, www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-amf-rob-mather. 10 Lewis-Kraus, “Reluctant Prophet.” 11 “About Us: What Do We

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Naina Bajekal, “Want to Do More Good? This Movement Might Have the Answer,” Time, August 10, 2022, https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/. 14 “History,” Centre for Effective Altruism, accessed June 12, 2024, www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/history; “Oxford-Based Charity Receives More Than $2.5 Billion in Pledges from ‘Community

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AI,” Politico, November 24, 2022, www.politico.eu/article/meet-the-musk-backed-ngos-trying-to-save-europe-from-bad-ai/; “Future of Life Institute,” Effective Altruism Forum, accessed August 30, 2022, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/future-of-life-institute; “Our Mission,” Future of Life Institute, accessed August 30, 2024,

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Your Career. Here’s How to Do the Most Good with Them,” Vox, August 3, 2015, www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9067641/william-macaskill-effective-altruism. 55 William MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2014): 269–283, https://doi.org/10.1007

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2024/03/28/1241210300/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-sentencing-crimes-crypto-mogul-greed. 63 Zachary Robinson, “EV Updates: FTX Settlement and the Future of EV,” Effective Altruism Forum, December 13, 2023, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev. 64 “Who We Are,” Future Fund

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72 Kelsey Piper, “Sam Bankman-Fried Tries to Explain Himself,” Vox, November 16, 2022, www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy. 73 “Transcript of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Interview at the DealBook Summit,” New York Times, December 1, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022

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2020/09/climate-variability.html. 20 Watson email. 21 Reader, I ate one. 22 See pages 1 and 9 of CEA’s 990: Centre for Effective Altruism USA Inc., return of organization exempt from income tax (Form 990, 2021), accessed January 25, 2024, https://ev.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/

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-exhibits-twitter-v-musk.pdf. EA forum comments: “dyj34650,” “Will MacAskill’s Role in Connecting SBF to Elon Musk for a Potential Twitter Deal,” Effective Altruism Forum, November 12, 2022, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dk9HTJKNAAwaEZTgk/will-macaskill-s-role-in-connecting-sbf-to-elon-musk-for-a. 28 “About Us

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, www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/8/8/23150496/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-dustin-moskovitz-billionaire-philanthropy-crytocurrency. 36 Jason Matheny, “Effective Altruism in Government,” Effective Altruism, June 3, 2017, www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/effective-altruism-in-government-jason-matheny. Called an EA Global talk here: Centre for Effective Altruism, “Jason Matheny wanted to do good…,” Facebook, October

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Matthews, “Carrick Flynn May Be 2022’s Unlikeliest Candidate. Here’s Why He’s Running,” Vox, May 14, 2022, www.vox.com/23066877/carrick-flynn-effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-congress-house-election-2022. 43 Cullen O’Keefe et al., The Windfall Clause: Distributing the Benefits of AI (Oxford: FHI, 2020),

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Shaping Rishi Sunak’s AI plans,” Politico, September 14, 2023, www.politico.eu/article/rishi-sunak-artificial-intelligence-pivot-safety-summit-united-kingdom-silicon-valley-effective-altruism/. 54 Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford), Twitter (now X), May 30, 2023, https://twitter.com/tobyordoxford/status/1663550874105581573. 55 Geoffrey Hinton et al., “Statement on AI

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“Statement on AI Risk”; “Who We Are,” Future Fund, accessed June 16, 2024, https://ftxfuturefund.org.cach3.com/index.html%3Fp=32.html; “Future Fund,” Effective Altruism Forum, last modified June 21, 2023, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/future-fund; Nicholas Kulish, “FTX’s Collapse Casts a Pall on a Philanthropy Movement

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,” New York Times, November 13, 2022, updated November 14, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/business/ftx-effective-altruism.html. 59 Ord interview. 60 Ibid. Here’s one of the surveys he’s talking about: Zach Stein-Perlman and Katja Grace, “2022 Expert

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Spent a Weekend at Google Talking with Nerds About Charity. I Came Away… Worried,” Vox, August 10, 2015, www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai. 74 Thorstad, interview with author, May 29, 2023. 75 Ord interview. 76 Ibid. 77 Ord, Precipice, 11. 78 Ibid., p. 52. 79

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perils-part-9-objections-and-replies/. 86 Thorstad interview, April 26. The post is here: Carl Shulman, comment on “The Discount Rate Is Not Zero,” Effective Altruism Forum, September 3, 2022, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLZMsthcqfmv5J6Ev/?commentId=Nr35E6sTfn9cPxrwQ. And here’s an example of that comment being used as a standard

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reference among EAs: “Time of Perils,” Effective Altruism Forum, last modified October 1, 2022, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/time-of-perils. 87 Thorstad interview, May 29. 88 Ord, Precipice, 227–231.

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interview with author, July 26, 2023. 112 Setiya, “New Moral Mathematics.” 113 Ibid. 114 MacAskill, What We Owe, 186. 115 Tyler Cowen, “William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation (Ep. 156),” August 10, 2022, in Conversations with Tyler, podcast, https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill/. 116 MacAskill, What We

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