Effective Altruism's Lifestyle Dilemma

Are EAs in the Big Tent of Populism?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement organized around a single commandment: use your time and money to do the most good. Exactly what that means can and does vary between people, from preventing catastrophes to curing malaria to creating plant-based food. What matters to them is the method: thoughtful, humble, rational, and numerate consideration of the options. 

It might not look like it, but effective altruism is fundamentally a negation. After all, there is no need for an effective altruism movement to exist if altruism is already effective. So like the “rationalist” community (a closely related community with another name that sounds unquestionably good), understanding precisely what they are a negation of is important.

EA is a critique of the legacy charity model, in which charities drive donations primarily through emotional appeals and PR. In other words, social desirability bias warps the ability of most people to give well, so a movement needs to help. It is subtly an indictment of the institutions which led altruism to develop in this way, including legacy universities and media. Some key early EA figures, most notably Scott Alexander, have not been treated well by such institutions. This means, you guessed it, EA falls under the big tent of populism. 

So, when I boarded my flight to Washington D.C. to meet the EAs for myself, I was expecting a Scott Alexander-style novelty and heterodoxy (in its uncorrupted usage). While the openness was greater than in most places, it was often (though not always) matched with a brand loyalty to legacy institutions that epitomized the causes of ineffective altruism. Perhaps this was in part due to selection bias (this was, after all, D.C.), but the magnitude of this faction, which easily made up more than two thirds of the people I spoke to, makes me think that it's present to a large extent within the movement as a whole. In my view, here lies the core point of divergence for the EA movement.

There is a fundamental contradiction in many new EAs: they (austensibly) hold a belief system that is a searing indictment of past beliefs and authorities. The way they go about their lives, from their social circle to their news sources to many of their jobs, revolve fundamentally around those same legacy systems. This style of contradiction is what led Nietzsche to famously proclaim that “God is dead ”: the desacrilized way of living life was incompatible with people’s austensive faith. 

But I would disagree with Nietzsche on the inevitability of the EA contradiction resolving in favor of lifestyle. It is certainly a possibility, but far from inevitable. After all, EA was founded on the precise tools to move people in the other direction: cost-benefit analysis and blogging. 

Moreover, even if EA slowly declines into the same socially desirable traps which made its predecessors ineffective, it will not be without first doing significant good. While I have some disagreement on AI timelines, the marginal AI safety researcher is contributing well above the alternatives. The same can be said for almost all EA causes. This is particularly important considering that the pool of people it is drawing from could easily have been attracted to far more deleterious causes, such as social justice or ESG. As Bryan Caplan puts it, “EA is what SJ ought to be.”

This denotes a fundamental tradeoff seen in movements across time between reach and focus. In many ways EA is becoming a schelling point for young talent in a way that reaches deep into populations which (explicit) populism simply could not do. Yet many EA ideas necessarily delegitimize legacy institutions.

I’ve made the case that one of the major EA issues, preventing future pandemics, cannot be done without destroying current public health agencies which banned Covid tests and delayed vaccines (or at the very least stripping them of the ability to use force). After doing so, multiple readers suggested that I invite a well known EA-affiliated forecaster, Zvi Mowshowitz, onto my podcast where we explored the depths to which this reaches. 

So, which way will this pan out? What will be the major factions, trends, and events?

Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out today, when the EA conference continues. Maybe you’ll find out in the next part of this series.