Astral Codex Ten

effective altruism movement

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effective altruism movement

Article

effective altruism movement is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 29, 2021 and November 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “The effective altruism movement, which largely grew directly out of the rationalist movement”; “Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement”. It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, Bill Gates, EA.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: November 28, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
The effective altruism movement, which largely grew directly out of the rationalist movement, seeks to maximize the efficacy with which charitable donations are directed using standard rationalist methods. It is a tight-knit community that strongly privileges rationalist approaches over all other forms of knowledge-making (such as from the humanities, continental philosophy, or humanistic social sciences) and tends to dismiss input not formulated in rationalist terms. The community also has a strong and explicitly stated view that its activities uniquely contribute to the achievement of “the good”: of their top five recommendations of most productive careers by a leading community organization, two suggest being a researcher or support staff within the movement, and two others recommend working on the AI alignment problem (see the next point). Until recently, much of the analysis and funding emerging from the community has pointed towards a focus on extremely unlikely but potentially catastrophic risks, such as alien, asteroid or biological catastrophes.
I want to briefly respond to Weyl's critique of rationality and effective altruism:
And would Weyl's suggestions really help prevent populist backlashes? He wishes we abandoned our overly-rational ways in favor of "humanities, Continental philosophy, and the humanistic social sciences" - isn't that usually code for stuff like queer theory, postcolonial theory, and postmodernism? Are working-class Trump supporters really banging on their keyboards when they read about effective altruism, shouting "YOU NEED TO STOP TRYING TO BE OBJECTIVE AND FACT-BASED, AND BE MORE OPEN TO INSIGHTS FROM QUEER THEORY AND POSTMODERNISM"?
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
The founders of Anthropic included several EAs (I can’t tell if CEO Dario Amodei is an EA or not). The original investors included Dustin Moskowitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jaan Tallinn, and various EA organizations. Its Wikipedia article says that “Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement”. Anthropic is controlled by a board of trustees, most of whose members are effective altruists.
Inline links: board of trustees
Search “effective altruism” on social media right now, and it’s pretty grim.
But the journalists think we’re a sinister conspiracy that has “taken over Washington” and have the whole Democratic Party in our pocket. Click to expand. Source: https://twitter.com/the_megabase/status/1728771254336036963 The only thing everyone agrees on is that the only two things EAs ever did were “endorse SBF” and “bungle the recent OpenAI corporate coup.”
Inline links: “taken over Washington”