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Charity is good; there are aspects of the effective altruism movement that are good, but the mandate to maximize it at scale deserves to be questioned and investigated.

The effective altruism movement is an attempt to formulate morality from the top-down, which is antithetical to how morals have emerged since the dawn of humanity.

“Maximizing the most good for the most number of people” can lead to repugnant conclusions when applied at-scale

Erik Hoel wrote an essay describing how humanness is a moral quality in and of itself. Maintaining our connection to our humanity is morally important. Putting a chip in everyone’s head to make them happy all the time would reduce humanness, and is not something a long-term humanist would support

The “drowning child” thought experiment involves seeing a child drowning in a pond on your way to work. Most people would jump in the pond to save the child, not thinking twice about the laundry bill from getting their clothes dirty. And yet, the amount of dollars spent on the dry cleaning bill could be spent on saving a child from starvation in a ... See more

Not only should you not have the birthday party for your son, but you’re morally obligated to spend less time with your son so you can work more and send more money to help solve the malaria crisis in Africa

Effective altruism in its simplest form is just the “Moneyball of charities”, a reference to a movie where the sport became all about statistics and less about the players.

Changing the scale of these simple thought experiments adds complexities that completely change the calculus of the scenario

The repugnant conclusion of never-ending well-being arbitrage: everyone ends up with a life that is just barely above the subsistence level. Effective altruism wants to arbitrage all the extra happiness away and fairly distribute it amongst the global population.