Nate Silver • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

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.

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.

One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to futur

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

Effective altruism’s strength lies in its infrastructure, which we can use to better understand how other idea machines work, what their impact will be, and what’s needed to make them more effective.

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.