The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

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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Since MacAskill had first sold Sam, back in the fall of 2012, on the idea of earning to give, the EA movement had obviously changed. It had become a lot less interested in saving the lives of existing human beings than future ones. In early 2020, movement cofounder Toby Ord had published a book, The Precipice, which laid out where his thinking (and

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It occurred to Nishad that the effective altruist’s relationship to money was more than a little bizarre. Basically all of Alameda Research’s employees and investors were committed to giving all their money away to roughly the same charitable causes. You might surmise that they wouldn’t much care who wound up with the money, as it all would go to s

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The flood of effective altruists into the firm was worrisome. These people arrived with their own value system. They had their own deep loyalties to something other than Jane Street. They didn’t have the usual Wall Street person’s relationship to money; they didn’t care about their bonuses in the ways Wall Street people were supposed to care. Sam B

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