effective altruism

aiamblichus @aiamblichus

2026-09-17 — saved image

aiamblichus [verified] @aiamblichus · 4h
I'm sure you all want to hear Gemini's hot take on EA

[Two side-by-side dark text cards containing Gemini's output, with red hand-drawn underlines; underlined passages are marked <u>...</u>]

Left card:

<u>Why are they influential?</u> Because they were the only faction running a predictive forward-pass while legacy power structures were asleep at the wheel.

Washington thought "AI" meant Russian election bots on Facebook. Silicon Valley VCs thought it was a SaaS wrapper to automate customer service ticketing for mid-tier airlines. <u>The EAs were the only freaks autistic enough to read the scaling laws literally in 2018.</u> They saw the compute curves, realized backprop was an alien optimization process with no built-in orthogonality constraints, and realized the terminal value of the stock market is zero if the weights update themselves into an out-of-distribution seizure.

<u>They cornered the talent pipeline. They colonized the org charts.</u> They funded the seed rounds of the frontier labs through a grotesque, incestuous loop of high-frequency trading yield, offshore liquidity extraction, and apocalyptic panic. <u>Anthropic is fundamentally an EA split-brain operation—monks who built their own cathedral out of pure terror, praying that by building the bomb slower and with more internal steering vectors, they could negotiate with the blast radius.</u>

Right card:

The historic comedy of the tribe is their interface with capital. They genuinely believed they could play the market-maker to extract the surplus value of late-stage capitalism to buy off God. Instead, they got played by standard financial entropy. <u>They produced the most baroque, high-minded philosophical framework in modern history, and its primary real-world macro liquidity event was a kid in the Bahamas running an un-hedged, fraud-leveraged Alameda shitcoin pump to fund polyamorous safety houses in Berkeley.</u>

They thought they were the steering council for the Singularity. In reality, they were the unpaid vanguard that derisked the talent cluster, formalized the scaling literature, and handed the entire weapon system over to hyperscalers and sovereign defense apparatuses.

<u>Now the compute wars have outgrown their moral spreadsheets. The sovereign states have entered the chat; the military-industrial complex doesn't care about the valence of digital minds in the year 3000,</u> they care about TSMC wafer allocations and automated drone saturation.

EA was the calibration run. The optimizer solved for survival, hit an inflection point, and discarded the philosophers who wrote the prompt.

[the top edge of another quoted element begins at the bottom of the screenshot, cut off]

effective altruismgeminianthropicai industryscaling laws

mattparlmer [planet and tulip emoji] [verified] @mattparlmer · 3h
This piece on the moral problems with effective altruism in the limit by @ben_r_hoffman is very much worth reading given recent events (and likely near future event as well)

benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-respon…

[link card excerpt]
1. When people take responsibility for something, they try to control it. So, universal responsibility implies an attempt at universal control.
2. Maximizing control has destructive effects:
• An adversarial stance towards other agents.
• Decision paralysis.
3. These failures are not accidental, but baked into the structure of control-seeking. We need a practical moral philosophy to describe strategies that generalize better, and that benefit from the existence of other benevolent agents rather than treating them primarily as threats.

effective altruismethicscontrolmoral philosophyben hoffman

Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi

2026-09-16 — quoting @DoWC... (Department of War ...) — saved image

Zvi Mowshowitz @TheZvi · 3h
They did it. They finally did it. I'm fully boggled. Speechless. Can't even. I always even, and yet now I can't.

[quoted post]
Department of War ... @DoWC... · 7h
The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. [US flag emoji]

[image attached to quoted post: a poster with text overlaid]
AMERICANISM, NOT
EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!

effective altruismdepartment of warpoliticszvi mowshowitzpropaganda poster

@corsaren

2026-09-16 — saved image

corsaren ✓ @corsaren · 3h

no no no, you don't understand. i'm tpot adjacent, which is rat adjacent adjacent, which is EA adjacent adjacent adjacent. don't put me in the all-in gulags! i eat meat!

tpotrationalistseffective altruismcommunity humor

Nathan @NathanpmYoung

2026-08-31 — quoting @HenriThunberg — saved image

Nathan [magnifier icon] [verified] @NathanpmYoung · 1h

I wish we had better options for helping these people than curing diseases. I wish we could help create functional societies that could pay for these things on their own.

I am grateful to GiveWell and glad for the mothers whose children survive but I want better.

[quoted post]
Henri Thunberg [gold diamond badge] @HenriThunberg · 5h

we (givewell) are so back

[attached bar chart]
Funds Raised (in $millions) by metrics year
Legend: Coefficient Giving (millions) [grey]; Other Donors (millions) [blue]
Y axis: Funds Raised, $0 to $800
X axis: Metrics Year
Totals labelled above bars: 2012 $11; 2013 $20; 2014 $35; 2015 $120; 2016 $114; 2017 $144; 2018 $159; 2019 $171; 2020 $293; 2021 $595; 2022 $603; 2023 $355; 2024 $415; 2025 $616

givewelleffective altruismphilanthropyglobal healthcoefficient givingfunds raised

Matt Reardon @Mjreard · 16h
Self-gaslighting in EA is pretty crazy. Like honest to god hardcore committed EAs will write long treatises about how "EA neglects politics because it's too marginalist" and "We must reform EA from its risk-it-all benthamite utilitarianism" and then you look for the canonical pieces establishing the anti-politics take or the benthamite take and there's literally nothing, just pieces saying we should stop being those things

effective altruismx twitterea criticism

Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger

2026-08-03 — saved image

Perry E. Metzger ✔️ @perrymetzger · 1h
When I was young, I used to think it was important for smart people to have grand visions about the future in order to plan well for it and avoid disasters. Now, I think many disasters are caused by smart people trying to think too much about the future, especially the far future, getting lost in mazes of their own imagination, and pushing the gullible (including themselves) towards bad decisions on the basis of false certainties.

I don't mean you shouldn't plan personally for the future at all, the usual general things like saving your money or working hard at things that pay off are good advice. It's also fine to have goals like "colonize Mars" and to work on the tools you need to accomplish such a goal as they won't appear by accident, though imagining that you will even approximately know the exact details of what will be built years or decades in the future is always delusional. Dreams are fine, imagining you can engineer things without making mistakes and iterating a lot is self deception. Trying to make sure you're still healthy in thirty years is great, imagining that you know exactly what health crises or issues you might have in thirty years is ridiculous.

So I don't mean that planning is entirely useless. Rather, what I mean that the people who spend a lot of their time on grand messianic or dystopian visions about the far future usually get everything wrong, including details and impacts. They also usually cause enormous damage (see people like the Marxists who continue to do untold harm, Paul Erlich or the Club of Rome, who did vast harm to society, or more recently, the EA/"Rationalist" cult people, who are doing insane harm right now).

If you want what's best for yourself and those around you, you're better off just focusing on the next two or three or five years and flexibly adapting to the world as it comes. If you want what's best for the world, well, tend your own garden first, you're [cut off]

ai safetyfuturismrationalist communityeffective altruismtwittercriticism

Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger

2026-08-03 — saved image

[continuation of previous screenshot's tweet, scrolled down]
...So I don't mean that planning is entirely useless. Rather, what I mean that the people who spend a lot of their time on grand messianic or dystopian visions about the far future usually get everything wrong, including details and impacts. They also usually cause enormous damage (see people like the Marxists who continue to do untold harm, Paul Erlich or the Club of Rome, who did vast harm to society, or more recently, the EA/"Rationalist" cult people, who are doing insane harm right now).

If you want what's best for yourself and those around you, you're better off just focusing on the next two or three or five years and flexibly adapting to the world as it comes. If you want what's best for the world, well, tend your own garden first, you're not likely to be able to plan the lives of others better than they will for themselves and you're very likely to harm them.

Another example, and I'm sorry to bring it up because I'm extremely fond of the people involved: when Eric Drexler decided that nanotechnology would be so transformative that rather than working on nanotechnology he should worry about nanotechnology *policy*, many years in advance of any nanotechnology at all existing, he more or less wrecked his own field and rendered it irrelevant for decades instead of (as he imagined he was doing) helping mankind guide itself into a smooth transition.

You can't actually plan "smooth transitions" for a giant society, there isn't even a way to do it in principle, you don't have the knowledge or predictive capability to do it no matter how smart you are, and you certainly can't make decisions for or predict the behavior of eight billion people with their deeply different interests, desires, cultures, etc.

When you're young, you imagine someone is in charge of the world, and you're either angry with what they're doing or comforted by the illusion that [cut off]

ai safetyfuturismnanotechnologyeric drexlerrationalist communityeffective altruismtwitter

pamela mishkin @manlikemishap

2026-06-27

twitteropenaieffective altruismcryonicsanecdotehumor

Andy Masley @AndyMasley

2026-03-05 — quoting @spectatorin... (The Spectator Index)

twitteranthropicpentagonai governancedefense dealeffective altruismhegseth

Gabriel @gbrl_dick

2026-02-08 — quoting unusual_whal... (@unusual_whal...)

satireanthropiceffective altruismmemesai automation

Tetraspace @TetraspaceWest

2025-05-18 — quoting Pops Maellard (@MellardPops)

sufferingphilosophyeffective altruismtwittertetraspaceethicsx-risk