The Effective Altruism Shell Game 2.0 - Freddie deBoer

This is the second time I’ve written an updated version of a previous post; this one has been redone from scratch. If you read this newsletter you’ve very likely already heard of effective altruism, or EA, the philosophy/community that’s concerned with performing charitable acts in a way that creates the most positive good for the most people. If not, here’s an explainer/endorsement from Dylan Matthews that’s a good introduction. If you do know what EA is, you probably also know that it’s lost a considerable amount of shine in the past year, going from a media darling to the recipient of a tremendous amount of skepticism. Matthews himself would, only four months later, write a piece to express some regrets; he did so because the spectacular implosion of the recently-convicted Sam Bankman-Fried, previously an EA philosopher king, caused many people to turn a harsh eye on that world. I don’t think, though, that the machinations of Bankman-Fried or the cultist excess that were revealed in

This is the second time I’ve written an updated version of a previous post; this one has been redone from scratch. If you read this newsletter you’ve very likely already heard of effective altruism, or EA, the philosophy/community that’s concerned with performing charitable acts in a way that creates the most positive good for the most people. If not, here’s an explainer/endorsement from Dylan Matthews that’s a good introduction. If you do know what EA is, you probably also know that it’s lost a considerable amount of shine in the past year, going from a media darling to the recipient of a tre