Opinion | Effective Altruism Is Flawed. But What’s the Alternative? - The New York Times

You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange. (This spring, at age 32, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.) But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us: To “help others as much as we can with the resources available to us” based on three criteria: “importance, neglectedness and tractability.” That’s from the website of Open Philanthropy, which is funded mainly by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Moskovitz’s wife. Effective altruism is a new movement inspired by philosophers (including Peter Singer and William MacAskill) and embraced by Silicon Valley engineers who pride themselves on taking a log

You don’t hear so much about effective altruism now that one of its most famous exponents, Sam Bankman-Fried, was found guilty of stealing $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange. (This spring, at age 32, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.) But if you read this newsletter, you might be the kind of person who can’t help but be intrigued by effective altruism. (I am!) Its stated goal is wonderfully rational in a way that appeals to the economist in each of us: To “help others as much as we can with the resources available to us” based on three criteria: “importance, neglect