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  • Hacker News
  • Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism

    https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...

    by williamcotton
  • I do not think you can call it a social movement because it does not have any significant mass of people behind it and by its nature, never will.
    by giacomoforte
  • What’s that thing pg said about a submarine? Somebody’s got a dossier of all the weirdest things about effective altruism they can find (not that it’s in short supply), and they’re out there convincing reporters who need to run articles about AI that this is the ideology of the AI guys, and wouldn’t your readers like to know all the lurid details?

    While it’s probably something prosaic as “Anthropic pays the most lip service to EA, this makes them look bad” or “Our employees are leaning EA and it’s causing problems, things would be easier if they were too embarrassed to admit they were EA”, I do wonder - the board member who instigated the firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI does happen to be a long-time effective altruist…

    by fwlr
  • There was modest farmland in Iraq managed by a trust for about 400 years that paid for the wedding dresses for all women in the nearby town. The colonial administrators found this ineffective and dismantled the trust fund and privatized the land.

    There is something to be said about how we sometimes fail to account for the effectiveness of ineffective altruism.

    by mohamedkoubaa
  • If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.
    by smitty1e
  • Likely a better read

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-...

    by abhis3798
  • > There is an elusive quality to effective altruism. The movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only “EA adjacent”.

    Oof, that one hit close to home.

    by PoignardAzur
  • I was surprised by the weakness of this article, regardless the potential absurdities of parts of EA.

    Why does The Economist consider this the most important issue this week, in a world of complex problems, to splash its first leader on (and more than one page long too)?

    by wodow

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