A once wholesome and inspiring movement has become entangled with cults and has lost years chasing dead-end ideas
Effective Altruism Is a Dangerous Cult — Here's Why
Understanding the "Scientology of Silicon Valley." (7,700 words)
Altruism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Effective Altruism’s Problems Go Beyond Sam Bankman-Fried - Bloomberg
archived 12 Mar 2026 21:01:45 UTC
Effective Altruism Summit 2013
Giving Altruism a Bad Name
Effective Altruism’s metrics-driven model of philanthropy is elitist, condescending and — most damning of all — extremely ineffective.
Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creed
Tech billionaires seem intent on giving away a lot of money. But are those who support ‘longtermism’ and ‘effective altruism’ ignoring the very real problems of today?
Effective Altruism’s Bait-and-Switch: From Global Poverty To AI Doomerism
The Effective Altruism movement Effective Altruism (EA) is typically explained as a philosophy that encourages individuals to do the “most good” with their resources (money, skills). Its “effective…
The Effective-Altruism Comeback
Out of the spotlight, the movement has been preparing for the soon-to-be AI rich to donate billions.
The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline — Working Classicists
If it seems like the alt-right are filling social media with their bile, this piece will at least confirm that for you.
Effective Altruism Has a Hostile Culture for Women, Critics Say
Seven women connected to effective altruism tell TIME they experienced harassment and worse within the community
Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better
Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 4: What You Owe The Future
Is the increasingly controversial "effective altruism" movement about helping the most people in the most efficient ways, or about saving trillions of future humans from the dread threat of an AI apocalypse? Or, as some adherents argue ... both?
Startup “Cults” — Real Life
Calling tech companies “cults” distracts from the social and economic conditions that empower them
