It’s been a no good, very bad year for Effective Altruism, or “EA” for short, the cultural movement that aims to use “evidence and reason” to figure out the best ways to do the “most good.”
One year ago, the EA community was flying high. Its poster boy, a philosopher named William MacAskill, had just published his book “What We Owe the Future,” which makes the case that we should be far more concerned about humanity’s long-term future — thousands, millions, even billions of years from now — than we ordinarily are.
If this sounds bizarre and potentially dangerous, that’s because it is. Yet MacAskill’s book, longtermism and the EA movement that he co-founded received mostly favorable coverage from leading news outlets like The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Time magazine.
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This was EA’s big opportunity to convince the public to join the movement and embrace the longtermist “ethic.” And boy did it backfire, due to a series of scandals that, as of this writing, starts and ends with a certain crypto heavyweight named Sam Bankman-Fried, whose criminal trial for perpetrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history recently concluded with seven guilty verdicts.
