Effective Altruism and the Making of the World: A Dilemma of Elijah Moskovitz and Sam Bankman-Fried
Sam Bankman-Fried is a leader in the field of effective altruism and is due to be sentenced tomorrow. The inventor of electric cars has said that he feels that the company is close to what he believes. Moskovitz has spent millions of dollars to influence American politics, as have Jaan and the others. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over decades to spread Islamic fundamentalism around the world.
The real difference between the philosophers and SBF is that SBF is now facing accountability, which is what EA’s founders have always struggled to escape.
If you’ve ever come across effective altruists, you’re likely fond of them too. They tend to be earnest young people who talk a lot about improving the world. You might have been such a young person once—I confess that I was. A decade before effective altruism was formed, I set out to save the world’s poor.
How Did You Start GivingWell? A Survey of EA Charities During the First Three Years of Engagement at OpenAI, SBF and OpenAI
I grew up in a similar way today. A childhood full of computers and books was led by a white male. I went into philosophy for the fact that it felt like a game. I was playing with the ideas of Peter Singer in 1998 after receiving my PhD from Harvard.
But while OpenAI and SBF were busy besmirching the EA brand, the philosophy’s central inquiry has persisted. How best to help others? Should we feed the hungry? Model the potential catastrophes of AGI? Colonize Mars?
Hassenfeld’s answer to “How to be good?” is unnervingly specific. It’s also utilitarian, and boring. Against Malaria Foundation, Helen Keller International, and new incentives are all charities that need your help. These are GiveWell’s top charities, chosen because they stave off malaria, prevent childhood blindness and death, and get kids vaccinated. How is GiveWell certain? If you want to see what a credible performance of candor looks like, consult, and be sure to look at the “Our Mistakes” tab.
Hassenfeld cofounded GiveWell with fellow ex-hedge-funder Holden Karnofsky in 2007, before effective altruism was even a seed-stage social movement. From the start, the organization was the leading light of the so-called evidence-based charity community. Over time, its mission was subsumed under the EA rubric along with the missions of disparate other projects, including Giving What We Can and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
GiveWell also became a starter employer for young bourgeois EAs looking to do demonstrable good. Among many other EAs, Hassenfeld and Karnofsky hired Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the one who most resoundingly clashed with the CEO, Sam Altman, over ethical issues. Toner especially seems to have found a mentor in Karnofsky, who now works to mitigate the AI threat at Open Philanthropy, an EA grantmaking organization that he helped create at GiveWell.