Effective Altruism
Utilitarianism as institutional engineering.
Kernel
Effective Altruism (EA) is the doctrine that one should maximize expected positive impact per unit of effort, calculated as rigorously as possible. Founded around 2009 by Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and the Oxford-rationalist orbit, it grew into a global movement and a multi-billion-dollar philanthropic engine. The 2022 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX (its largest funder) and the 2023 OpenAI board firing of Sam Altman (its most consequential intervention) bracket EA's period of maximum institutional influence.
Origins
Peter Singer's 1972 "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" supplies the philosophy. Toby Ord's Giving What We Can (2009) supplies the pledge. GiveWell (Karnofsky, Hassenfeld, 2007) supplies the analytic engine. The movement consolidates around 2015 with the founding of Open Philanthropy.
Doctrine
Calculate cost-effectiveness in expected lives improved per dollar. Cause prioritization matters more than effort. "Earning to give" — high-paying jobs subsidize the cause. Longtermism — most expected value lies in the far future. AGI alignment dominates many longtermist portfolios.
Lineage
Singer → Ord → MacAskill (What We Owe the Future, 2022) → Open Philanthropy → Anthropic (recipients of major OpenPhil grants) → the 80,000 Hours career-advice apparatus. The EA pipeline directly placed multiple researchers into AI safety roles at every major lab.
Conflicts
The internal conflict — near-term global health (bed nets, deworming) vs. longtermism (AI alignment, biorisk) — is genuine and unresolved. The external conflict with e/acc is more performative than philosophical, but the FTX collapse damaged the movement's ability to claim epistemic superiority.
Trajectory
Post-FTX, post-OpenAI-board, EA's institutional reputation is lower than its actual impact. Quietly, OpenPhil money continues to fund a meaningful share of the AI safety field; quietly, EA-trained safety researchers continue to staff the frontier labs. The next chapter of the movement is being written in less public registers.