There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good.

When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people.

This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future.

It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence.

If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.

Something about arbitrary moralizing? Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of lung disease in childhood and his very Calvinist nurse told him lots of stories while he was sick in bed. Then later his own short stories generally had this creepy sense that moral retribution is coming to get you from an unpredictable direction.