Effective Altruism is one of those things that sounds smart on the surface, but in practice is a yellow flag. The fact that he started the club is a red flag.

In short, Effective Altruism says you don't engage in charity until you have sufficient means to actually make a difference. Basically, you leverage capitalism to accumulate enough wealth to actually be able to solve a big problem, then you go all in on solving that problem. Sounds great right?

In the real world these people never accumulate enough wealth to actually start solving problems. Even when they become billionaires. In practice it is a convenient excuse to act like the most depraved capitalist while still pretending to sit on the high horse and talk down to people who simply try to help with the means available to them.

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platinumrad an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have a lot of problems with Aschenbrenner and the "Rationalist" community as a whole, but this is not a factually correct characterization of Effective Altruism.

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pingou an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Giving What We Can" pledge is to give 10% of your income to charity.

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skavi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

can you support those claims?

	▲	TimorousBestie an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s the “tractability” part of the ITN framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/itn-framework In practice, it can be used as a fully-general counterargument to supporting most charities, since decisively and completely solving problems in this space is rare. It’s harder to split a problem into component parts than it is to throw up one’s hands and say, “well, this isn’t tractable.”
	▲	jandrese an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		One has to only look at the actual participants to find ample examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQZWMmINqxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54GrXDjokg https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/a-mirror-for-tech-br... https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-problem-with-effectiv...