From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to proselytize EA ideas. I was never fully convinced to pursue a career as an AI safety researcher or in animal welfare, but I found the ideas around agency, counterfactual impact, and a life structured around a single coherent philosophical vision compelling.
If I had to attribute my exit from EA to a single event, it would be reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. For an author who has written an essay provocatively titled "The Virtue of Selfishness" and is known for relentlessly bashing altruism, one might expect that Rand's philosophical ideal is entirely disjoint from EA and that I had merely been turned away from altruism altogether.
Instead, it clarified to me that EA constitutes a bundle of distinct belief systems, each of which is rare in modern philosophical and cultural discourse but is typically presented in a single tight argument.
My goal for this post is to explain the uniquely appealing aspects of the EA movement that have likely fueled its growth and what they might mean for the future of adjacent philosophical ideals like e/acc.
Unbundling Effective Altruism
EA philosophy is a big tent, and I will not attempt to consider every possible variant. I will instead use the term Aggregate Utilitarian Rationalist Effective Altruism (AUREA) to denote a "mainline denomination" of EA commonly promoted by philosophers like MacAskill, Ord, Bostrom, and Bentham's Bulldog and pitched in EA intro fellowships. The case for AUREA is built on four separate arguments:
RATIONALISM:
Premise-REALITY: Reality exists independently of any observer
Premise-REASON: Reason and logic are the means by which a mind comprehends reality
Premise-FALLIBILITY: Unaided cognition is fallible and bias-prone, so clear reasoning requires strict, disciplined application of logic.
Conclusion-RATIONALISM: Reality is knowable, and reason rigorously applied is the means of knowing it.
IMPACTFUL AGENCY:
Premise-MALLEABLE: The world is malleable and can be altered by action
Premise-VARIATION: Different actions produce different effects, and some actions produce more change in the world than others
Premise-INDIVIDUAL: An individual can, through purposeful effort and use of resources, bring about changes in the world
Conclusion-IMPACTFUL AGENCY: Individuals can reshape reality towards chosen ends, and the magnitude of change depends on choice of actions
MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY:
Premise-VALUE: Let V be the agent's ultimate value. Lives differ in how fully they realize V.
Premise-MAXIMIZE: An agent ought to realize V as fully as their capacities and circumstances permit, not merely to a sufficient, customary, or comfortable degree.
Premise-UNBOUNDED: There is no fixed ceiling, no set of dischargeable obligations, and no point at which one has done "enough." Because there is no upper bound, the ideal life is one of continual reaching.
Conclusion-MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY: One ought to realize V as fully as one's capacity permits, with no point at which one has done enough.
UTILITARIANISM: V is aggregate welfare across all sentient beings. Value is agent-neutral; the agent itself counts as one among all in one's moral circle.
These four combine to reconstruct a common variant of EA philosophy:[1]
AUREA:
MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY: One ought to realize V as fully as one's capacity permits, with no point at which one has done enough.
RATIONALISM: Reality is knowable, and reason rigorously applied is the means of knowing it.
IMPACTFUL AGENCY: Individuals can reshape reality towards chosen ends, and the magnitude of change depends on choice of actions
UTILITARIANISM: V is aggregate welfare across all sentient beings. Value is agent-neutral; the agent itself counts as one among all in one's moral circle.
Conclusion-AUREA: One ought to use evidence and reason to identify the actions that produce the greatest aggregate welfare, and direct one's time, money, and career toward them, assigning one's own interests no special weight.
What is striking, however, is that each of the four claims in AUREA -- MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY, RATIONALISM, IMPACTFUL AGENCY, and UTILITARIANISM -- has been popularized in modern cultural discourse by means of EA and EA-adjacent communities. EA is, of course, not the first to make any of these arguments, but EA is often one's first exposure to people who take each of these arguments seriously and to their logical conclusions, and they can be seen as monolithic and uniquely EA to new EAs.
Rationalism as an ideal has been around since the Enlightenment, but forums like LessWrong have been instrumental in the modern discourse around cognitive biases, Bayesian epistemology, and rigorous predictive modeling. Similarly, utilitarianism as a concept has been around since the late 18th century, but until recently, one would be hard pressed to find self-described utilitarians putting pencil to paper trying to maximize utils and not just dollars.
Take, for example, IMPACTFUL AGENCY. In an increasingly secular world, a primary appeal of EA is as a source of purpose and antidote to nihilism. It's a movement that proclaims -- "hey, do you like good things like saving lives and positive change in the world because boy do we have the philosophy for you. And, we're like, 1000x more effective than everyone else." You get the pitch -- "$5500 to save a life? That's so cheap! We can save so many!" This has been described as the infatuation phase of EA, and it's easy to get swept up in it. As a bonus, agency is about the individual. You don't have to wait until you are a local politician or leader to make an impact but can do so measurably and immediately.
Similarly, MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY is an excellent attractor of ambitious young people. Consider earn-to-give pitches made up until the last few years: You're a freshman in college and feel like you want to do something good in the world but don't want to work as a foreign aid worker. Well guess what! If you took a high-paying, high-status role as an investment banker or quant trader and donated most of your income, EA said you'd make more of an impact than an individual aid worker since you could fund the salaries of 10. You can satisfy your ambition while enacting positive change in the world.
More recently, 80,000 Hours as an organization is structured precisely to offer answers to ambitious talented people who don't know what they want to do with their lives but want it to align with some ideal and have some status -- and they will agree with you. 80k will tell you that ambition is good and you should pursue high-impact roles at prestigious organizations to build career capital and increase your chances of being important and powerful in the future at an AI safety or similar organization.
This is a respite from many modern narratives that paint prestige and ambition in negative lights. Ask a graduating econ major at a top 10 school and they might sheepishly admit to entering consulting or finance because of the pay, status, and optionality even if it's not what they want to do long-term. EA gives the license to say "yes, I am earning 200k, and it's also for a good cause." By using altruism as the rationale, it gives a broadly socially acceptable justification for unbounded ambition. EA even argues you should not be ashamed of privilege but use it as leverage to do good in the world, either by donations or networking into important positions.
RATIONALISM and UTILITARIANISM appeal to STEM-minded would-be EAs because they offer a way to convert numbers into meaning. If you love math, it's very tempting to make complicated models of utility maximization and spend your time taking expectation values of freshly updated posterior distributions. "Shut up and multiply", as the saying goes, lets you focus on your strong suit.
EA puts a lot of effort into growing the movement compared to e.g. rationalist organizations, so the (un)bundling of EA also seems to explain the common EA->rationality+agency pipeline as individuals tacitly decouple the components of EA and hang on to their favorite pieces.
Objectivism and Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies
The catalyst for this framing was reading Atlas Shrugged and subsequent works by Ayn Rand because Objectivism can be put into a nearly identical frame:
MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY: One ought to realize V as fully as one's capacity permits, with no point at which one has done enough.[3]
RATIONALISM: Reality is knowable, and reason rigorously applied is the means of knowing it.
IMPACTFUL AGENCY: Individuals can reshape reality towards chosen ends, and the magnitude of change depends on choice of actions
HAPPINESS: V: "life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose."
Conclusion-OBJECTIVISM: One ought to use evidence and reason to identify the actions that achieve the greatest happiness, and direct one's time, money, and life towards them.
Now, whether or not you agree with the axiology of Rand, the syllogistic structure of Rand's ethics is shockingly close to AUREA's -- both involve some value function coupled to a framework for execution. What has been left out of both syllogisms as written is the side constraints which both philosophies at least claim to uphold. AUREA would say, particularly post-FTX, "don't do things that are illegal or 'common sense bad' or generate bad optics for the sake of maximization." Rand would say that pursuing rational self-interest by lying, cheating, stealing, and unprovoked force is irrational and goes against the notion of rights. It is telling, however, that both must tack on these kinds of statements to slightly hedge their claims to avoid absurd conclusions.
Objectivism and AUREA are perhaps the two most pure modern Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies (RAMPs). Some of the most ridiculed individualistic beliefs of Rand, including the idea that heroic characters like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are like Atlas holding up the country (which promptly collapses when they leave), are not so far off from EA's valorization of figures like Norman Borlaug and Viktor Zhdanov for their enormous counterfactual impact.
The two appear to uniquely share the IMPACTFUL AGENCY, RATIONALISM, and MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY conclusions among popular philosophies: Nietzsche may promote agency and a maximization of sorts, but the ubermensch is not exactly bound by rationalism. Kant's categorical imperative may be rational, but it's not particularly agentic -- living within your duties is sufficient, and there is not really a sense in which you can maximize rule-following. Aristotle's golden mean is explicitly against the kind of endless striving of Objectivism and AUREA, even if it seeks a kind of rationalism and agency. Modern religions reject IMPACTFUL AGENCY in favor of a more rules-based, Kantian morality. The contrast is even sharper against modern politics. The modern left rejects "hero" stories in favor of systemic explanations, and the modern right is more concerned with cultural issues and the economy as a whole.
My point in making this parallel, however, is that if you can take the same execution framework and plug in self-consistent yet diametrically opposed value systems, then what you really have is a philosophical gun ready to be loaded with any unbounded V. This may be the most lasting impact of EA if it inspires similarly passionate and driven movements. A neo-Objectivist movement would be appealing in exactly the same way EA has been -- providing meaning, licensing ambition, and "weaponizing autism" as they say -- for values that are on the opposite end of the individual-collective spectrum. E/acc, which most EAs despise, is a direct descendant of the same framework, differing mainly on the sign it assigns to the expected value of powerful AI. I expect an increasingly secular world to generate many more EA-flavored RAMPs by loading the gun with a variety of maximizable V's.
UNBOUNDED and UTILITARIANISM premises are often modified to include things like "don't literally run yourself into the ground because you are human and burn out and this is -EV in the long run" and various forms of prioritarianism or blends of utilitarianism with deontology, but this is beside the point.
I am mapping IMPACTFUL AGENCY to Purpose/Productiveness, RATIONALISM to Reason/Rationality, and MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY to Self-Esteem/Pride in her essay "The Objectivist Ethics".
See also the productive work section: "Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. 'Productive work' does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind." (The Objectivist Ethics)
From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to proselytize EA ideas. I was never fully convinced to pursue a career as an AI safety researcher or in animal welfare, but I found the ideas around agency, counterfactual impact, and a life structured around a single coherent philosophical vision compelling.
If I had to attribute my exit from EA to a single event, it would be reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. For an author who has written an essay provocatively titled "The Virtue of Selfishness" and is known for relentlessly bashing altruism, one might expect that Rand's philosophical ideal is entirely disjoint from EA and that I had merely been turned away from altruism altogether.
Instead, it clarified to me that EA constitutes a bundle of distinct belief systems, each of which is rare in modern philosophical and cultural discourse but is typically presented in a single tight argument.
My goal for this post is to explain the uniquely appealing aspects of the EA movement that have likely fueled its growth and what they might mean for the future of adjacent philosophical ideals like e/acc.
Unbundling Effective Altruism
EA philosophy is a big tent, and I will not attempt to consider every possible variant. I will instead use the term Aggregate Utilitarian Rationalist Effective Altruism (AUREA) to denote a "mainline denomination" of EA commonly promoted by philosophers like MacAskill, Ord, Bostrom, and Bentham's Bulldog and pitched in EA intro fellowships. The case for AUREA is built on four separate arguments:
These four combine to reconstruct a common variant of EA philosophy:[1]
What is striking, however, is that each of the four claims in AUREA -- MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY, RATIONALISM, IMPACTFUL AGENCY, and UTILITARIANISM -- has been popularized in modern cultural discourse by means of EA and EA-adjacent communities. EA is, of course, not the first to make any of these arguments, but EA is often one's first exposure to people who take each of these arguments seriously and to their logical conclusions, and they can be seen as monolithic and uniquely EA to new EAs.
Rationalism as an ideal has been around since the Enlightenment, but forums like LessWrong have been instrumental in the modern discourse around cognitive biases, Bayesian epistemology, and rigorous predictive modeling. Similarly, utilitarianism as a concept has been around since the late 18th century, but until recently, one would be hard pressed to find self-described utilitarians putting pencil to paper trying to maximize utils and not just dollars.
Take, for example, IMPACTFUL AGENCY. In an increasingly secular world, a primary appeal of EA is as a source of purpose and antidote to nihilism. It's a movement that proclaims -- "hey, do you like good things like saving lives and positive change in the world because boy do we have the philosophy for you. And, we're like, 1000x more effective than everyone else." You get the pitch -- "$5500 to save a life? That's so cheap! We can save so many!" This has been described as the infatuation phase of EA, and it's easy to get swept up in it. As a bonus, agency is about the individual. You don't have to wait until you are a local politician or leader to make an impact but can do so measurably and immediately.
Similarly, MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY is an excellent attractor of ambitious young people. Consider earn-to-give pitches made up until the last few years: You're a freshman in college and feel like you want to do something good in the world but don't want to work as a foreign aid worker. Well guess what! If you took a high-paying, high-status role as an investment banker or quant trader and donated most of your income, EA said you'd make more of an impact than an individual aid worker since you could fund the salaries of 10. You can satisfy your ambition while enacting positive change in the world.
More recently, 80,000 Hours as an organization is structured precisely to offer answers to ambitious talented people who don't know what they want to do with their lives but want it to align with some ideal and have some status -- and they will agree with you. 80k will tell you that ambition is good and you should pursue high-impact roles at prestigious organizations to build career capital and increase your chances of being important and powerful in the future at an AI safety or similar organization.
This is a respite from many modern narratives that paint prestige and ambition in negative lights. Ask a graduating econ major at a top 10 school and they might sheepishly admit to entering consulting or finance because of the pay, status, and optionality even if it's not what they want to do long-term. EA gives the license to say "yes, I am earning 200k, and it's also for a good cause." By using altruism as the rationale, it gives a broadly socially acceptable justification for unbounded ambition. EA even argues you should not be ashamed of privilege but use it as leverage to do good in the world, either by donations or networking into important positions.
RATIONALISM and UTILITARIANISM appeal to STEM-minded would-be EAs because they offer a way to convert numbers into meaning. If you love math, it's very tempting to make complicated models of utility maximization and spend your time taking expectation values of freshly updated posterior distributions. "Shut up and multiply", as the saying goes, lets you focus on your strong suit.
EA puts a lot of effort into growing the movement compared to e.g. rationalist organizations, so the (un)bundling of EA also seems to explain the common EA->rationality+agency pipeline as individuals tacitly decouple the components of EA and hang on to their favorite pieces.
Objectivism and Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies
The catalyst for this framing was reading Atlas Shrugged and subsequent works by Ayn Rand because Objectivism can be put into a nearly identical frame:
Now, whether or not you agree with the axiology of Rand, the syllogistic structure of Rand's ethics is shockingly close to AUREA's -- both involve some value function coupled to a framework for execution. What has been left out of both syllogisms as written is the side constraints which both philosophies at least claim to uphold. AUREA would say, particularly post-FTX, "don't do things that are illegal or 'common sense bad' or generate bad optics for the sake of maximization." Rand would say that pursuing rational self-interest by lying, cheating, stealing, and unprovoked force is irrational and goes against the notion of rights. It is telling, however, that both must tack on these kinds of statements to slightly hedge their claims to avoid absurd conclusions.
Objectivism and AUREA are perhaps the two most pure modern Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies (RAMPs). Some of the most ridiculed individualistic beliefs of Rand, including the idea that heroic characters like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are like Atlas holding up the country (which promptly collapses when they leave), are not so far off from EA's valorization of figures like Norman Borlaug and Viktor Zhdanov for their enormous counterfactual impact.
The two appear to uniquely share the IMPACTFUL AGENCY, RATIONALISM, and MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY conclusions among popular philosophies: Nietzsche may promote agency and a maximization of sorts, but the ubermensch is not exactly bound by rationalism. Kant's categorical imperative may be rational, but it's not particularly agentic -- living within your duties is sufficient, and there is not really a sense in which you can maximize rule-following. Aristotle's golden mean is explicitly against the kind of endless striving of Objectivism and AUREA, even if it seeks a kind of rationalism and agency. Modern religions reject IMPACTFUL AGENCY in favor of a more rules-based, Kantian morality. The contrast is even sharper against modern politics. The modern left rejects "hero" stories in favor of systemic explanations, and the modern right is more concerned with cultural issues and the economy as a whole.
My point in making this parallel, however, is that if you can take the same execution framework and plug in self-consistent yet diametrically opposed value systems, then what you really have is a philosophical gun ready to be loaded with any unbounded V. This may be the most lasting impact of EA if it inspires similarly passionate and driven movements. A neo-Objectivist movement would be appealing in exactly the same way EA has been -- providing meaning, licensing ambition, and "weaponizing autism" as they say -- for values that are on the opposite end of the individual-collective spectrum. E/acc, which most EAs despise, is a direct descendant of the same framework, differing mainly on the sign it assigns to the expected value of powerful AI. I expect an increasingly secular world to generate many more EA-flavored RAMPs by loading the gun with a variety of maximizable V's.
UNBOUNDED and UTILITARIANISM premises are often modified to include things like "don't literally run yourself into the ground because you are human and burn out and this is -EV in the long run" and various forms of prioritarianism or blends of utilitarianism with deontology, but this is beside the point.
I am mapping IMPACTFUL AGENCY to Purpose/Productiveness, RATIONALISM to Reason/Rationality, and MAXIMALIST PHILOSOPHY to Self-Esteem/Pride in her essay "The Objectivist Ethics".
See also the productive work section: "Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. 'Productive work' does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind." (The Objectivist Ethics)