The movement gained popularity outside academia, spurring the creation of research centers, advisory organizations, and charities, which collectively have donated several hundred million dollars.
Popular cause priorities within effective altruism include global health and development, social and economic inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over the long-term future.
[5] Effective altruism has strong ties to the elite universities in the United States and Britain, and Silicon Valley has become a key centre for the "longtermist" submovement, with a tight subculture there.
[6] The movement received mainstream attention and criticism with the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX as founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major funder of effective altruism causes prior to late 2022.
Beginning in the latter half of the 2000s, several communities centered around altruist, rationalist, and futurological concerns started to converge, such as:[7] In 2011, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to incorporate into an umbrella organization and held a vote for their new name; the "Centre for Effective Altruism" was selected.
[25][26] In 2018, American news website Vox launched its Future Perfect section, led by journalist Dylan Matthews, which publishes articles and podcasts on "finding the best ways to do good".
[31] In 2023, Oxford University Press published the volume The Good it Promises, The Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen.
[1] Other than Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers associated with effective altruism include Nick Bostrom,[21] Toby Ord,[38] Hilary Greaves,[39] and Derek Parfit.
[42] To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes values and actions such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other resources.
[5] The information required for cause prioritization may involve data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions (counterfactual reasoning), and identifying uncertainty.
[34] This practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another" was criticized by Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator for being "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word" and "elitist".
[52] Toby Ord has described utilitarians as "number-crunching", compared with most effective altruists whom he called "guided by conventional wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers".
[36] Many people in the effective altruism movement have prioritized global health and development, animal welfare, and mitigating risks that threaten the future of humanity.
Charity evaluator GiveWell was founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 to address poverty,[71] where they believe additional donations to be the most impactful.
[73][74] The organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from Singer's book of the same name,[75] works to alleviate global poverty by promoting evidence-backed charities, conducting philanthropy education, and changing the culture of giving in affluent countries.
Given the potentially extremely high number of individuals that could exist in the future, longtermists seek to decrease the probability that an existential catastrophe irreversibly ruins it.
[88] Existential risks have such huge impacts that achieving a very small change in such a risk—say a 0.0001-percent reduction—"might be worth more than saving a billion people today", reported Gideon Lewis-Kraus in 2022, but he added that nobody in the EA community openly endorses such an extreme conclusion.
On the non-profit side, for example, Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster conducted randomized controlled trials in Kenya to find out the best way to improve students' test scores.
They tried new textbooks and flip charts, as well as smaller class sizes, but found that the only intervention that raised school attendance was treating intestinal worms in children.
[110] While much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, more systematic social, economic, and political reforms have also attracted attention.
[113] Srinivasan said, "Effective altruism has so far been a rather homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad church.
[115] The Ethiopian-American AI scientist Timnit Gebru has condemned effective altruists "for acting as though their concerns are above structural issues as racism and colonialism", as Gideon Lewis-Kraus summarized her views in 2022.
[5] Philosophers such as Susan Dwyer, Joshua Stein, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have criticized effective altruism for furthering the disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals in domains that should be the responsibility of democratic governments and organizations.
[126] Timnit Gebru claimed that effective altruism has acted to overrule any other concerns regarding AI ethics (e.g. deepfake porn, algorithmic bias), in the name of either preventing or controlling artificial general intelligence.
[129][134] Some journalists asked whether the effective altruist movement was complicit in FTX's collapse, because it was convenient for leaders to overlook specific warnings about Bankman-Fried's behavior or questionable ethics at the trading firm Alameda.
[124][135] Fortune's crypto editor Jeff John Roberts said that "Bankman-Fried and his cronies professed devotion to 'EA,' but all their high-minded words turned out to be flimflam to justify robbing people".
[132][137] Philosopher Leif Wenar argued that Bankman-Fried's conduct typified much of the movement by focusing on positive impacts and expected value without adequately weighing risk and harm from philanthropy.
He argued that the FTX case is not separable, as some in the EA community maintained, from the assumptions and reasoning that molded effective altruism as a philosophy in the first place and that Wenar considered to be simplistic.
[138] The accusers argued that the majority male demographic and the polyamorous subculture combined to create an environment where sexual misconduct was tolerated, excused or rationalized away.
[138] The organization also argued that it is challenging to discern to what extent sexual misconduct issues were specific to the effective altruism community or reflective of broader societal misogyny.