# Methinks effective altruism has been tarred with a wide brush **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 22, 2024, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/methinks-effective-altruism-has-been-tarred-with-a-wide-brush/1000606 "2024-04-22T05:28:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 37
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2024, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/methinks-effective-altruism-has-been-tarred-with-a-wide-brush/1000606/37 "2024-05-01T03:51:17Z")
I made my views on EA clear in the SBF thread > [@Sam Bankman convicted 2023-11-02 (was living with parents, then jail). Is BTC and cryptocurrency busted too?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sam-bankman-convicted-2023-11-02-was-living-with-parents-then-jail-is-btc-and-cryptocurrency-busted-too/977019/159): > > No, that was always the illusion put on to make the entire movement seem non-threatening to outsiders. EA started from the rationalist community as a way to justify why a small group of grifters deserved money to help save us from our future AI overlords. They put a bunch of mumbo jumbo together and pulled together a bunch of efforts they weren’t really involved in and called it EA as a way to add a thin coat of paint to essentially Pascal’s Wager and it worked because it turns out that the rat… And this twitter thread has made it even more explicit with damning quotes from many of the early top figures in EA: > > **[Effective Altruism’s Bait-and-Switch: From Global Poverty to AI Doomerism](https://www.aipanic.news/p/effective-altruisms-bait-and-switch)** > > Repost from Techdirt. The Effective Altruism movement Effective Altruism (EA) is typically explained as a philosophy that encourages individuals to do the “most good” with their resources (money, skills). Its “effective giving” aspect was marketed as... I challenge anyone to read the quotes and still have any illusions about what EA actually is vs what you wish it could be from the deliberate PR campaign. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/methinks-effective-altruism-has-been-tarred-with-a-wide-brush/1000606)._