The Pragmatists

Effective Altruism

modern movement · Modern Western · c. 2009 · Oxford, England

If you want to help people, don't help emotionally -- help mathematically. Your money and time are finite, so to help the world maximally you must optimize: literal spreadsheets ranking how many lives malaria nets or vitamin A supplementation or AI-safety funding will save.

Who holds the steering wheel?

A data-science way of applying philosophy that has moved billions of dollars into global health, AI safety and factory-farming reform. The standing counterargument: humans live by stories, relationships and communities, which can't be quantified -- how will you measure glory or greatness?

Agency+50 est.

Estimated from its tier position. Score +50.

Scorecard · eight factors

Agency: +50 est.
Flexibility: 55
Science fit: 95
Pragmatism: 90
Accessibility: 75
Practice load: 45
Community: 60
Wellbeing evidence: 40

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Core idea

The framework

The Cause-Picking Filter

radial

The five tests effective altruism runs any cause through before it gets your money or your career.

1
Do the most good — Same resources, wildly different results. Which cause you pick dominates everything.
2
Scale — How many are affected, how badly, and for how long?
3
Tractability — If you doubled the money going in, would the problem actually move?
4
Neglectedness — How many people are already on it? Crowded fields leave little room at the margin.
5
Counterfactual — Would this have happened without you? Only the difference you made counts.
6
Personal fit — The best cause you will quit is worth less than the second-best you sustain.

EA's real claim is not that you should give more, but that where you give matters far more than that you gave.

Vocabulary

Key concepts

optimization of compassionquantified givingcause prioritizationglobal healthAI safety

Where it came from

Origins

Peter Singer

1972 onward

Australian philosopher whose essay on famine and affluence, with its drowning-child thought experiment, set the moral premise the whole movement runs on: distance does not reduce obligation.

Toby Ord

2009

Oxford philosopher who founded Giving What We Can, publicly capped his own income and gave the rest away. He turned Singer's argument into a mechanism people could actually join.

William MacAskill

2011 onward

Co-founded Giving What We Can with Ord, then 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He became the movement's public face, and after FTX its lightning rod.

Famine, Affluence, and Morality 1972
Singer's essay arguing that if you can prevent something very bad at small cost to yourself you are obliged to, regardless of distance. Everything downstream is an attempt to act on this consistently.
Doing Good Better 2015
MacAskill's popular statement of the method: cost-effectiveness, counterfactuals, and the finding that interventions differ in impact by factors of a hundred rather than a few percent.
The Precipice 2020
Ord's case that risks capable of ending humanity's future are radically underfunded relative to their stakes. This is the book that turned EA toward longtermism and AI safety.

In the long story

Milestones

399 BCETrial of SocratesSocrates is tried and executed for impiety and introducing a personal daimonion over the civic gods — philosophy colliding with state religion.
c. 341–270 BCEEpicurean critique of superstitionEpicurus teaches that the gods do not intervene in human affairs, aiming to dispel fear-driven superstition through materialist atomism; Lucretius later carries the argument to Rome.
1624 CEHerbert of Cherbury's De VeritateFoundational deist treatise deriving religion from reason and five innate 'common notions', rejecting miracles and revelation as unnecessary.
1618–1648 CEThirty Years' War and WestphaliaEurope's most destructive religious war kills 20–40% of Germany's population; the Peace of Westphalia (1648) extends toleration to Calvinism and subordinates religion to state sovereignty.
1670 CESpinoza's TractatusSpinoza pioneers biblical criticism, treating scripture as a historical human document and advocating separation of philosophy from theology.
1687 CENewton's PrincipiaThe clockwork universe of immutable mathematical law becomes the scientific backdrop for deism's non-interventionist creator.
1689 CELocke's Letter Concerning TolerationLocke argues faith cannot be coerced and the state should be neutral among sects — a foundation of religious liberty.
1696–1730 CEDeist classicsToland's 'Christianity Not Mysterious' (1696) and Tindal's 'Christianity as Old as the Creation' (1730) argue reason suffices for religion; Voltaire popularizes the critique across Europe.
1748 CEHume against miraclesHume's Enquiry argues testimony for miracles always fails against uniform experience; his posthumous Dialogues (1779) dismantle the design argument.
1770 CEd'Holbach's System of NatureCalled the first positive, unambiguous statement of atheism in the West.

See the full timeline →

Try it

Practices

The 1% start

monthly · 5m

Set up an automatic monthly transfer to a top-rated charity at a percentage you will not resent - one percent is fine. Raise it once a year on a fixed date. Automation beats resolve.

Giving What We Can's trial pledge, the lower rung below its 10% lifetime pledge

Cost-per-outcome check

as-needed · 10m

Before any donation above a threshold you set, spend ten minutes finding an evaluator's estimate of what one unit of good costs at that organisation. If no such estimate exists anywhere, that is itself information.

GiveWell's core method, published spreadsheets and all

Red-team your cause

monthly · 30m

Once a month, write the strongest available case against the cause you fund. Go looking for the critics rather than the defenders. If your reasons survive, continue; if they do not, move the money.

EA's criticism contests and the post-FTX push to make internal dissent cheaper

Career hour

weekly · 60m

Spend one hour a week on the biggest lever you have, which is what you do with your working life rather than what you donate. Read a problem profile, message someone doing the work, apply for one thing.

80,000 Hours, named for the number of hours in a typical career

Get it wrong less

Common misconceptions

MythEffective altruism is about earning as much as possible so you can donate it.

Actually'Earning to give' was one early suggestion, and 80,000 Hours has publicly downgraded it since. Its current career advice pushes most people toward direct work on neglected problems, and most people involved simply give a fixed share of an ordinary income.

MythEA was discredited by the FTX collapse.

ActuallySam Bankman-Fried was the movement's biggest funder and his fraud did genuine damage: grants clawed back, organisations restructured, and a hard internal argument about whether 'maximise expected good' can license rule-breaking. The charity evaluation work continued and is independently checkable, but the reputational hit was earned rather than imagined.

Learn it

A short course

Care, with a spreadsheet open.

Module 1
The drowning child
Why physical distance carries no moral weight in Singer's argument, and where the argument genuinely strains.
Do: Write your strongest honest objection to it, then try to answer your own objection.
Module 2
Cost-effectiveness
Why the best interventions beat the average ones by roughly a hundred times, not ten percent.
Do: Compare a top-rated charity's cost per outcome against something you already donate to.
Module 3
Cause prioritisation
How scale, tractability and neglectedness combine to rank problems rather than causes you happen to like.
Do: Score three causes you care about on all three dimensions and see what happens to the ranking.
Module 4
Your career is the bigger lever
That roughly eighty thousand working hours dwarf almost anyone's lifetime donations.
Do: Read three of 80,000 Hours' problem profiles and list roles you could plausibly do.
Module 5
Where the method breaks
The honest failure modes: measurable causes crowding out unmeasurable ones, expected value licensing recklessness, and what FTX exposed.
Do: Write down the rule you would not break for any amount of expected good, and why.

Argue with it

Would you answer like they would?

A colleague is running a marathon for a cancer charity and asks you to sponsor him. You know the money would go further elsewhere.

You can fund four hundred cataract surgeries, or a research post working on a risk that may never materialise.

You are offered triple your salary at a firm you think does mild harm. You would give most of the extra away.

Alive today

Vitality & community

living · trend stable

small but leveraged: ~10K highly engaged members and ~9K+ Giving What We Can 10% pledgers steering billions in philanthropy

Oxford and the Bay Area, EA Global conferences, 80,000 Hours, university groups worldwide -- rebuilding reputation post-FTX while its AI-safety wing goes mainstream.

Where to join

GiveWell orgThe charity evaluator, which publishes its full cost-effectiveness models and a standing page of its own mistakes. Worth reading even if you never join anything.
Giving What We Can orgRuns the 10% lifetime pledge, now with over ten thousand pledgers, plus a lower-commitment trial pledge for people testing the water.
80,000 Hours orgFree career research, problem profiles and one-to-one advising, aimed at what you do rather than what you give.
EA Global and EAGx conferences eventSeveral a year across continents. The EAGx regional events are deliberately beginner-friendly and often subsidised for students.

Giving season November-December
The movement's closest thing to a festival: annual donations are made, funds allocate their pots, and everyone argues in public about where the money should go.
EA Global spring and autumn
The main gatherings, usually in the Bay Area and London, where the career advising and funding conversations actually happen face to face.

The movement's biggest funder committed one of the largest frauds in history while reasoning fluently in its language. Was that a bug in the person, or a bug in 'maximise expected good'?

In the world

Faces & culture

Peter Singer · William MacAskill · Toby Ord · Dustin Moskovitz (chief funder)

The FTX collapse made EA front-page news (Michael Lewis's Going Infinite); The Good Place runs on the same trolley-problem moral math.

A programmer takes the 10% pledge and redirects her giving from the local charity gala to malaria nets -- accepting the blunt slogan that helping mathematically beats helping emotionally, at the price of the warm glow.