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30 September 2026
One time in a conversation, I noted my connection with effective altruism, and my interlocutors, young, probably at least somewhat intellectual people, had a negative reaction.
Now, I read about recent "EA is a sex cult" language. Maybe EA is seen in a negative light for other reasons, as well. So I thought I would explain how it could be that I would have a basically positive view of EA, and what EA means to me. I will also discuss the rationalist community a little bit, though I have less connection to them.
One thing that EA does right is "show up to the conversations that matter". Many much more normal people don't do that. Futurism is an important conversation, and EA does show up to that conversation. I disagree with some EAs about futurism (perhaps the ones who stand out the most for having pungent beliefs). I try to "show up to the conversation" about the future in my own contradicting way. But I have to give them credit for caring about it, and (from my perspective) pioneering the categories in which I can have my response.
Their idea of "expanding the moral circle", and of personal responsibility for the overall state of the world (the Drowning Child Illustration) are also valuable. Some of their communication and epistemic norms are valuable.
You can read horror stories about EAs, and horror stories about evangelicals. I'm not sure I could belong to either group. I tried to be part of EA to some extent online (as an outsider, to be fair) and it just didn't happen. I grew up in what could be called a "moderate evangelical" setting (one which wasn't very strongly into evangelism). The more intensely evangelism-oriented evangelicals (what I automatically think of when I hear the word "evangelical") I think would be too much for me. My religion separates me both from them and EA. However, I have a basically positive view of both EA and evangelicalism. I think of them as being soldiers, sacrificing themselves, doing wrong, being misguided, but caring about what matters most.
When I was in college, I was part of a campus fellowship, as well as attending a church. The church I went to was not affiliated with the fellowship. The fellowship wanted to draw people in to deeper, more intense affiliation with it. They didn't push it, but their structure was designed to do that. I didn't go in deeper because I didn't want to attend the church affiliated with the fellowship, nor go on the retreats that would conflict with attendance at my church. I found out after I graduated that the fellowship was spiritually and/or emotionally abusive. But I never saw that, because I never went in to "the inner circle" of it.
My experience with EA has been similar. I see them as having three expressions: ideology, public (generally online) spaces, private and/or offline interactions. I only have significant experience with the first two. The first, the ideology, I have written about before and I think is a valuable thing to consider, and sometimes to adopt. I have my issues with the second, public EA, but it's nothing scandalous, just a sense that I was not being paid attention to for whatever reason, maybe because my writing style was not like theirs, I was too religious, too philosophical. Upvote based platforms like the EA Forum are such that no one decides "I will reject this piece" (unless they downvote, which I don't remember happening to me), they just fail to pay attention to it, and then it is not recommended for other people to read, the way upvoted material is. The community as a whole rejects ideas without any one person taking responsibility for a move of rejection. A movement that was optimizing for considering unusual views might not use an upvote-based platform, so that the unusual things could really get platformed. But I think EA had an important mission to pursue, and didn't have time to consider things outside its interests, even though being open-minded is supposed to be part of its mission. So they went with an upvote-based platform.
(What would the opposite of an upvote-based platform be? Maybe being stuck in a small group, like a local meetup group, or some replication of that online. Over time, you have to deal with the people who are unlike you, and you might slowly be influenced by them.)
Like the fellowship I was in in college, I never saw the weirder, darker things in EA, which seem to happen in person and not online, and with those who are more deeply enmeshed in the social scene. If I recommend EA, I'm mostly recommending the ideology, or at least some of it, and to some extent being on the Forum, because that's basically all I have experienced.
I mentioned the rationalists above. I tried both the Sequences and LessWrong but never could connect with them. Not for me. However, I did read Slate Star Codex from sometime in 2016 until 2020 when it ended, as well as a number of older posts, and I did keep up with Astral Codex Ten until recently (SSC and ACX being Scott Alexander's two blogs). I got at least a bit of rationalist influence through that. I attended a Slate Star Codex meetup group for a few years before the pandemic. (There was an EA there, but most discussion was either SSC-related or general intellectual discussion.)
(I have also had a bit of interaction with post-rationalists/TPOT, but didn't go into it much, didn't find it to be for me.)
I was significantly affected by hearing about the Drowning Child Illustration at a talk given in 2013. I have spent about a decade somewhere in the fandom of Scott Alexander, a time in which I developed my own writing. I feel myself moving away from that world. Maybe it was more a school than anything else. I don't have any rationalist or EA friends (though at least some affiliation with Christians who read Scott Alexander).
Optimistically, EAs will become MSLians. The cultures are similar. (And similarly with evangelicals.) However, I can see that both EAs and evangelicals are on important missions, and could easily view what I have to say with suspicion, as some kind of scam to veer them off their missions. Secular EAs may have a bias against religion, which they might argue is justified from how bad apologetics have always been. They would rather prevent billions of future beings from suffering, or something they can be more sure of like that. Christian EAs might not approach religion in as evangelical (in the sense of salvation-maximizing) a way as I would (otherwise they wouldn't be getting so involved with secular well-being within the EA movement, would join an evangelical organization instead), although I could see some of them maybe liking MSL/VMH. If I see myself as a missionary, it may be as much that I transmit some EA influence to non-EAs, as that I bring theistic belief to EAs.