Effective Altruism is Silicon Valley techbro Ayn Rand libertarianism wrapped up with in a pretty package, hiding truly noxious ideas like eugenics. They propose helping the world by donating money. But only to very specific things. Absolutely, let’s save the drowning child in a pool (their favorite example) and feed the starving. But they never inquire why the girl was drowning or why the hungry need food. Because that would entail funding social justice causes and asking who benefits from people starving. And EA proponents are so not about that. Instead, it’s about funding tech-related projects so they can presumably tell the rest of us what to do. For our own good, of course.
“They may work on the prioritization of scientific projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.
WikipedIa
They say to make as much money as you can at whatever endeavor including crime, then donate to the causes. Join me in being surprised that their poster child for this is Sam Bankman-Fried, recently convicted cryptocurrrency felon. Who didn’t actually give away much money. Imagine that.
It gets worse, much worse. Inherent in Effective Altruism is transhumanism, longtermism, racism, and eugenics. We can become more than human, sometime in the future, they say. But to do that we need to create the master race and rid ourselves of the imperfect (and of course from political dissent too.) Longtermism is particularly noxious as it posits we must consider the welfare of those in the future over humans now. You can see where this is going, right?
My first article for The Dig claimed that the ideology of longtermism is in important respects another iteration of the “eternal return of eugenics.” Not only can one trace its genealogy back to the 20th-century eugenics tradition, but the longtermist movement has significant connections with people who’ve defended, or expressed, views that are racist, xenophobic, ableist and classist. Indeed, my point of departure was an email from 1996 that I’d come across in which Nick Bostrom, the Father of Longtermism, wrote that “Blacks are more stupid than whites,” and then used the N-word. He subsequently “apologized” for this email without retracting his claim that certain racial groups might be less “intelligent” than others for genetic reasons.
Truthdig
These philosophies are embedded in Silicon Valley culture. And poisonous to democracy, because at heart they want a world run by them and their technology. Democracy is irrelevant to them.