The New York Post Releases the Most Idiotic Hitpiece I Have Ever Read

Nearly every sentence is wrong, rarely in just one way

Effective altruism is a social movement about doing good effectively. It’s been amazingly successful: saving about 300,000 lives, majorly mitigating existential risks, and improving conditions for billions of animals. Recently, the New York Post released a truly deranged hitpiece on EA, with such a staggering number of bizarre misstatements and errors that it read like parody. I genuinely do not know whether the piece was more extravagant in its misrepresentations than Amos Wollen’s parody of anti-EA hitpieces. Many of the central claims would not survive one Google search.

Start with the title: Cult-like Effective Altruism spreading its message among the influential, with 80 journalists embedded at top news orgs. The article never substantiates the claim that EA is cult-like. Whether it’s true that there are 80 EA journalists depends a bit on how you count things, but if so, so what? There are also, I’m told, some journalists who are vegetarians, others who are Mormon, and still others who are Sikh: this is rarely seen as a cause for alarm.

The first sentence of the article reads, “A progressive cult-like movement known as Effective Altruism (EA) has embedded over 80 journalists in mainstream newsrooms to spread its ‘philosophy,’ a Post investigation can reveal.” EA has no direct political affiliation. It is a social movement about doing good effectively. Most EAs are moderate liberals, not progressives, though you can be an EA no matter what you think about politics. Many EAs are conservative.

Sentence two reads “The billionaire-backed movement aims to solve the world’s problems, but believes government welfare and foreign aid is inefficient and easily corrupted and that unchecked AI will destroy us all.” This is an impressive amount of wrongness packed into one sentence. It is true that EA is backed by billionaires. So are most movements: conservatism, environmentalism, Islam. That there is at least one billionaire, somewhere on Earth, who is a part of a social movement doesn’t tell us anything.

It is false that EA believes that welfare and foreign aid are inefficient. In fact, EAs are just about the group most supportive of foreign aid on the planet. The journalists most frantically sounding the alarm on the USAID cuts were largely EAs. EAs are also a bit more supportive of welfare programs than most people, as they’re largely moderate liberals. But EA, the movement, has no official position on the matter. So this statement is about as ridiculous as saying “the billionaire-backed Islam movement aims to solve the world’s biggest problems, but believes that pork farming is great and the top marginal tax rate should be 27%.”

EA also does not “believe” that unchecked AI will destroy us all. Individuals have beliefs, not groups. The more common belief among EAs is that AI poses serious existential risks. The two founders of EA—Will MacAskill and Toby Ord—think odds AI causes extinction are around 2% and around 10% respectively.

I am now five hundred words in, and I’ve only covered the misstatements in the first two sentences.

New York Times superstar columnist Ezra Klein has maintained deep, longstanding ties to EA and its billionaires, and even uses his widely read NYT column to solicit donations to the cult.

Ezra Klein “soliciting donations to the cult,” involves writing pieces that suggest people give to GiveWell top charities. These charities provide Vitamin A supplements to poor children and put up anti-malarial bednets. I would think that if one claims that such a thing is “solicit[ing] donations to a cult,” they’d give, you know, some semblance of a reason to think that. Apparently not.

Their beliefs can be summed up as:

Earn to give: Send 10-50% of your earnings to philanthropic causes.

That is not what earn to give means. Earning to give is the idea that one way to make a big impact is by making a lot of money and then giving a lot away. If you make $300,000 per year, and give away $200,000, then you’ll save 40 lives per year. The claim that people should give away a big portion of their wealth is distinct, and applies even to those who don’t earn to give.

Global scope: Prioritize causes like climate change, global health, poverty, pandemics.

What “global scope” means is that one shouldn’t only focus on problems in their own country. They should instead focus on where they can do the most good. Also, EAs generally don’t focus that much on stopping climate change because it isn’t super effective. Our left-wing critics complain about this, in fact.

Impartiality: Everyone’s well-being matters equally, with no one person’s happiness or health above another’s.

EA does not require a commitment to full impartiality. To think that it’s good to give to effective charities, you don’t have to think the welfare of a stranger matters exactly as much as the welfare of your Mom.

Calculated reasoning: Make philanthropic decisions based on cold hard data and algorithms, not emotion. Money goes to what data says will save the most lives.

For the first time in the article, we have reached a sentence that isn’t a total misstatement. Now, there are a few nits to pick. I don’t quite know what the hell they’re saying about algorithms. Similarly, EAs think that saving lives isn’t the only worthwhile thing—improving lives is good too. And often a cause is valuable in light of our evidence, even if we don’t have empirical evidence to support it. It’s hard to get empirical evidence about the value of, say, efforts to reduce nuclear risk.

Put more simply, the core of EA is that the billionaires who fund it — notably Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn — know best, and better than any government.

This is not remotely even close to the core of EA. The core of EA is that we should make doing good effectively a big part of our lives.

“Effective Altruists want to be Superman saving the world. They often take dangerous shortcuts to solving very hard problems. And their fatal flaw is their egoism,” Stanford University philosophy professor Leif Wenar told The Post.

Oh no, Leif Wenar thinks we’re not doing a good job. How will I recover?

To spread their message the group has the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism — funded in part by EA foundations — which pays full salaries of journalists placed inside such newsrooms as Time, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and The Guardian, NBC News and The Verge.

Wow, what a terrifying conspiracy. Some EAs think AI is a big deal, so they fund journalists who report on important AI issues. Glad the New York Post brought to light this already public information, that you can find freely on the internet.

Nowadays, EAs focus on “longtermism”, an avant-garde philosophy of the nouveau riche invented by Elon Musk which says that since there will be so many people in the future, we should focus on them at the expense of everything else, including supporting open and independent journalism.

Actually, this line wasn’t from the New York Post article, but from Amos Wollen’s parody. You noticed, right?

The next section of the article is mostly spent telling readers that there are a lot of EAs, some of them fund things, and some write for newspaper. This is true. Next:

Critics charged to The Post that EA is a calculating, smug nerd clique that prioritizes numbers over lives while protecting the power of those with the fattest wallets.

Lmao.

The “numbers,” EA prioritizes are numbers of lives saved and benefitted. It’s not like EAs are carrying out interventions to improve the welfare of the number 7. So the claim—from a very serious journalistic outlet, that we are to take very seriously—is that if you use empirical evidence to try to save as many lives as possible, you are prioritizing numbers over lives. This is a bit like charging that in the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane was prioritizing numbers over baseball victories.

From Richard Yetter Chappell.

“Effective Altruism is really an extended version of globalism. It takes away building relationships with your neighbor, that impulse to give locally that is really important to humans flourishing,” Rebecca Richards, senior director at charity org Philanthropy Roundtable, told The Post.

It is true that EAs generally suggest you give overseas. That is because money goes much farther overseas. You can save lives for just a few thousand dollars. Maybe if you do that you will feel slightly less connected with your neighbors, but there will also be many fewer people dead, which seems like an improvement. Also, in my experience, EAs are unusually caring, decent, and in touch with the flourishing of those around them.

“I think the real end of philanthropy is not just about survival, but how do you live a good life?” she added.

Wow, deep. Of course, this is easy to say if you are not one of the people currently dying.

University of Chicago philosophy professor Brian Leiter sums up the view of himself and others who see it as a tax dodging scheme to siphon welfare resources from the state, which means some of its harshest detractors hail from the far left.

A tax dodging scheme? What? The only way that EA affects taxes is by the standard write-off for charitable donations. Did Leiter, whose writing I often enjoy, hit his head before writing this?

“Tech bros eat this up,” Leiter told The Post. “[With EA] there’s no talk about higher taxes, redistribution to a more progressive income tax, anti-trust investigations or more regulation of their businesses. That’s why they love it.”

The overwhelming majority of tech people aren’t EAs. It is false that EAs never talk about regulations. EAs mostly have normal political views. Now, EA is not an explicitly political movement, so generally EA groups won’t specifically focus on politics. But this is like complaining that Hindu temples and dance studios don’t talk enough about a progressive income tax.

The article next talks about how Sam Bankman Fried was a big EA and did lots of fraud. This is true, but the fact that someone does bad things for a cause doesn’t discredit the cause. A bunch of Christians have burned heretics—this doesn’t disprove Christianity.

The movement was founded by philosopher Peter Singer in the 70s and popularized by University of Oxford philosopher William MacAskill in the 00s.

That is false. It was founded in the 2000s by Ord and MacAskill, not just MacAskill. Singer had some of the key ideas for the movement, but he wasn’t involved directly in its creation. So this statement is both wrong about who founded the movement and gets when the movement was founded off by thirty years. I thus repudiate this cult-like article written by Barrack Obama, published by the New York Post, in 1995!

Effective Altruists are instructed to pursue careers to make as much money as possible — then commit to giving ten to 50 percent of their salaries to EA-approved causes and organizations.

Effective altruism is about trying to do good effectively. One easy way for most people to do that is by giving away some of their money to effective charities. Another way, along these lines, is by making extra money and giving it away. This is one route to impact, not some universal guide for how to be an EA.

EA offshoots proliferated in the wake of the Bankman-Fried scandal with names like “longtermism,” “progress studies” and the “Abundance movement.”

All of these things existed before the SBF scandal. Also, only Longtermism is an offshoot of EA. So of the three things claimed to be offshoots that proliferated in the wake of Bankman Fried, only one is an offshoot, and none proliferated in the wake of Bankman Fried.

Atheist blogger Sam Harris is among the high priests of EA operating in the podcast universe, pushing the cult’s AI doomerism and centralized, algorithmic do-gooder protocols.

Sam Harris is not a central EA figure (nor a “high priest”). He is a podcaster who has occasionally interviewed EAs, suggested that people give effectively, and pledges to give some of his money to effective charities.

Poster boy Klein raised eyebrows at the New York Times last year when he attended a secret retreat for Senate Democrats advising them on how EA can work for the embattled party. He reportedly gave lawmakers a private briefing shortly after the release of his bestselling book “Abundance,” which “challenges liberals to create a more dynamic and prosperous society by cutting regulations and embracing new technologies,” as Axios put it.

Wow, scary.

So the giant conspiracy that the article uncovered was that some EA groups fund journalists to write important things, EAs suggest that people give away their money to poor people overseas, EAs think you should give where you can have the highest impact instead of where you like best, and Sam Bankman Fried did serious fraud several years ago. Wow, really? I’m just hearing this for the first time.

I genuinely cannot believe such an idiotic article was published. Did the New York Post instruct all their writers to take a powerful dose of Ketamine, and then fire all their editorial staff? I admit it sounds farfetched, but I don’t know that we have a better theory for how this article made it into print.