My lover, effective altruism

Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series!

On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me.

At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the definition made itself known: “yeah, it’s just a bunch of wankers who pretend to have social impact, but all they do is go to conferences and raise money and they’ve never had any impact at all.”

I have never had any chill. I did not develop it in that moment. If anyone is going to say EA is just a bunch of wankers, it’s going to be me, newbie.

“That’s interesting, Ben, but I think it’s a serious misconception — you might not be aware that EA has literally raised billions of dollars for global health charities, which very likely saved hundreds of thousands of children’s lives (do you hate children, Ben?) They have literally stopped millions of hens being tortured in cages too small for them to ever stretch their wings; they literally called it on AI and pandemics (do you LIKE pandemics…)”

At three literally-s, my husband usually intervenes. It’s a risky move for him. I was glad he did.

It gave me a moment to notice my blood was pumping faster than was reasonable for someone providing context on the track record of a movement. It let me wonder why, when I felt cornered, I’d reached for bednets and caged hens, when I think EA’s biggest impacts will be on AI and culture.

It made me realise that the words I was saying had a c. zero per cent chance of resulting in the thing I wanted — which was to transmit with all of my cells what it felt like to be 24; unsure if you were insane or the world was; and meet your people at a time your people were up to some of the craziest shit you’d ever seen.

I didn’t get a chance to tell Ben. (OK, I didn’t want to.) I want to tell you.

Long before we met

I was a sensitive child, and no one in my life ever made any fucking sense.

I was sensitive in the sense that everything horrified me.

History class disturbed me (what do you mean people burned to death under rubble in their thousands and we called it “the Blitz” and now we should go and eat lunch??)

TV disturbed me (what do you mean the wolf is going to eat that rabbit. We have a rabbit! And now we should go and eat dinner??)

No one ever making any sense disturbed me.

“How come I was allowed to go to Hannah’s last week but not now?” (because I said so)

“How come I have to eat this nut roast that I hate, just because I want to be vegetarian?” (because people are starving)

“How am I supposed to sleep when there are nuclear bombs?” (don’t be silly)

Right before we met

I got older, and was still sensitive, and still no one made any sense.

I wanted to find a place for my sensitivity. I applied for five universities with a screed on the nature of suffering, and the ways in which art shows us we are not alone in it (I’d share an excerpt but I’d prefer to actually die).

Four instant rejections, and I spent three years at Oxford reading everything I could from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. It seemed there were a lot of other people who were sensitive, but they were mostly dead or my tutors. It seemed there were a lot of other people who wanted things to make sense, but they were mostly not doing a degree in poems.

I then tried finding a job that made sense. I worked at an international non-profit that was going to end hunger. My job, as an expensive proto-Claude, was to sit in on board meetings and write the minutes. Board members would say egregious things like, “well, the Bangladesh programs never really existed, per se”, and then turn to me and say don’t write that down. Hmmmm.

I then got a job working with an organisation at the United Nations Human Rights Council. They work on the rights of women and girls in the Middle East. JACKPOT, I thought. FINALLY, I thought. OH NO, I thought, moments later, when I realised that I was the “cute young woman” hire, and not the “do things” hire (a position that was not being hired for).

Our job was to take women from the Middle East and educate them on human rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Inconveniently, none of the women we brought over from the Gulf States had the slightest interest in learning about human rights, and even if they had, it was very unclear what this would mean in their lives of luxury shopping and spoiling their children (both of which they were very happy with). As was entirely within their (human) rights, they wanted to go to Hermès and then go home. I wrote another screed — truly the genre of my heart — and left.

2014

Imagine all of this. Then imagine getting hit in the face with a GiveWell spreadsheet.

I’ve never been into BDSM, but I imagine the hit is similar. I mean, look at it:

For those who can’t make sense of this (fair), it is the 2025 version of a spreadsheet I opened around a decade ago. It is a line-by-line estimate of how many lives a dollar saves when you spend it on malaria bednets — with every assumption and uncertainty visible.

Imagine writing notes for a board that’s telling you not to, until suddenly someone sends you this spreadsheet with an explanation of why they prioritised this problem, and why they chose this solution (my heart!)

Imagine you’re used to fundraising pitches that go “with $100 you can build a university”, and suddenly people are telling donors about issues with their 90% confidence intervals (and that like, their whole moral theory might be wrong so this might be a waste of money or grave moral atrocity).

Imagine you’ve always been told you’re overthinking in a weird way, and suddenly you’re reading blogs about suffering in fundamental physics, or at least thinking about building totems to aliens.

Imagine you’ve always been the smartest nerd in class, and suddenly you can yap with the youngest philosophy professor of all time (and all the even smarter people he continually berates himself for “not being as smart as”).

Imagine you’ve been a lawyer and seen people sell out their spouses for $5,000, and suddenly you have friends who double their investment banker salary at 20-something, donate all the money to charity, and take a c. one hundred per cent pay cut to work at a nonprofit.

Imagine your entire life you’ve felt alone and crazy with questions such as wtf wolves and wtfffff nuclear bombs, and suddenly you’re surrounded with people asking wtf alongside you (as well as wtf shall we do about it!)

And imagine that — alongside all of this — you are falling in love with another nerd who won’t stop sending you love letters, blogs about building totems to aliens, and (for reasons that are no longer clear to me) taxing thought experiments about dungeons and boxes.

Imagine it is the first time you fall in love, but you’re falling in love with the first community to ever make sense to you, and the people within it are trying hard to do good and be honest, and the love is mutual, and it’s the most intense thing you’ve ever felt.

It was a time.

We know what happens to the times, of course.

But that is another piece.

This was a piece about falling in love. Part three will be about this shit you do when you’ve fallen.

Part 1 here, Part 3 coming soon! (If you are reading this on the EA Forum, please subscribe to my Substack — I would like to move from screaming into the void to screaming at strangers online!)