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I got interested in effective altruism back before it was called effective altruism, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. I joined the Effective Altruism Forum to try to figure out where effective altruism could fit into my life these days and what it means to me. You can read my latest thoughts on effective altruism here.
I write on Substack, and used to write on Medium.
Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
The context for what I'm discussing is explained in two Reflective Altruism posts: part 1 here and part 2 here.
Warning: This is a polemic that uses harsh language. I still completely, sincerely mean everything I say here and I consciously endorse it.[1]
It has never stopped shocking and disgusting me that the EA Forum is a place where someone can write a post arguing that Black Africans need Western-funded programs to edit their genomes to increase their intelligence in order to overcome global poverty and can cite overtly racist and white supremacist sources to support this argument (even a source with significant connections to the 1930s and 1940s Nazi Party in Germany and the American Nazi Party, a neo-Nazi party) and that post can receive a significant amount of approval and defense from people in EA, even after the thin disguise over top of the racism is removed by perceptive readers. That is such a bonkers thing and such a morally repugnant thing, I keep struggling to find words to express my exasperation and disbelief. Effective altruism as a movement probably deserves to fail for that, if it can't correct it.[2]
My loose, general impression is that people who got involved in EA because of global poverty and animal welfare tend to be broadly liberal or centre-left and tend to be at least sympathetic toward arguments about social justice and anti-racism. Conversely, my impression of LessWrong and the online/Bay Area rationalist community is that they don't like social justice, anti-racism, or socially/culturally progressive views. One of the most bewildering things I ever read on LessWrong was one of the site admins (an employee of Lightcone Infrastructure) arguing that closeted gay people probably tend to have low moral integrity because being closeted is a form of deception. I mean, what?! This is the "rationalist" community?? What are you talking about?! As I recall based on votes, a majority of forum users who voted on the comment agreed.[3]
Overall, LessWrong users seem broadly sympathetic to racist arguments and views.[4] Same for sexist or anti-feminist views, and extremely so for anti-LGBT (especially anti-trans) views. Personally, I find it to be the most unpleasant website I've spent more than ten hours reading. When I think of LessWrong, I picture a dark, dingy corner of a house. I truly find it to be awful.
The more I've thought about it, the more truth I find in the blogger Ozy Brennan's interpretation of the LessWrong and the rationalist community through the concept of the "cultic milieu" and a comparison to new religious movements (not cults in the more usual sense connoting high-control groups). Ozy Brennan self-identifies as a rationalist and is active in the community, which makes this analysis far more believable than if it came from an outsider. The way I'd interpret Ozy's blog post, which Ozy may not agree with, is that rationalists are in some sense fundamentally devoted to being incorrect, since they're fundamentally devoted to being against consensus or majority views on many major topics — regardless of whether those views are correct or incorrect — and inevitably that will lead to having a lot of incorrect views.
I see very loose, very limited analogies between LessWrong and online communities devoted discussing conspiracy theories like QAnon or to online incel communities. Conspiracy theories because LessWrong has a suspicious, distrustful, at least somewhat paranoid or hypervigilant view on people and the world, this impulse to turn over rocks to find where the bad stuff is. Also, there's the impulse to connect too much. To subsume too much under one theory or worldview. And too much reliance on one's own fringe community to explain the world and interpret everything. Both, in a sense, are communities built around esoteric knowledge. And, indeed, I've seen some typical sort of conspiracy theory-seeming stuff on LessWrong related to American intelligence agencies and so on.
Incel communities because the atmosphere of LessWrong feels rather bitter, resentful, angry, unhappy, isolated, desperate, arrogant, and hateful, and in its own way is also a sort of self-help or commiseration community for young men who feel left out of the normal social world. But rather than encouraging healthy, adaptive responses to that experience, instead both communities encourage anti-social behaviour, leaning into distorted thinking, resentment, and disdainful views of other people.
I just noticed that Ozy recently published a much longer article in Asterisk Magazine on the topic of actual high-control groups or high-demand groups with some connection to the rationalist community. It will take me a while to properly read the whole thing and to think about it. But at a glance, there are some aspects of the article that are relevant to what I'm discussing here, such as this quote:
And this quote:
And this one:
In principle, you could have the view that the typical or median person is benefitted by the Sequences or by LessWrong or the rationalist community, and it's just an unfortunate but uncommon side-effect for people to slip into cults or high-control groups. It sounds like that's what Ozy believes. My view is much harsher: by and large, the influence that LessWrong/the rationalist community has on people is bad, and people who take these ideas and this subculture to an extreme are just experiencing a more extreme version of the bad that happens to pretty much everyone who is influenced by these ideas and this subculture. (There might be truly minor exceptions to this, but I still see this as the overall trend.)
Obviously, there is now a lot of overlap between the EA Forum and LessWrong and between EA and the rationalist community. I think to the extent that LessWrong and the rationalist community have influenced EA, EA has become something much worse. It's become something repelling to me. I don't want any of this cult stuff. I don't want any of this racist stuff. Or conspiracy theory stuff. Or harmful self-help stuff for isolated young men. I'm happy to agree with the consensus view most of the time because I care about being correct much more than I care about being counter-consensus. I am extremely skeptical toward esoteric knowledge and I think it's virtually always either nonsense or prosaic stuff repackaged to look esoteric. I don't buy these promises of unlocking powerful secrets through obscure websites.
There was always a little bit of overlap between EA and the rationalist community, starting very early on, but it wasn't a ruinous amount. And it's not like EA didn't independently have its own problems before the rationalist community's influence increased a lot, but those problems seemed more manageable. The situation now feels like the rationalist community is unloading more and more of its cargo onto the boat that is EA, and EA is just sinking deeper and deeper into the water over time. I feel sour and queasy about this because EA was once something I loved and it's becoming increasingly laden with things I oppose in the strongest possible terms, like racism, interpersonal cruelty, and extremely irrational thinking patterns. How can people who were in EA because of global poverty and animal welfare, who had no previous affiliation with the rationalist community, stand this? Are they all gone already? Have they opted to recede from public arguments and just focus on their own particular niches? What gives?
And to the extent that the racism in EA is independently EA's problem and has nothing to do with the influence of the rationalist community (which obviously has to be more than nothing), then that is 100% EA's problem, but I can't imagine racism in EA could be satisfactorily addressed without significant conflict with and alienation of many people who overlap between the rationalist community and EA and who either endorse or strongly sympathize with racist views. (For example, in January 2023, when the Centre for Effective Altruism published a brief statement that affirmed the equality of Black people in response to the publication of a racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, the most upvoted comment was from a prominent rationalist that started, "I feel really quite bad about this post," and argued at length that universal human equality is not a tenet of effective altruism. This is unbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong. Independently, that person has said and done things that seem to indicate either support or sympathy for racist views, which makes me think it was probably not just a big misunderstanding.)[5] That's why the diversion from talking about racism on the EA Forum into discussing the rationalist community's influence on EA.
Racism is paradigmatically evil and there is no moral or rational justification for it. Don't lose sight of something so fundamental and clear. Don't let EA drown under the racism and all the other bad stuff people want to bring to it. (Hey, now EA is the drowning child! Talk about irony!)
Incidentally, LessWrong and the rationalist community are dead wrong about near-term AGI as well — specifically, the probability of AGI before January 1, 2033 is significantly less than 0.1% and the MIRI worldview on alignment is most likely either just generally wrong/misguided or at least not applicable to deep learning-based systems — and that poses its own big problem for EA to the extent that EA has been influenced to accept LessWrong/rationalists' views about near-term AGI. So, the influence of the rationalist community on EA has been damaging in multiple respects. (Although, again, EA bears responsibility for its part in all of it, both allowing the influence and for whatever portion of the mistake it would have made without that influence.)
About a day after posting this quick take, I changed the first sentence of this quick take from just italicized to a heading to make the links to the Reflective Altruism post more prominent and harder to miss. The sentence was always there.
Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:22 PM Eastern to add: If you don't know about the incident I'm referring to here, the context for what I'm discussing is explained in two Reflective Altruism posts: part 1 here and part 2 here. The links to these Reflective Altruism posts were always in the first sentence of this quick take, but I'm adding this footnote to make those links harder to miss.
Edited on October 25, 2025 at 10:52 PM Eastern to add: I purposely omitted a link to this comment because I didn't want to make this quick take a confrontation against the person who wrote it. But if you don't believe me and you want to see the comment for yourself, send me a private message and I'll send you the link.
Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:25 PM Eastern to add: This is extensively documented in a different Reflective Altruism post from the two I have already linked, which you can find here.
Edited on October 25, 2025 at 11:19 PM Eastern to add: I'm referring here to the Manifest 2024 conference, which was held at Lighthaven in Berkely, California, a venue owned by Lightcone Infrastructure, the same organization that owns and operates LessWrong. I'm also referring to the discussions that happened after the event. There have been many posts about this event on the EA Forum. One post I found interesting was from a pseudonymous self-described member of the rationalist community that was critical of some aspects of the event and of some aspects of the rationalist community. You can read that post here.
Edited on October 26, 2025 at 11:57 PM Eastern to add: See also the philosopher David Thorstad's post about Manifest 2024 on his blog Reflective Altruism. David's posts are nearly encyclopedic in their thoroughness and have an incredibly high information density.
Yep, it would be a lot of revenue, very fast!
In the older thread I linked to, a few people's rationale for forecasting that much revenue that fast seemed to be: just look at the graph! But you can look at literally thousands of graphs about companies' financial performance and note that their periods of fastest growth do not sustain indefinitely...
If there is a good rationale for thinking Anthropic will do $514 billion in 2027, whatever it is, it's not "just look at the graph".
If you want to know Anthropic's annualized revenue, the simplest way is just to take its most recent quarter's revenue and multiply by four. Q3 revenue is not disclosed in the S-1, but Reuters reported it at $16.8 billion. Times four that's $67.2 billion.
Something that could be useful as a guidepost is a) if Anthropic gives its own revenue estimates for 2027 and 2028 (e.g., Reuters reported in August that that Anthropic estimated $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028) and b) when Wall Street inevitably publishes its estimates. Anthropic and Wall Street know how to look at graphs but will not forecast $514 billion in revenue in 2027.
Another bet that may be of interest:
Anthropic just released its S-1 form, which contains the official financial information it must report to the SEC in order to go public. From the S-1, we now know that Anthropic's revenue grew more than 100x (specifically, 112x) from 2023 to 2025. Revenue was:
A few people in the EA community apparently believe this revenue growth rate will continue for the next several years at least. However, I am confident we won't see Anthropic bring in $514 billion in revenue in 2027, which is what extrapolation would imply.
Indeed, I'm confident that Anthropic won't hit half of what extrapolation would imply, which is $257 billion in 2027.
I'm willing to bet as much and would be delighted to wager $20 on it, to be donated to the charity of the winner's choice.
I also have an open offer for a more general AI bubble bet.
Since this is just a $20 bet for charity, it's purely symbolic and recreational.
If you want to avoid the money aspect altogether, you could just strongly commit to a prediction that by January 1, 2034, the nine aforementioned news outlets will not all report as fact (not opinion or editorial) that the AI bubble has popped.
I don't think betting makes sense at all if you're doing it for financial reasons. Bets are not legally binding. If you win and the other person decides not to pay up, you have no legal recourse. Similarly, if you lose and decide to pay up, you have no way of knowing if the other person would have paid up if they had lost.[1]
Part of the theory behind betting is that it's cognitively helpful because it encourages you to mentally focus much more intensely and carefully on your predictions. That might be true, but there are other considerations I haven't seen many people bring up:
For this bet, my thinking is just: betting is fun and this is a fun, small stunt I can use to make a point.
I couldn't get a firm answer on whether bets are technically illegal. Social betting is legal in the U.S., Canada, and the UK, but if the EA Forum turned into an unlicensed marketplace for bets, that would be illegal. Bets on the EA Forum are currently a lot more like social betting than a marketplace, but if there were a lot more bets, then the EA Forum would be a lot more like a betting marketplace. In any case, it's definitely not legally binding. ↩︎
It looks like Tesla has abandoned the idea of upgrading cars to HW5 and will stick with the current hardware, HW4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot_hardware#AI5_(Hardware_5)
(Incidentally, AI also still isn't writing 90% of code.)
Thanks for writing this. It is... strange... and disturbing... that there is any need at all for you to write such a post, but, anyway, it's good that you did and I appreciate that.
The commonsense answer is actually stricter than what you propose: Caroline Ellison (or anyone else convicted of crimes at FTX or Alameda) should probably never be employed by any EA organization, and certainly not in a financial role shortly after her release from prison, without doing anything to try to redeem herself or prove she can be trusted. Especially not since Austin Chen explicitly said the hire was a reward and thanks for money Manifold and Manifund got from FTX. Caroline Ellison should not be rewarded and thanked for her work involving FTX or Alameda.
I also doubt that any deal was arranged in advance, but since Austin said this was one of his motivations, that makes it a quid pro quo. If people are hung up on the definition of quid pro quo and whether it applies to this case, at least we can say that this is corrupt.
I particularly agree with this part:
It would be so easy for EA organizations and individual EA leaders to follow suit with the Centre of Effective Altruism, which has banned Manifund from its events, or Andy Masley, whose tweet you show vowing to boycott Manifund and Manifold. Indeed, the CEA and others could go further by also banning Austin Chen and Caroline Ellison as individuals.
The main purpose of this is not to look good but to do the right thing. Do you want the EA movement to be a place where there are no (or minimal) negative consequences for corruption? There's a lot people need to be able to disagree about or do differently but still tolerate each other and try to get along. But, come on, if this isn't an ethical red line, what is?
I can empathize that people are grappling with ethical principles that are each deeply held yet seem to oppose one another. For instance:
Or:
Or:
The push and pull of these principles can be confusing. In many cases, it is vexing how to integrate or reconcile them — how to resolve the apparent opposition. But this is not one of those vexing cases. Ultimately, it's clear and straightforward. You don't reward crime. You don't put people who've committed financial crimes involving EA in a financial management role at an EA charity. What's at stake here is not the concept of universal compassion or forgiveness. It's just common sense.
There are a million other things a person can do in the world than manage money at an EA charity. And, if for some strange reason managing money at an EA charity is their God-given destiny that they must fulfill within their lifetime, there are a million other things they can do while they work to redeem themselves and prove they can be trusted. Which could take many years and is never guaranteed to succeed.
If people are really curious and want a deeper understanding of this topic, I'm sure there are an abundance of good resources on the topic of criminal rehabilitation from people who have practical experience and a lot of knowledge. There are many people who take the perspective that our approach to criminal justice is excessively punitive and retributive, and advocate what they see as a more compassionate and forgiving alternative. Yet I'm certain they would not see Manifund's hiring of Caroline Ellison as an acceptable situation.
A comment on how variations on the simulation hypothesis like this one may actually defeat the popular formulations of the simulation argument. Here's physicist Sean Carroll's formulation of the simulation argument (which, like other popular formulations, differs from philosopher Nick Bostrom's original argument):
Carroll observes that this formulation of the argument implies a contradiction, since typical simulations or universes will be bottom-level simulations that don't have the compute to create more simulations.
If we take some further series of reasoning steps from (7) to the view that we live in a simulation of a tiny fragment of the world that simulates a short span of years before it terminates, then we arrive at the conclusion that we will not be able to create simulated universes with many conscious beings in them. Therefore, (3) becomes false. (This is similar to Sean Carroll's more general point.)
Some series of steps — whatever they are— takes us from (7) to a particular conclusion. But then that conclusion loops back around and renders one of its premises false, thereby rendering the whole argument unsound. In this way, the argument is that we live in this particular kind of simulation — whatever that argument is — ends up defeating itself, assuming it rests on the sort of popular formulation of the simulation argument that I quoted from Sean Carroll.
For any version of the simulation argument to be coherent and valid (let alone sound), care needs to be taken with the logical steps that take us from the premises to the conclusion. Careless logic will create invalid arguments and wrong conclusions.
For instance, if we end up a positing top-level, non-simulated universe (or set of universes) fundamentally and radically different from our own, which operate according to different laws of physics and perhaps other different laws of nature or different metaphysical laws, then the simulation argument seems to fall apart. This prevents us from positing that the top-level universe (or set of universes) has infinite computation, unlike — apparently — our own.
If there are no constraints on the metaphysical or natural laws that rule the top-level universe, then we could just as easily say that the top-level universe is Heaven and God created our universe supernaturally. Or any of an infinite number of similar conceivable origin stories. (This is not an idea original to me, but I can't remember who I heard it from. Maybe the physicist David Deutsch? But I'm not sure.)
So, it seems important to the simulation argument's coherence and logical validity that a) our universe will actually create simulated universes eventually and b) that the top-level universe be similar to our universe, e.g., that it shares laws of physics, other laws of nature, and any other metaphysical laws that apply. It seems that any version of the simulation argument that doesn't meet both criteria (a) and (b) can't be sound.
On top of this, it should be said that it's completely arbitrary to suppose that a simulation would focus on North American and British effective altruists as opposed to, say, Japanese librarians or Sicilian clowns. If you're going to entertain the notion of a simulation that only focuses on a narrow slice of the world for a narrow time — which seemingly can't be reached by any logically sound argument — then there are endless possible versions of that simulation. There seems to be nothing that particularly supports this imagined version of a simulation above any of the endless other conceivable varieties.
I'm surprised that this is a featured post on the Effective Altruism Forum because it's such a bizarre, crazy idea and because there is no attempt to argue that it's true. It's just asserted. Moreover, the idea rests on the simulation argument, which itself is quite flawed. The idea that effective altruists are the only people who really exist (and that everyone else is just an illusion) is not an idea that could have any rational basis. It is really strange, then, to see the employees of the Centre for Effective Altruism who run the EA Forum single this post out as one that has particularly high quality. What on Earth is going on?
I wrote in my post "The sad decline of effective altruism" that effective altruism has suffered a steep decline in its intellectual standards over the last 15 years. It's possible that the featuring of this post was some kind of fluke or mistake, but it fits the pattern of what I've observed.
If someone earnestly believes that only effective altruists exist and 99.9%+ of people on the planet are fake, from a place or compassion and genuine concern, I would recommend they talk to a qualified mental health professional. This is outside the realm of a rational difference of opinion and into mental health territory.
I would be worried if anyone I loved told me they believed they're part of an elite group comprising the less than 0.1% of humanity that is real, while everyone else is fake and doesn't really exist. I would want them to get help. I extend that same concern to anyone who truly believes the idea entertained in this post.
I will probably not read or reply to further comments here, but I welcome civil, kind messages and comments on Substack.
I don't believe in shaming, but I do believe in accountability. There's a crucial difference.
If your argument is that there's nothing EA organizations or leaders can do if a leader of an EA organization goes rogue and does something really bad, well, I can think of some things. EA orgs and leaders can decide to impose sanctions on Manifund like the Centre for Effective Altruism did. I think the CEA should go even further than it did and other EA orgs should follow suit.
Your other argument is that this is an acceptable difference of opinion rather than an ethical red line. But this is a clear-cut case of financial corruption (a quid pro quo between FTX and Manifund, which rewards a key player in FTX's crimes for those crimes because they benefited Manifund). Austin Chen conveniently admitted corrupt intent, although even without such an admission, the case for corruption would be strong. Financial corruption should be a clear ethical red line for the EA community.
The simulation argument is silly, for reasons I've previously detailed here and here. For one, the physicist Sean Carroll cleverly pointed out that the simulation argument contains a logical self-contradiction. Often, a logical self-contradiction is enough to end all discussion! Yet that's not even the end of the simulation argument's problems.
Another problem is that forecasts about future technological events within our universe don't necessarily tell us the story of the creation of our universe. Let's say we could accurately forecast that our descendants will simulate lots of universes. What does that tell us about the creation of our universe? Nothing, without further logical steps.
By analogy, let's say you plan to have a baby using IVF. Does that imply you were born thanks to IVF? No, of course not, not just by itself. Yet the simulation argument wants us to infer that if we create a universe a certain way, then our universe was also created that same way. This is an invalid inference.
But this still isn't the end of problems for the simulation argument, which just gets messier and more objectionable the more you scrutinize it. For instance, what major crimes or morally abhorrent acts might the creator of a simulation be guilty of? Torture, murder, genocide...? Wouldn't there be prohibitions against this sort of thing?
I could go on. There is just no good reason for the simulation argument to be taken seriously.
Edit (Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 8:50am UTC): I realized after writing this comment that I made a few minor mistakes, or at least there are a few minor things that should be clarified. These might be either boring and nipticky or important, depending on your perspective.
First, Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is not an argument that we live in a simulation. It contains the possibility that simulations might be morally or legally prohibited. However, most people hear a version of the simulation argument different from what Bostrom originally argued. A good example is Sean Carroll's formulation. My point about moral or legal prohibition applies to the more popular formulations of the simulation argument, but not to Bostrom's original simulation argument, which already contains that point.
Second, my point about inferring the universe's origins from technological forecasts and whether it's a valid inference is already covered in Sean Carroll's blog post, which addresses the simulation argument's anthropic reasoning. The anthropic reasoning should be questioned, but even popular formulations of the simulation already contain the extra steps I was alluding to. In any case, it's worth thinking carefully what series of logical steps takes us from a technological forecast to a cosmological origin story. That was my point, but it was not clearly expressed.
It remains true that the popular formulation of the simulation argument discussed by Sean Carroll implies a logical contradiction. It remains true there are multiple major problems with that version of the argument. Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also objectionable, but less so because it is not an argument that we live in a simulation.
The bottom line remains that it's silly to think we live in a simulation. Neither Bostrom's original argument or the more popular reformulations present a serious case that we do.
I haven't read any replies to this comment and probably won't because I usually find discussions on the EA Forum to be unconstructive. However, I welcome further discussion on Substack.