Who Are Your EA Role Models?
Learning from Inspiring Figures in Our Community
Background
This post emerged from discussions during the EA values project, where we observed that many community members cite specific individuals (whether EA founders, organization leaders, or mentors) as key influences in their journey into effective altruism. Understanding who inspires us and why can help us identify the values and approaches that make EA compelling to newcomers and sustaining for existing members.
Historical movements have often been shaped by individuals who embodied their core principles in compelling ways. From Gandhiâs commitment to nonviolence to scientists like Marie Curie who persevered despite systemic barriers, these figures serve not just as leaders but as concrete examples of abstract values in action.
The Value of Role Models in EA
Role models serve several important functions:
They make abstract EA principles concrete and relatable.
They demonstrate how EA values translate into career and life decisions.
They provide inspiration during challenging periods of community involvement.
They help newcomers envision what an EA-aligned life might look like.
However, we should approach this topic thoughtfully. People are complex, and even our most admired figures have limitations and make mistakes. The goal isnât to create unrealistic pedestals but to learn from examples of EA values lived out imperfectly by real humans.
Categories for Discussion
Rather than simply listing names, it would be best to organize this around qualities that make these figures inspiring (feel free to include more qualities you see as important in EA):
Intellectual Humility and Truth-Seeking
Who demonstrates exceptional commitment to following evidence even when it challenges their prior beliefs?
Scope Sensitivity and Moral Circle Expansion
Who has effectively helped others care about neglected populations or causes?
Personal Sacrifice for Greater Good
Who has made significant personal sacrifices to maximize their positive impact?
Bridge-Building and Communication
Who excels at making EA ideas accessible to diverse audiences?
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Who has created new institutions or approaches that significantly advanced EA causes?
Some Starting Examples
Within EA
William MacAskillâfor pioneering EA outreach through accessible writing and speaking.
Toby Ordâfor intellectual leadership on existential risk and personal giving commitments.
Holden Karnofskyâfor systematic thinking about charity evaluation and cause prioritization.
Julia WiseâFor community health leadership and modeling sustainable EA engagement.
Adjacent to EA
Peter Singerâfor foundational work on effective giving and animal ethics.
Paul Farmerâfor demonstrating how to combine academic rigor with direct service to the global poor.
Hans Roslingâfor data-driven optimism about global development progress.
Guidelines for discussions and comments
Focus on specific actions, decisions, or approaches rather than general praise.
Consider both public figures and personal mentors whoâve influenced you.
Feel free to discuss both strengths and limitations (complexity makes role models more relatable).
Include people at different career stages and from different backgrounds.
Remember that being inspiring doesnât require perfection.
The hope moving forward
Understanding who inspires us can help the EA community:
Identify the values and approaches that resonate most with people.
Recognize diverse pathways into EA engagement.
Support community members in finding mentors and role models.
Celebrate the human side of our movementâs foundations
It would be great to know who has inspired your EA journey and what people in EA can learn from their examples.
I note that the suggested role models are all thinkers rather than doers. I worry that in a world of influencers and celebrities, we celebrate public profile more than concrete impact. Yes, influencers can lead to concrete impact- but if everyone wants to be an influencer or a public intellectual, and sees that as the most impactful thing to do, then whoâs actually going to do the hard work of changing laws, of earning to give, of actual concrete steps that reduce suffering.
All of which to say: show me your role models who have directly improved the world, not just the people who have told others that they should.
Iâm surprised to read this. Although an important part of their job is thinking, some of those figures have founded organisations like Giving What We Can, 80,000 hours or GiveWell, which is actually (a lot of) doing. Also, pledging to donate at least 10% of their income until they retire, thus saving several lives and helping thousands of people by preventing that they get terrible diseases is âimproving the world directlyâ rather than thinking. (Although that impact is probably neglegible compared what they achieved in other ways, it is still a lot of good).
I want to be clearâI donât think these people havenât achieved anything or done good, but e.g. 80,000 hoursâ impact is indirect rather than direct. Iâm not saying we shouldnât celebrate these people, but if we only focus on community building/âmeta level activity, then thereâs a risk EA ends up in a level of abstraction/âMLM kind of space. My point was I donât think we should only celebrate EAs who create public discourse and the infrastructure to support more people becoming (better) EAs.
This somewhat related to mainanence and operations and how credit/ârespect is apportioned, but often the people doing the work are lower level employees who arenât famous or well-known. They arenât necessarily acknowledged at an annual organizational celebration, or in the local media. As an example, we might think that Rob Mather is great for founding/ârunning the Against Malaria Foundation, but we donât know the names of the people who manufactured or delivered those anti-malaria bednets.
But here are some examples of people that I sort of, vaguely [1] consider moral role models:
There is a guy in Oakland, California who goes by PengWeather online, and he cleans up trash in his free time. From an EA perspective we could certainly criticize his actions by claiming that they arenât effective, and that it might be better for the world if he instead donated $20 a week for a high-impact cause area. But I take inspiration from his initiative: he saw a problem, nobody was doing anything about it, so he decided to take action and make things better. People in EA talk about agency a lot, but it is rare that I see somebody doing things on their own.
Esther Duflo. She is somewhat of a celebrity among people who care about development economics, but she is also a doer. She (and the teams of people she worked with) discovered what was an wasnât effective in a variety of situations, improving the popularity and visibility of using randomized control trials for economic field research.
Jeff Kaufman. Iâve never met him, but he chose to earn to give, and boy did he give! He has a blog, and he posts on the EA forum as well.
Generally I donât really have role models. Iâve seen enough people express good traits and bad traits that I try to focus on specific behaviors/âactions rather than on people as a whole. Think of all the people who work in virtuous fields/âvocations who are also real assholes.
For example, Jeff Kaufman seems like a great guy from what Iâve read. But imagine that he has really bad emotional regulation, or he is really rude to strangers, or he isnât considerate to others, or he is a compulsive liar. If any of those things were true, that wouldnât change the fact that his earning to give is admirable. I try to not boil people down to a simple god/âbad judgement, and instead look at people as a collection of their actions.
At least some of the people listed are either doers, or are a sort of combination of thinkers and doers. Iâm do view these people mostly as thinkers, but I also have a sort of bias in that I didnât know about Hans Rosling in the 80s or about Paul Farmers work in the 90s. These people have done much more than simply give talks and write blog posts; they have also done things to directly improve the world.
Some of the people on the list
Changed their careers in order to generate more donations for the global poor (Holden Karnofsky)
Founded/âcreated/âran organizations (William MacAskill)
Volunteered at a hospital in Haiti (Paul Farmer)
Counselled and provided guidance/âadvice to many, many people (Julia Wise)
Studied the outbreak of disease across multiple African countries and worked for Swedenâs International Development Agency (Hans Rosling)
âThinkerâ vs âDoerâ gets pretty fuzzy: âchanging lawsâ certainly involves a lot of thinking, as do ~all of the highest-impact things you might be considering âdirectly improving the worldâ. I especially have trouble seeing how you could classify Farmerâs work in Haiti as something other than an attempt to directly improve the world.
But riffing on your ânot just the people who have told others that they shouldâ, and emphasizing the âthatâ, perhaps the line is whether someoneâs primary work has been persuading other people to be more altruistic and/âor effective? In which case Iâd probably put MacAskill, Ord and Singer, and Rosling as âThinkersâ and Karnofsky, Wise, and Farmer as âDoersâ. But several of the folks in the âThinkerâ category still did substantial âDoerâ work (Roslingâs hands-on public health work in Africa, MacAskillâs co-founding 80k, Ordâs cause prioritization, Singerâs political advocacy and donations).
The suggested role models was to start the discussion and sharing of role models. Yes, role models can be doers, thinkers, or both and they all have influence to people especially on values. Since values are in words, thoughts and actions, it would be great to know also more EA doers.
Here are some people who are currently particularly inspiring to me:
Nicolas Laing who has worked in Uganda as a doctor for more than a decade and co-founded OneDay Health, which sets up health clinics in under-served parts of Uganda.
Cherry Rainflower and Adam Semple who run Fluffy Torpedo, an ice cream shop in Melbourne that donates 50% of proceeds to effective charities.
Keyur Doolabh, an ED doctor who recently co-founded Healthy Futures Global which is trying to eliminate mother to baby syphilis transmission in the Phillipines.
Akhil Bansil who founded High Impact Medicine and is training to become an infectious diseases specialist with interest in antibiotic resistance.
Kat Dekkar, Calvin Baker and Jeremy Chirpaz, who founded Give Industries, an electrical contracting business in Brisbane/âMelbourne that gives 100% of profits to effective charities ($581,000 given so far).
Those guys that founded Humanitix.
I loved meeting Nick at EAG! I knew he worked on public health in Uganda, but we also chatted about choices he and his wife have made to better fit in with their local community, like spending at a level comparable to the better-off of their Ugandan neighbors rather than more typical expat levels. His energy and positivity wowed me.
Iâm disproportionately drawn to people who demonstrate their radical empathy both with their lifestyle and their actions/âgiving. These arenât all strictly EAs and 2 of them arenât alive any more...
1) EAs who donât earn huge amounts and give lots away. I especially respect when people set caps on how much they keep from their salariesâso much discipline required. @Vasco Grilođž @Henry Howard, the Wises⊠Ages ago I was drawn to @William_MacAskill doing this, but Iâm not sure if thatâs still a practice of his? And all the hundreds of you out there I donât know of!
2) Dr. Edrick Baker who ran perhaps the most cost-effective hospital of the 20th century. He trained poorly educated local people to do most of the medical work at the hospital. Great and unappreciated biography about him here.
3) The founders of Wave and Humantix. Growing profit-making businesses which either directly help people, or to give the money away is no joke and I have huge respect for this.
4) (Top of mind from the book âHow Asia Worksâ) Wolf Ladejinsky, who advised the land reform of Japan and Taiwan, which redistributed landlordâs land to individual farmers, massively increasing productivity and setting up their industrial revolutionsâbefore the USA accused him of being a communist :(. Seemed like a dude!
5) Bill Gates (to break the mold). Yeah he lives a bit like a Diva but billionaires donât usually give all their money away, and heâs doing it pretty darn well.
Thanks for the mention, Nick! I appreciate your contributions, and pushback on some of my points too.
I think Humantix cofounder Josh Ross is dope.
In this podcast with Peter Singer he says he got into the digital ticketing space with the purpose of developing software that can be scaled up into a tremendous source of charity.
In that podcast he also was incredibly honest that he is also motivated by a fear of Hell
He was disillusioned with his religious upbringing but figured that if there was a right religion out there, humanitarian efforts would probably help save him from the negative afterlife that lack of faith can incur.
To be honest I can relate to that but unlike him I havenât donated over $10,000,000 yet. Thatâs according to Humantixâs site today, which says it donates virtually all its profits, to nonprofits including Peter Singerâs The Life You Can Save.
P.S. In various interviews like this one he says his long-term goal is to create more tech innovations that can generate more for charity and disrupt more industries than just ticketing. So maybe get in touch if you want to help him out with that.
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââjgspXC8GKA7RtxMRE/ââon-living-without-idols
Agreed that idolatry is unhelpful. *And* I donât think having role models is inherently/âalways harmful, as long as we remember that everyone is fallible.
Both posts are great, especially in conversation with each other.
Iâve noticed local role models in your community are important in addition to the big-name leaders that you mentioned. Iâm a community builder in Finland, and members of our community have often said that seeing and talking to people from the same country who do impressive stuff has helped them be more ambitious in their careers or even consider that they can have an impact instead of just being passive observers of EA.
This is true, we also had some people who shared that attending EAGx helped them to see clearer other cause areas, especially what is being done by local organizations in the region. We just started with some known leaders, but it will be great to know the local leaders, and we believe they bring great value as big-name leaders.
Love this question! Some role models for me:
@Julia_Wiseđž â both in terms of bridge-building and personal sacrifice. Juliaâs writing was pivotal in making me feel welcome in EA. Seeing many of my own interests/âconcerns/âways of being reflected in her work reassured me there was a place for me in the community. I also greatly admire + aspire to her (and Jeffâs) level of giving.
@Catherine Lowđž â a local mentor/ârole-model for me, though many outside NZ know her too! Sheâs an amazingly warm and welcoming super-connector/âbridge-builder. As my predecessor at EA NZ, I often think about whether Iâm living up to her example. I also love her story as a reminder that life (and impact) doesnât end at 30. Given how young the community skews, there can be a sense that youâve failed if you havenât achieved something amazing by age 25. Catherine is a great counter to this: she didnât discover EA until well after 25, and is having a fantastic impact regardless.
@GraceAdamsđžâ another local-ish mentor/ârole model. I really appreciate her example of balancing a high-impact career alongside ongoing health issues. (Not sure which theme this fits under. Maybe we need one for sustainable engagement with EA?) I also really admire what sheâs achieved at GWWC. She was the one who ultimately persuaded me to take the pledge, as someone whoâd already been giving 10% for many years, and didnât feel the need for an external commitment device.
There are many others in/âaround the community who I greatly admire and respect, but donât think of as personal role models. E.g. Paul Farmer did incredible work, but I donât especially see myself reflected in him, or aspire to live like him in the particulars. I guess I tend to gravitate towards role models who are in some sense âme-but-betterâ.
There are also many people who exemplify particular virtues/âprinciples, but who I wouldnât call âEA role-modelsâ per-se. E.g. I consider Darwin a role model in terms of intellectual humility and truth seeking, but he wasnât exactly EA.
Rowan, this is enormously sweet! I just logged in to the EA Forum for the first time in ages and Iâm really honoured! Being public about my health has felt like a tough decision but knowing that itâs resonated with you and others makes it feel really worth it!
The QURI people
luisa rodriguez
arepo
vasco grillo
michael st jules
The moral weights people at RP
brian tomisik
carl schuman