After the collapse of FTX, any predictions that the effective altruism movement will die with it are greatly exaggerated. Effective altruism will change that maybe none of us ourselves can even predict but it won’t die.
There are countless haters of so many movements who on the internet will themselves into believing what will happen to that movement when it fails is what they wish will happen. I.e., that the movement will die. Sensationalist polemicists and internet trolls don’t understand history or the world enough to know what they’re talking about when they celebrate the gleeful end of whatever cultural forces they hate.
This isn’t just true for effective altruism. This is true for every such movement towards which anyone takes such a shallow interpretation. If movements like socialism, communism, and fascism can make a worldwide comeback in the 2010s and 2020s in spite of their histories, effective altruism isn’t going to just up and die, not by a longshot.
Small movements (like species with few members, I think[1]) die more quickly, as do younger movements.
Also EA seems to have a quite specific type of person it appeals to & a stronger dependence on current intellectual strands (it did not develop separately in China & the Anglosphere and continental Europe), which seems narrower than socialism/communism/reactionary thought.
I think it’s good to worry about EA disappearing or failing in other ways (becoming a cargo-cult shell of its original form, mixing up instrumental and terminal goals, stagnating & disappearing like general semantics &c).
After the collapse of FTX, any predictions that the effective altruism movement will die with it are greatly exaggerated. Effective altruism will change that maybe none of us ourselves can even predict but it won’t die.
There are countless haters of so many movements who on the internet will themselves into believing what will happen to that movement when it fails is what they wish will happen. I.e., that the movement will die. Sensationalist polemicists and internet trolls don’t understand history or the world enough to know what they’re talking about when they celebrate the gleeful end of whatever cultural forces they hate.
This isn’t just true for effective altruism. This is true for every such movement towards which anyone takes such a shallow interpretation. If movements like socialism, communism, and fascism can make a worldwide comeback in the 2010s and 2020s in spite of their histories, effective altruism isn’t going to just up and die, not by a longshot.
Small movements (like species with few members, I think[1]) die more quickly, as do younger movements.
Also EA seems to have a quite specific type of person it appeals to & a stronger dependence on current intellectual strands (it did not develop separately in China & the Anglosphere and continental Europe), which seems narrower than socialism/communism/reactionary thought.
I think it’s good to worry about EA disappearing or failing in other ways (becoming a cargo-cult shell of its original form, mixing up instrumental and terminal goals, stagnating & disappearing like general semantics &c).
I’ve tried to find a paper investigating this question, but haven’t been successful—anyone got a link?