Selected Sequences

Zvi Mowshowitz's Book Review of Going Infinite, in which he reveals that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, since convicted of fraud, was personally going around telling my friends to blacklist me because of the quality of my criticisms of Effective Altruism, as .

Effective Altruism is Not a No-Brainer

When Givewell's Open Philanthropy Project recommended that the Moskovitz family only partially fund GiveWell's top charity recommendations, I wrote GiveWell and Partial Funding, an analysis of plausible reasons for this decision, and concluded that the only internally coherent justification would be "we're irreproducibly special, so we should focus on maximizing our long-run influence over charitable spending, since everyone else not controlled by us is irreparably making worse choices than us."

Then I wrote these pieces arguing that that attitude ("we're irreproducibly special so we should manipulate others") is mistaken:

Effective Altruism as a case study of a social movement that takes on elements of a pyramid scheme: Effective Altruism is Self-Recommending

Object-level critiques of two of the regular top GiveWell recommendations, cash transfers and bednets:

Pointing out that the main action the Open Philanthropy Project, Elon Musk, and the Future of Life Institute took on AI safety was canonically bad: OpenAI makes humanity less safe

Oppression and Production are Competing Explanations for Wealth Inequality. I made $1,000 writing this one, because the Center for Effective Altruism ran a criticism contest with financial rewards. I was sure they weren't interested in radical substantive criticism of the kind I had to offer, so I sold 50% of any prize winnings to a friend who wanted to encourage me to submit something.