Introduction
Effective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.
I used to be closely involved in the movement, and I still think many of its ideas are worth defending. But as the movement has grown, so have certain structural problems: increasing reliance on large donors, pushback on dissent, and systems that concentrate influence in subtle but significant ways. This post is about those concerns — not to denigrate the movement, but to explore how it might better live up to its own stated values.
EA and conformity
One of the clearest places where these structural issues show up is in how the movement handles conformity and internal disagreement. Carla Zoe Cremer, a former EA insider, has become an outspoken critic of how EA functions internally. Back in 2020, she warned about “value-alignment”, her term for extreme intellectual conformity within EA:
value-alignment means to agree on a fundamental level. It means to agree with the most broadly accepted values, methodologies, axioms, diet, donation schemes, memes and prioritisations of EA.
Her concerns deepened in 2021, when she co-authored a peer-reviewed paper with Luke Kemp on existential risk studies — one of EA’s flagship cause areas. The paper argued for more diverse voices and warned that the field had become overly “techno-utopian” and was in need of democratic reform.
The reception was… rough. According to her:
It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written. We lost sleep, time, friends, collaborators, and mentors because we disagreed on: whether this work should be published, whether potential EA funders would decide against funding us and the institutions we’re affiliated with, and whether the authors whose work we critique would be upset.
While many in the community responded constructively, others reportedly sought to suppress the paper — not on academic grounds, but out of fear that it might alienate funders. The clear implication here is that critique is encouraged, as long as it doesn’t threaten the financial or ideological foundations of the movement. In response, Cremer laid out a series of concrete reforms to tackle this problem:
diversify funding sources by breaking up big funding bodies and by reducing each orgs’ reliance on EA funding and tech billionaire funding, it needs to produce academically credible work, set up whistle-blower protection, actively fund critical work, allow for bottom-up control over how funding is distributed, diversify academic fields represented in EA, make the leaders’ forum and funding decisions transparent, stop glorifying individual thought-leaders, stop classifying everything as info hazards...amongst other structural changes.
She reached out to MacAskill and other high profile Effective Altruists (EAs) with these concerns. While they acknowledged the issues, Cremer didn’t think talking to them achieved much:
I was entirely unsuccessful in inspiring EAs to implement any of my suggestions. EAs patted themselves on the back for running an essay competition on critiques against EA, left 253 comments on my and Luke Kemp’s paper, and kept everything that actually could have made a difference just as it was.
EA and criticism
This story might surprise you if you’ve heard that EA is great at receiving criticisms. I think this reputation is partially earned, since the EA community does indeed engage with a large number of them. The EA Forum, for example, has given “Criticism of effective altruism” its own tag. At the moment of writing, this tag has 490 posts on it. Not bad.
Not only does EA allow criticisms, it sometimes monetarily rewards them. In 2022 there was the EA criticism contest, where people could send in their criticisms of EA and the best ones would receive prize money. A total of $120,000 was awarded to 31 of the contest’s 341 entries. At first glance, this seems like strong evidence that EA rewards critiques, but things become a little bit more complicated when we look at who the winners and losers were.
Other than using “democratic” as a buzzword, what exactly is the problem here?
We live in a world where the vast majority of people doesn’t care about charity being effective. So the most democratic way of doing effective altruism would be… to stop doing it.
Or did you mean something else by “democratic”?
That alone is no evidence of the quality of the argument. (Women’s tears shouldn’t automatically win at the marketplace of ideas.)
Looking at the quote, I like the parts about the whistle-blower protection and “stop classifying everything as info hazards”, but I am not sure how to reduce “each orgs’ reliance on EA funding and tech billionaire funding” (the only way to reduce your dependence on some sources of funding is to find other sources of funding, do you have a specific proposal in mind?), and the part about “actively fund critical work” is suspiciously self-serving.
More importantly, the quoted part doesn’t feel like “concrete reforms” (maybe it makes much more sense in proper context), but more like a list of buzzwords.
Most EAs are from USA, UK, and Germany? Well, those sound like big and rich democratic countries. (By the way, I find it weird that you used similar colors to put USA and UK together, when the numbers show that the difference between USA and UK is much bigger than between UK and Germany.)
Can you be more explicit about what is missing there? You probably didn’t expect many EAs to come from Monaco. So is this about China? Yeah, it would make sense to discuss this problem separately. Maybe it is about a language barrier, and someone should write a convincing letter or a book about effective altruism in Chinese, maybe using some quotes from Confucius. Seems like a potentially high-value move. (There is a risk that the Chinese government might disapprove of it. But it is worth trying.)
I suspect that Americans in general give more money to charity (per capita) compared to other nations. If that is true (I am not sure) then it wouldn’t be so surprising that they dominate in the effective altruism.
And yet the criticism is often highly upvoted.
I think democratic reforms in charities would work. The main issue with democracy is that you have uninformed people making the decisions with little or no knowledge of the subject matter, and they end up being manipulated by ideological zealots. However, if voters were limited to people within the charity, then it would be harder to manipulate those people because they have knowledge and expertise.