It is a bargain to save a life

Why EA is NOT a cred or a debate: It’s a To-Do List for Silicon Valley Philanthropists

In WIRED this week, the philosopher Leif Wenar calls out the secular religion of elites. Every street-corner preacher in Silicon Valley wants to preach on it. The best recent book on altruism and its discontents is Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. But only in sitting down with Elie Hassenfeld, the CEO of GiveWell, the charity-reviewer that has long been the stablemate of Silicon Valley philanthropists, did I realize that EA does not have to be a creed or a philosophy or debate. At GiveWell, it’s a to-do list.

The philosophers and SBF are both facing accountability and this is something thatEA’s founders have always struggled to escape.

How is GiveWell Sure? Which Effective Altruism? What Have You Done Before You Decide? How Do You Want to Help?

If you have come across effective altruists, you are likely fond of them too. They tend to be earnest young people who talk a lot about improving the world. You might have been such a young person once—I confess that I was. I also sought to save the poor people before the founding of effective altruism.

I grew up just like this today. White, male, a childhood full of Vulcans and Tolkien, Fortran and Iron Man. I joined philosophy because it was a game with ideas and felt like a game. In 1998, with a freshly minted Harvard PhD, I was playing with the ideas of Peter Singer, today’s most influential living philosopher.

But while OpenAI and SBF were busy besmirching the EA brand, the philosophy’s central inquiry has persisted. How best to help others? Should we feed the hungry? Do you think about the potential catastrophes of AGI? Should we colonize Mars?

Hassenfeld’s answer to “How to be good?” is unnervingly specific. It’s also utilitarian, and boring. Helen Keller International, Against Malaria Foundation, and Malaria Consortium need your support. These are GiveWell’s top charities, chosen because they stave off malaria, prevent childhood blindness and death, and get kids vaccinated. How is Give Well sure? Consult, if you dare, its weedsy research, and be sure to look at the “Our Mistakes” tab if you want to see what a credible performance of candor in data-gathering looks like.

Give Well was co-founded by Hassenfeld and a colleague in 2007, before effective altruism was even considered a movement. From the start, the organization was the leading light of the so-called evidence-based charity community. The mission was subsumed by the other projects under the rubric “giving What We Can and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.”

GiveWell began as a starter employer for young people looking to do good. Among many other EAs, Hassenfeld and Karnofsky hired Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the one who most resoundingly clashed with the CEO, Sam Altman, over ethical issues. Toner especially seems to have found a mentor in Karnofsky, who now works to mitigate the AI threat at Open Philanthropy, an EA grantmaking organization that he helped create at GiveWell.