I'm pleasantly surprised how kind and charitable this article ends up being. I'm really used to shortcuts being used to ridicule EAs ("look, these morons think shrimps are an important problem!"), so I'm happy the article takes the time to present the object-level arguments (e.g. yes, it's kind of fucked up we torture tens of billions of small animals per year in ways that would make most people physically recoil if they had to look at it, just to produce a luxury good. Watch the Dominion documentary!).

I know I'm already late to the party and HN's libertarian techno-optimism means that lots of people have already made up their mind about EAs, but still, I'd like to make my case.

I've mets dozens of EAs in person and gone to a few events with hundreds of them. None of the people I met were billionaires and AFAICT most of them didn't especially hope to become millionaires. A lot of them were broke students, though obviously a lot also had comfortable tech jobs.

What they had in common was that they were the most driven, idealistic people I've ever met. All of them cared about something, whether it was animal welfare, climate change, global poverty or AI x-risk. They talked about these things not the way people talk on the internet, when they're trying to win an argument, they talked about them like they have stakes and making the right decision will impact lives.

Every step of my journey to becoming flexitarian, then vegetarian, then vegan-ish, has been spurred by an effective altruist talking to me about the moral outrage that is factory farming, and that it was something that mattered and that we can and must do something about.

Yes, they're often sexually open, yes, the cults (and all the problems that plague groups dominated by autistic white men) exist, yes SBF exists and Effective Altruism gave him way too much of a platform, yes, they bought a castle that one time, but these things shouldn't be treated as the only things worth knowing about the movement, the same way one shouldn't denounce feminism forever because [insert stupid thing some high-profile feminist did that one time]. No reformist movement looks good when presented through the lens of its detractors.

EA is a group of people that spend a lot of their time encouraging each other to do more, to believe that actions matter and every life has value. They're eager and sincere, they take abstract ideas seriously and consider their consequences even when it's uncomfortable or weird, and that makes them a target of ridicule (because people don't like their conclusions, and because cynical people like to take overly eager people down a notch).

So I'm really happy the Economist refrained from taking those cheap shots throughout. It's a good article.