Weird people doing good things

Scott Alexander and Freddie DeBoer both published articles on Effective Altruism in the past few days. Scott’s piece gives a load of examples of Effective Altruists doing good things. EAs have saved 200,000 human lives (mostly by paying for malaria nets). They’ve convinced farms to move 400 million chickens from tiny cages to slightly-less-unpleasant barns or outdoor areas. They’ve also given quite a lot of cash to weirder causes that are probably good: the YIMBY movement, think tanks trying to reduce the risk of nuclear war, various groups trying to make Artificial Intelligence safer, and so on.

Freddie’s piece, on the other hand, makes the point that Effective Altruists are very weird, and some of them think extremely weird things, and that those weird things are often bad. Effective Altruists claim that the whole EA schtick is a commitment to doing as much good as possible, but basically everyone would agree we should do a lot of good! That can’t really be what makes someone an Effe…