Greentext roasts effective altruism: from mosquito nets to galaxies of expected value
banteg · x · 2026-09-18
- A classic greentext walks through the EA/longtermism logic chain: from quantifiable charity like mosquito nets, to future people counting morally, to descendants 500 million years out—until today's 8 billion humans become a rounding error and the priority becomes "protecting the long-term future."
- It then skewers expected-value reasoning: a one-in-a-million chance of preventing extinction multiplied by 10^50 future lives yields "several galaxies" of expected value, beating curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude—with the probability sourced from "us, extremely thoughtfully."
- The kicker: a 46-page report with 17 sensitivity analyses all assumes the intervention's sign is positive, and structural-uncertainty critiques are answered by shrinking the numbers further. A sharp parody of AI-doom and longtermist argumentation.
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