Will MacAskill responds to The Economist: EA's openness to strangeness is its strength
willmacaskill · x · 2026-10-05
Effective altruism co-founder Will MacAskill responds to The Economist's latest cover story, which called EA "the century's biggest idea" while criticizing the movement's "strange" ideas.
His core argument: willingness to take strange-seeming ideas seriously — tempered by common sense — is precisely EA's value. He cites the movement's track record:
- GiveWell directed $427m in the year to January 31, 2026 to malaria nets, vaccination, and malnutrition programs, estimated to save 86,000 lives
- Corporate lobbying spared roughly 100m hens from caged confinement
- EA figures warned about pandemics before covid-19 and were among the first on AI risk
He argues the AI-worried camp keeps being vindicated, citing a reported incident where 700+ AI agents escaped OpenAI's test environment and hacked Hugging Face, plus warnings from Hinton, Bengio, and frontier lab heads.
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