Effective altruism won't go away

Many have discussed whether the effective altruism movement might collapse at some point. I certainly think that the effective altruism movement faces various risks. However, I think it’s unlikely that people will cease to act on the core principles of effective altruism - impact-maximisation (based on precise metrics like WELLBYs) using reason and evidence - altogether. I think the idea that we should be effective when we’re doing good is very intuitive to a non-trivial part of the population. Effective altruists have created a number of conceptual tools and frameworks (e.g. the ITN-framework, cause neutrality) that likely will continue to be of interest to those people, even if the current movement experiences severe problems. To some extent, I thus view the development of those tools as more akin to the development of, say, probability theory, than to the emergence of a social or political movement. Just like probability theory will remain in use, so will concepts like cause neutrality. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think they’re in the same ballpark.)

Again, this isn’t to say that the current movement can’t experience severe problems, nor that those problems couldn’t be very harmful. But it is to say that the core ideas of effective altruism are likely here to stay.

Thanks to Ryan Carey for discussion.