Zachary Segall's Quick takes

By Zachary Segall @ 2026-02-24T16:52 (+2)

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Zachary Segall @ 2026-02-24T16:52 (+8)

Whenever I talk about Effective Altruism (EA) to someone new, I talk about EA-the-Movement and EA-the-Philosophy. EA-the-Movement draws a specific kind of person (quantitative, techy, philosophical) and has selected a few causes it has determined to be the most effective. EA-the-Philosophy is about asking whether our donations and volunteering are going to places that get the most bang for our buck and those questions can be applied to anything we care about. 

It's a way of easing people into our way of thinking without insisting that they join our particular group or adopt our priorities. I find it's especially useful if the quantitative or strong recommendations from EA-the-Movement to be offputting, or if they have previous associations with the movement. I think it's worth making people who are doing good in some way more effective, even if it doesn't end up getting them to do what we'd consider the most good. Although if someone spends enough time thinking with the EA Philosophy, it might end up leading the straight back to the EA Movement. 

Elena Ciobanu🔹 @ 2026-02-25T19:45 (+1)

So, for example, if you're talking with a feminist you can ask them where their donations or volunteering could do more or the most good, and they could think about that and come up with answers. And you could give suggestions, e.g. charities that focus on girls education in LMICs, or reproductive health for women, or maternal health charities. 

If you're talking with MRAs, you could ask them what are the more effective ways to help men and boys, and they could research ways to help in cases of IPV or MGC, etc.

And the same goes for environmentalists, civilisation collapse doomers, vegetarians and vegans, liberals, conservatives, proponents of free and open source software, people suffering from specific physical and mental health disorders, and so on. 

Do you think it's useful to talk with people online (e.g. on YouTube, X, other social media, forums) about EA-as-philosophy? Although I think that EA-as-philosophy still requires some quantitative analysis of data, research and ethics to find better ways to help, people can still simply ask each other about how they can better help people.