I'm a longtime Effective Altruist and the co-founder of the organization most frequently used as a stand-in for "EAs have lost their minds" (a.k.a. Shrimp Welfare Project). I've also read The Economist for over 20 years, so I was disappointed by how they portrayed a community I feel proud to be part of. I never post but I could hardly believe the verbal gymnastics one needs to do to make things like “taking moral commitments seriously” and "considering evidence and odds explicitly, correcting for biases" sound like the problem. I felt I had to speak my mind. Some of the implicit criticisms of EA are that we're young, inexperienced, from elite universities, polyamorous, wildly eccentric, etc. FWIW, I'm in my mid-40s, Mexican, straight, have a beautiful wife and 2 kids, and I grew up in a mid-sized conservative city with loving parents who got divorced when I was six. Pretty standard. After my parents divorced, my mom frequently had to make difficult economic choices, like whether to buy flowers for our kitchen table and eat only quesadillas, or eat something a tiny bit fancier. I always told her I loved quesadillas because I knew flowers made her happy. After graduating from a public university, I worked in finance for ~15 years and saved as much as I could so I could spare my wife and future kids the economic hardships I experienced. In that time I met thousands of people in finance, corporate law, accounting, real estate, insurance, etc. Most were decent, well-educated, ambitious and smart, all doing their best to excel in their professions. Most wanted to make money and improve their own and their loved ones’ quality of life. Nothing to see here. Since I found Effective Altruism ~7 years ago, most of the people I come across are of a different rarer kind. They come from all over the world, in all shapes and sizes, but they have the one thing in common: they want to improve the world using evidence and reason wherever that leads them. Yeah, they/we make a ton of mistakes like everyone but, IMHO tend to own them more frequently than the average person. I've met people who could easily be making >100% more money in a normal job, but instead they dedicate themselves to improving the lives of those who need it the most. People in the poorest countries whose children die from preventable diseases, from lack of basic medical equipment or vaccination, from lead in paint. Animals in factory farms subjected to conditions that most people find abhorrent, doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian or a huge meat lover. Yes, recently many of the people in my community are moving to work on making sure that AI and other powerful new technologies don't result in terrible things for humanity. I'm one of those people and contrary to what the article would suggest, it has nothing to do with the fact that SBF committed one of the biggest frauds in history or that someone wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. I'm doing it because I want to do the little that's in my power to make the world that my kids and grandkids (and yes, potentially their great-great-grandchildren) will inherit a better one. EA gave me a way to do that and I will be forever thankful. So no, I'm not EA-adjacent. economist.com/international/…