As of now, that total [of electoral votes in state signatories to the "National Popular Vote" compact] is 222, and, as Vox points out, there is a real chance that this year's midterms, fueled by widespread discontent with Donald Trump and his congressional Republican lapdogs, could cause the balance to tip over the decisive 270 electoral votes required to make the compact binding.

Until the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the NPVC was stuck at 222 Electoral College votes.

However, with Democrats gaining lawmaking authority – i.e., control of both houses of the state legislature and governorship – in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada, the NPVC has a clear shot of controlling the outcome of the 2028 election.

If the five newly Democrat-controlled states pass compact legislation, the NPVC will reach 283 Electoral College votes. Any one of Arizona, Wisconsin, or Nevada could not pass NPVC legislation, and the compact will still go into effect.

"At this point in the film, most audience members realise that they’ve been played. Just like the tv show 'Seinfeld,' 'You Can See Everything' is a movie about nothing.

"You Can See Everything' is a symbolic motif for millennial postmodernism. [Theranos's disgraced Elizabeth] Holmes, [her partner Billy] Evans, and [the film's director Nathan] Fielder represent a unique generation in world history that grew up with wealth, were always told that they’re special and important, that the norms and rules that apply to ordinary people don’t apply to them, that reality doesn’t really exist, that lying is in accord with non-reality, that their unique role in human civilisation puts them beyond good and evil, and that a documentary about their lives is no less fake. Nothing is real but somehow everything is transparent. The only thing that is transparent in this fan fiction film is that it makes clear just how vacuous and self-serving postmodern millennials really are.

"This fictional account of the lives of Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans, and Nathan Fielder really should have been titled, 'You Can See Nothing.' The fact is we really do see nothing because the souls of these people are an abyss of emptiness. It’s a journey into nothingness. There’s no there, there! ...

"My strong reaction to this movie is, in part, informed by the fact that I know these kinds of people all too well. They’re the product of America’s most elite universities. They inhabit Silicon Valley and the world I live in, which is among the reasons why I hated this movie so much. Just as Elizabeth Holmes ruined Theranos, so her academic paramours are ruining what could and should have been the pinnacle of Western civilisation. ...

"The film provides no insight into Holmes’s fraud and the damage it did, and no trace of common human decency, such as remorse, shame, privacy, or even responsibility to and for one’s children. Quite unintentionally, the movie is the autobiography of a 'look at me, look at me, look at me' generation of denatured, power-lusting eunuchs, who want to cosplay their pretend trans-historical importance. But in the end, there is only the polished vacuity of a generation that was taught to like itself first and foremost and that lying in the pursuit of fame and fortune is ok. (This applies to [the film's director] as much as it does to Holmes and Evans.)"

~ The Redneck Intellectual from 'You Can See Nothing' his film review of You Can See Everything

Soon ARU Press will release a collection of Ben Bayer’s essays, Breaking Free from Faith-Based Morality. The collection will feature essays previously published in New Ideal on the religious roots of altruistic morality. Aimed at secular readers who consider themselves rational and scientific, it argues that altruism is essentially faith-based and that a principled commitment to reason requires abandoning it. We are pleased to republish this substantially revised essay on effective altruism in anticipation of the book’s release.

Originally published March 22, 2023. Significantly revised, October 2026.

The collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in the fall of 2022 put the influence of a previously obscure philosophical movement in the spotlight. The company’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, was a leading advocate for and financial sponsor of the “effective altruist” movement.1 More recently, effective altruism entered the spotlight again due to its ongoing influence on the leaders of the artificial intelligence industry, especially at Anthropic.2

Why are so many young leaders of cutting-edge technological innovation attracted to an obscure philosophical movement?

Bankman-Fried learned this philosophy directly from a friend, the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, one of the theory’s most prominent advocates.3 Effective altruist roots at Anthropic run deep. Cofounder Dario Amodei became involved in effective altruist charities as early as 2010, pledging to give away 10 percent or more of his income, and later became one of their advisors.4 Another sign is that Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, who is the main author of the constitution governing Claude, is the effective altruist Amanda Askell (who also happens to be William MacAskill’s ex-wife).5

Effective altruism stresses the importance of using a rational, scientific approach to calculating the most impactful way to help the most people. According to the effective altruists, too much charitable giving is motivated by sentimentality without a view toward its actual impact on those with the greatest need. Celebrities telling feel-good stories about sponsoring poster children may pull at the heartstrings. But only scientific methods like the randomized controlled trial can determine the most effective means of improving health and educational outcomes (in East Africa, it seems to be deworming medicine).6 So effective altruists work to set up charitable organizations like Giving What We Can and GiveWell that do in-depth research about effective charity, drawing on the math of probability and expected value.

And those charities need money. This is why MacAskill advised Bankman-Fried years ago not to become an activist or a nonprofit worker but a businessman who could earn billions to give away to effective altruist causes.7 (There’s at least some reason to think this is why he took significant risks with his investors’ money.8)

Effective altruism also urges guarding against decisions and policies that could have unanticipated disastrous consequences. AI surely will have revolutionary consequences, so it’s no surprise that effective altruists gravitate toward offering guidance about its use. Here again, they draw on the mathematics of expected value (and disvalue) to calculate long-term impact.

Young tech leaders look to effective altruism because they have pressing questions about how to live meaningful lives amid their success. Doubtless their own commitment to science and technology makes effective altruism’s quantitatively oriented approach seem ready-made for their purposes.

But a closer look at both the full meaning of the philosophy and its intellectual roots suggests that it is anything but rational and scientific. Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge tech platforms appear to be running on legacy code — a legacy moral code from a more primitive era.

The absurd martyrdom of longtermism

If you really squint, from a distance effective altruism looks like common sense: don’t make decisions by doing what feels good in the short term; use hardheaded numbers to assess long-range consequences. But in focus, its ultimate advice is anything but common sense. It demands the kind of martyrdom for a cause you’d expect from a religious cult.

The philosophical father of effective altruism is Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” was seminal. Singer argues that if we agree we should wade into a shallow pond to save a child from drowning, we should also want to save the lives of strangers overseas dying from starvation or disease.9 And, since there could be millions of such strangers, we should be working full time to give so much that we might lower our standard of living to only slightly better than that of the suffering people we should be helping.10 According to Singer, this is our moral duty: it’s immoral not to do it.11

Effective altruists have gone on to practice what he preached. There are the tech and finance professionals (like Bankman-Fried) who earn huge salaries but live like grad students just so they can give the money away.12 One practitioner of this ethic was not content to give away millions: he also gave a kidney to a stranger (over the objections of his family).13 Others who were directly influenced by effective altruist ideology have now done the same.14

If that doesn’t already make effective altruism sound like a religious cult, William MacAskill’s manifesto of the latest “upgrade” to effective altruist ideology should make it especially clear.

Just months before the FTX scandal, MacAskill released a major new book, What We Owe the Future. The title conjures the “longtermist” version of effective altruism he advocates, which urges us to orient our thinking toward our impact on potential generations in the distant future and work overtime for their sake.

What does this mean practically? Because the longtermists also believe in maximizing the sum total of happiness, they think more of us should work to have and raise more children because an increase in the population adds more to that sum total.15 Longtermists also emphasize the moral imperative to colonize outer space, as this is seen as necessary for the expansion of consciousness across the universe.16 Some longtermists even seriously urge that we create the preconditions for the evolution of new post-human digital beings whose artificial consciousness, once it replicates itself, will add vast new quantities to the sum total of “happiness” of the universe.17^,18

This explains some of the effective altruist interest in artificial intelligence. Longtermists hunger for the day when it gives birth to more digitally conscious offspring. But more pressing than any hopes for AI’s happiness are fears of its wrath.

The longtermists regard worries about catastrophic climate change as too short-term and not existentially threatening enough. For them, real long-term thinking means trying to anticipate impacts centuries or even millennia into a future that no one we love will ever know. So they are concerned to prevent global pandemics and nuclear wars, but not because of the immeasurable suffering these could cause for the present human population. Instead, they’re concerned about the small chance they could cause the eventual extinction of the entire human race and so prevent the expanding happiness of distant future generations.19

What really animates their long-term ambitions is the concern that the wrong values could be locked into the programming of artificial intelligence, such that AI could someday turn on us, manipulate our values, and cause our extinction.20 No doubt there are massive challenges posed by rapidly developing AI technology — as there are extraordinary opportunities — just as we would expect from any revolutionary technology. But as with their account of pandemics and nuclear war, the longtermists do not think about the challenges of AI in the way the rest of us do, or should.

Consider: MacAskill’s book actually proposes that the extinction of humanity might not be all that bad, since it might be just what AI needs to achieve the greatest sum of happiness in the universe. The reason to fear this outcome is only that before this happens, we might not succeed in locking the right values into our AI. Such “misaligned” AI could then terrorize its own digital underlings. “The key issue, in my view, is not whether humans or AIs are in control. . . . The key issue is which values will guide the future.”21

MacAskill actually thinks that maybe we shouldn’t care about human extinction if it is good as a means to AI’s end, and that we should care about the impersonal sum total of happiness for digital beings we can neither know nor imagine. Both ideas are absurd. What reason could we possibly have to be humble servants dedicated to maximizing an impersonal mathematical sum of “happiness” that is not to be experienced or valued by anyone alive today, nor by any single individual ever? Why should we keep our eyes on the heaven or hell in the stars that awaits our distant human or digital grandchildren? Mostly, longtermists seem to fear a coming hell.

What’s the root of this absurd call to martyrdom?

The ideal at the root of longtermism’s absurdities

Critics claim that the effective altruist obsession with a far-off, improbable future is inexcusable when there are real people suffering and dying in our world today.22 To explain longtermism’s detachment, its conventional critics point to everything from the idiosyncratic sci-fi interests of tech nerds to the bias induced by donors eager to excuse their wealth and power.23 Still others claim it’s excessive idealism: longtermists are foolishly “hubristic” to think that any vision of the good can be achieved.24

None of these critics seriously consider the intellectual content of the ideal of altruism itself. We can begin to see why by looking closer at MacAskill’s book.

“Morality, in central part, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own.”25 That’s MacAskill’s foundational assumption about the nature of morality, one that few of effective altruism’s critics would challenge. But if it’s true, where shall we find all the other shoes to put ourselves in? If altruism is to be understood by looking to consequences of one’s actions for the largest number of people, why wouldn’t one look to the very long-term future where most of the other people will be?

What about the idea that it’s heartless to ignore the others in our very midst? MacAskill invokes another idea from Peter Singer, that we should not be any less concerned for strangers halfway around the world than we are for a child drowning in a pond in front of us. But if distance in space from the self is not morally relevant, why should distance in time be? The moral concerns of the conventional critics of effective altruism seem too sentimentally connected to the selfish present.26

Another inspiration for the effective altruists’ obsession with future generations is philosopher Derek Parfit. If Singer is the father of effective altruism, Parfit is the grandfather (he was also MacAskill’s mentor at Oxford).27 Parfit famously argued that if we should maximize the total sum of happiness, we should do it even if it means increasing the population in a way that makes each individual less happy (his infamous “repugnant conclusion”).28 Parfit’s reasoning is then clearly at work in the longtermists’ baby-making project.29

Why care about maximizing the total sum of this alleged “happiness” across all time, anyway? Parfit supplies an answer that reveals a core assumption of altruism, “effective” or otherwise. He famously challenged the idea that the individual has a stable personal identity over the course of his life. In this view, prudent planning and working for one’s future is really just sacrificing for the sake of one’s “future self,” a totally different person. There is no interest of an enduring self. But then one’s reason to serve one’s future self at a given time is not one of self-interest. It’s a moral reason that’s no different from one’s reason to serve other future people.30 All that matters morally is maximizing the impersonal total quantity of happiness.

Caring about such an impersonal sum should now look especially absurd. Who is there to enjoy any happiness, and for how long, if there are no enduring selves able to enjoy it? Who is there to care about anyone’s happiness, if there are no selves to care?

Yet the altruists are just following the logic of the path that’s been laid down by eminent moral philosophers — and religious gurus — of the past. They say morality is really about caring more about others than about yourself, since there are so many more others than you who need your equal attention. And the best way to be concerned with the most others is to concern yourself with the vast future beyond the interests of your insignificant, fragmented self.

If effective altruist practices are absurd, we should take seriously that this long-cherished moral ideal is the real absurdity at their root.

The faith-based roots

Effective altruism has long portrayed itself as a rational alternative to an irrational, emotionalist approach to charity. We are urged to ignore feel-good appeals about saving cute children and endangered species we connect to personally, when our resources could have greater impact by serving a greater number of distant others who bear no connection to our lives. Yet as we have seen, the practice of its doctrine has all the trappings of a cultish religion. Working overtime to earn money and sacrifice it while also churning out babies, all for the sake of appeasing and facilitating the creation of higher digital beings in a far-off future, sure does sound like joining a religious cult.31

But none of effective altruism’s critics today — not even those who call it a cult — consider that the essence of altruism itself is the source of the religious fervor. Yet even as the gurus of effective altruism urge us to avoid irrational sentiment when deciding on our means, they themselves indulge in it in their choice of end.

Peter Singer’s entire case for effective altruism rests on an article of faith, the idea that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”32 Singer thinks that even those who earn a salary that barely affords them a modest middle-class lifestyle should give it up to live just above the poverty line.33 That salary is not of comparable moral importance in his view, and so giving it up is obligatory, according to his faith.

In an effort to suggest that his faith is not “wildly out of line” with common sense, Singer quotes none other than St. Thomas Aquinas quoting St. Ambrose: “The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.”34 His quotation of Christian theologians should drive home that his basic premise derives from a cultural atmosphere that draws its basic moral doctrines from religion.

Elsewhere, when he seeks to defend the rationality of his methodology in ethics — to show it is not just faith — Singer finds a more general principle to deduce his arguments from. That “each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own” he takes as an intuitively obvious axiom, like a first principle of mathematics.35

But as Singer must know, such an axiom is far from clear and certain to everyone. It very likely would have been alien to Socrates, who founded the subject of moral philosophy to determine the virtues necessary to achieve one’s own happiness or eudaemonia. It would have been alien if not absurd to Aristotle, who said that while the end of one’s flourishing could include the good of one’s parents, children, spouse, and friends, “we must impose some limit; for if we extend the good to parents’ parents and children’s children and to friends of friends, we shall go on without limit.”36 And I for one reject it outright. Is my intuitive capacity for grasping moral truth damaged?

Parfit’s philosophical premises are no more exempt from faith-infused sentiment. He was the child and grandchild of Christian missionaries.37 And while he self-identified as an atheist, in the final appendix of his book Reasons and Persons, he tells the reader about how the foundational assumption of his ethics, about the nonexistence of an enduring self, can be found in the works of the Buddha, citing a poem: “The mental and the material are really here, / But here there is no human being to be found. / For it is void and merely fashioned like a doll, / Just suffering piled up like grass and sticks.”38

Effective altruists who pride themselves on their scientific approach seem oblivious to the possibility that their “intuitions” do not yield access to some self-evident truth but are nothing more than emotional reactions conditioned by ideas they’ve accepted uncritically from a social milieu pervaded by two millennia of Christianity. However dispassionate they think they may be about their selection of means, their end is dictated by an uncritical sentiment inherited from the teachings of their parents and grandparents.

The irrationality of effective altruism’s demands is due to the faith-based irrationality of its ideal, the ideal of altruism itself. This is the faulty legacy code of effective altruism’s sector of the tech industry. But it can be reprogrammed.

The real alignment problem

Many of the more rational people among the tech entrepreneurs who are attracted to effective altruism may see it as a source of optimism about the future. If they can use rational calculation to solve so many problems in technology, why can’t they do the same for the biggest social problems?

It’s an understandable attitude, but its flaw comes from the assumption that rationality only concerns the calculation of means to foreordained ends. Crucially, it leaves the end they seek to achieve — the greater good of the altruist’s impersonal sum — unscrutinized by reason. For those optimists bold enough to challenge the code of their elders, there’s an unprecedented opportunity to “disrupt” our society’s default thinking about morality.

For as much as AI doomsayers worry about the “alignment problem” — between the “values” locked into AI and those held by human beings — there’s a bigger alignment problem to solve. It’s the alignment between human values and reality. The assumption that some mix of our culture’s values is already good enough, that it’s just a challenge to make the machines “value” what we do, betrays a dangerous complacency. It’s the same complacency that leads longtermists to take altruist values to their logical consequence and propose bizarrely cultish forms of martyrdom.

Technology optimists should throw off that complacency and think more carefully about what it means for our values to align with reality, and then work first to instill those first principles into the culture of Silicon Valley, before they consider how to program their machines.

Image credits (left to right): Sam Deere, GRÉEA, and Anna Riedl / Wikimedia Commons