Legendary philosopher Peter Singer defends effective altruism. I don\u2019t self-identify as an EA, but I do think highly of the core thesis of using data to decide what actions will do the most good. I do consider myself a longtermist \u2014 a philosophical stance which is often thought of as existing under the EA umbrella. Note: there is a common misconception that longtermists *only* care about the long term future, which is false. Most care about the long term future as one major priority, but certainly don\u2019t think we should ignore the issues of today.<\/p>\n
When the US Department of War posted on X that they were focused on \u201cAmericanism, not effective altruism\u201d, it said much more about them than about the movement I helped to launch 15 years ago.<\/p>\n
The simple fact is that while President Trump\u2019s popularity has reached an almost unprecedented-26% approval<\/a>, rivalled by only Nixon after Watergate, the movement that his administration is spending its time attacking enjoys majority support<\/a> among those who are familiar with its tenets.<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s why The Economist cover this week has termed it \u201cthis century\u2019s biggest idea\u201d because ultimately, a movement focused on the simple question of how to do the most good possible with the resources we have is not, as an internal memo circulating in the White House termed it, \u201cputting shrimp over families\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Legendary philosopher Peter Singer defends effective altruism. I don\u2019t self-identify as an EA, but I do think highly of the core thesis of using data to decide what actions will do the most good. I do consider myself a longtermist \u2014 a philosophical stance which is often thought of as existing under the EA umbrella. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}