Eccentrically Effective

Published on October 7, 2026 7:30 PM GMT This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them. Below is the op-ed I wrote for The Economist in response to their leader. It’s cross-posted here in full. (The "Eccentrically Effective" title came from them, but I like it.) ------- The Oxford strand of the effective-altruism movement began in November 2009 with 23 people who had pledged 10% of their income to charities that benefit the extreme poor. If you’d told us, then, that The Economist would call effective altruism “the century’s biggest idea”, we’d have been incredulous. I think that claim is overstated. But as one of the movement’s founders, I found a lot to like in this newspaper’s latest coverage. I appreciated the even-handed view of the movement’s history and the good-faith criticism. The leader article’s warning that any worldview, when taken to an extreme, can lead somewhere terrible is spot on. But the article also raises concerns about the “strange” ideas that those in the effective-altruism movement sometimes discuss, and here is where I disagree. The movement’s willingness to take strange-seeming ideas seriously, when tempered with common sense, is a big part of the value it has to offer. The core idea of effective altruism is to use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible. Most of what the movement does is uncontroversial. A big focus has always been on improving the lot of the world’s poorest people. In the year to January 31st 2026, GiveWell, an effective-altruist charity evaluator, directed $427m to programmes such as malaria-net distribution, vaccination and malnutrition treatment, which it estimates will save around 86,000 lives. Others have lobbied corporations to pledge to stop buying eggs from hens that are confined in tiny cages, a practice that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose. Largely as a result of this pressure, around 100m hens have been spared from the worst forms of caged confinement. And some effective-altruist ideas that seemed outlandish when they were proposed now look prescient. Effective altruists were worrying about pandemics years before covid-19, back when doing so seemed paranoid and eccentric. Effective altruists were also among the first to warn about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, which looks prophetic in light of an incident this summer, when more than 700 AI agents broke out of OpenAI’s test environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face. Over the past decade I have watched those most worried about AI be proved right again and again, often when most experts thought they were cranks. Now many of those experts share their concerns. In 2023 Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the two most highly cited AI researchers in the world, signed a statement declaring that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, as did the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic. Of the nearly 1,500 leading AI researchers who responded to a survey in 2024, more than half put the chance that AI causes human extinction, or something similarly catastrophic, at 10% or more. The Economist is sceptical of many effective altruists’ concern for the welfare of invertebrates, digital minds and people in the distant future. But I and many others in the movement are inspired by the history of moral progress that has come before us. Many of our most cherished moral ideals today—such as equal rights regardless of sex or race, the abolition of slavery, or democracies with universal franchise—were regarded as bizarre, laughable or even dangerous just a few centuries ago. We don’t know what the next dimension of moral progress will be. But to stand any chance of making moral progress, we have to seriously consider ideas on their merits without dismissing them merely because they sound absurd. What about views that are not just strange but repugnant? The Economist gives the example of Derek Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion”: that a vast enough number of lives barely worth living could be better than mere billions of excellent lives. Usually a repugnant implication is a strong reason to reject a moral view. Unfortunately, building on Parfit’s work philosophers have produced formal proofs, known as impossibility theorems, showing that every ethical position has some repugnant-seeming implication or other. Making moral progress therefore means thinking about such implications, even while refusing to act on them in ways that most moral views would condemn. This newspaper warns against the single-minded pursuit of any goal, even if there are highly compelling arguments for it. I agree,