Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis:
But then there are the parts of effective altruism that are just … weird.
For many of its adherents, EA is not just an idea but a transformational lifestyle. There is no limit to how much of your time, money, and identity you can give over to it. EA is intertwined with the rationalist movement, so much so that they are virtually synonyms, different faces of the same set of thinkers, ideas, and organizations. There are formalized online communities. There are in-person meetups. For $3,900 a pop, you can attend four-day-long rationality training workshops at the Bay-area Center for Applied Rationality. Or you can just read up on what Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose work helped inspire the seminars, calls “The Way” of rationality: “The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less.” Yudkowsky, currently enjoying a moment as the world’s leading expert on AI safety research, was once better known for his FanFiction.net magnum opus Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which spans nearly twice the length of Anna Karenina.
more here.
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