17 years ago I was an EA
Today I am an EA still, despite it all.

Why?

There’s a man in India, 68 years old, we will call him Praggnanandhaa for short, who has 7 grandkids and 3 kids. Praggnanandhaa is celebrating his birthday tomorrow, the whole family is coming, the kids are expecting cake, which they don’t see often. During the birthday, the kids will play and laugh, and Praggnanandhaa will feel their love, and give some wise advice to his children, let’s call them Ajeya and Dwarkesh. There’s nothing super special about the event. They are not a wealthy family, but to them, it is special. They will get to learn, love, smile, and feel the taste of delicious, if unhealthy, cake.

Four years ago, Praggnanandhaa was between life and death. A donation I helped cause to an organization that could help him brought him oxygen, just in the nick of time. Praggnanandhaa is only alive today because of that donation. The joy and thrill of the kids in his birthday only happened because he is alive. His kids can only enjoy still having a father because of that donation. Praggnanandhaa will live to be 87 years old, a record in poorer areas of India. Those moments of joy (and some of sadness too, and loneliness) will multiply for 19 more years.

Praggnanandhaa is standing here for one of the many people my actions, and the actions of our movement, helped save.

THERE ARE 55,000 Praggnanandhaas

I used Sol, Astra, Fable and others to give them a ridiculous amount of private information of my actions over the last 17 years as an EA. What I did, what I didn’t, who I donated to, who I recruited. Who I caused to donate. Which causes I favored. Etc…

The end result is 55.000 lives. That’s 2026 lives. Not Shrimp, humans. Not future humans far away in time. People living and breathing today, like Ajeya, Dwarkesh, and Praggnanandhaa.

If that was the entirety of my contribution to life on earth, and I died today, I would consider that a spectacular, phenomenal, outstanding, unbelievable life well lived.

And that is not counting the 51% of me that is selfish, and has his own reasons to be happy, like watching a beautiful sunset or going on a rollercoaster. Like seeing my cousin smile when I was a toddler.

The future lives estimate, which I care about the most (I am a Long Termist EA, and have been since before we named EA, I was one of the early Extropians, SL4, Transhumanists, though I was just a teenager, passively watching the big brain adults speculate about jupiter brains) is staggering. The number is so staggering, I am embarassed to use it even for myself. I told Astra and Sol to do the geometric mean estimate of a bounded future. (I know that operation makes no mathematical sense for EV, I just coudn’t bear the colossal number. I have no justification for my actions other than emotion).

131 Trillion

I suspect you understand why I am emotionally averse to the far larger number. I can’t hold that much in my shoulders.

When I was a visiting fellow at FHI in 2013, I made a joke when saying bye to Nick Bostrom about thanking him on behalf of the 10^51 possible lives he may have influenced, and he pretended to be Atlas, holding the Earth, and pretended to almost fall, with the burden above his shoulder. At the time, I thought I knew what he meant not only intellectually, but emotionally.

Now I do.

Obviously by now, most of you are raging about me saying my genuine beliefs about the impact of my life, as just one more Ape in the floating rock in space. To which I say: Fair enough, but that is genuinely what I believe. And if I am wrong, even if I am wrong by a factor of 10 in present lives, and factor of a million in future lives, I would still do it all again in a heartbeat.

I am still an Effective Altruist despite the movement branching away from right-winger Trumpers like me in 2017 and 2018, because, understandably, there were literal billionaires saying “we will give you money and power, just don’t support the orange man.” That is what was effective at the time, for them.

6% of EAs are republican today, because we heavily recruited in the top 10 universities, which all lean left, and because literal billionaires said “here’s literally billions to save lives in your special way, just add some democrat causes along the way”.

If they say jump, EAs said how high? AS THEY WELL SHOULD.

I don’t resent EA for distancing me politically from those parts. I am a biological anthropologist, loud, I talk about IQ heritability all the time, I support Trump which today everyone does but in 2017 was the gravest sin imaginable in the bay area. They acted correctly, and I knew it at the time, and told them. Yes, it sucked for me. But some goods, like the many hundreds of thousands of lives saved by global poverty EAs, are worth one moderately less happy Brazilian ape.

I’m a threshold EA. I am not trying to do the absolute maximal good. First off I’m only 49% altruistic. Second, I only buy lives when the price is cheap. I would not buy a life for 10k, or 1k. That’s because I spent 17 years finding cheaper levers, some emerged, and now I have already done more for the world than, well, most people, to put it humbly.

That’s why I am still an Effective Altruist despite it all.

I still think of Praggnanandhaa, Dwarkesh, and Ajeya sometimes.

Much more often I think of the future people, who I care about 1/1000 of what I care for present people, but whose number is kinda large, 131 trillion.

I can now feel in my shoulders a tiny fraction what it must have been like to be Nick Bostrom in 2013 making that joke while writing Superintelligence, the most important book about the most important event in history.

It is a lot to carry.

But I am an optimist and dispositionally happy most of the time.
I am what we call a Gratitude EA, not a Guilt EA.

So, for me, EA doesn’t feel like a demand, exacting my every breath from me. If feels like an opportunity, like in the shoe salesman story.

Praggnanadhaa will receive his first ever closed shoe from Ajeya tomorrow. She got a good job, and wants to repay him for raising her right.

Glorious Opportunity, they don’t have any shoes yet!