“Eccentrically Effective” by William_MacAskill

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 [...] --- First published: October 7th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/imZtsr3Ww4c2zEMXA/eccentrically-effective --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.