Effective Altruism Is a Misnomer Just Ask Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias

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Many thinkers agree that a small motivated group of true believers can change the world, from Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” to Ayn Rand, “As long as men are free to speak, a small, rational minority will always prevail over an irrational majority” to Will Durant, ““The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.”

Well heads up, we’ve got a new, very small, very motivated, very deranged “effective altruist” (or “Rationalist” or “Tescreal” etc etc) minority and they’ve already changed the world dramatically for the worse.

Today I’m going to be singling out one of their leaders, “journalist” Ezra Klein, the swerve behind the “AI” will kill us all panic they’ve driven, and the roots of their associated belief systems, such as they are.

When possible, you know I like to remind everyone what era we’re in to start out. Repeat along with me: we’re in the Trump Regime 2.0 era.

What’s the Trump Regime Doing Talking About Effective Altruism?

We’re definitely going down the rabbit hole into wonderland today because the Trumpers are going to be something like a voice of sanity and Bernie Sanders will be ranking amongst the batsh….family bloggers.

Regardless, like a blind rat on a battlefield who’s long since gone insane nibbling on lead bullets seizing on a corn nut that’s fallen out of a corpse’s pocket, the Trumpers have seized on something healthy and nutritious for once.

Axios sums up the Trump war on EA the best, they also completely misrepresent the nature of EA and what the likely goals of their “AI doomerism” are, but that’s Axios for ya:

The philosophy, which promotes the use of evidence and reason to do the most good for humanity, has helped shape and fund parts of the AI safety movement.

But it has put some of its supporters at odds with President Trump’s push to accelerate U.S. AI development.

The Trump administration spent the early part of the week criticizing AI leaders after a number of key voices called for a slower development pace due to concerns about catastrophic risks from the technology.

Trump bashed AI doomers on social media, claiming that fears of AI are a hoax on par with “Russiagate” and the president’s own impeachments.

The Defense Department called out the EA movement by name, posting “Americanism, not effective altruism” on X.

Defense Department Under Secretary Emil Michael told Fox News that EA and the push for AI safety “comes from a deep-rooted ideology that is pretty dystopian.”

Trump adviser and former AI czar David Sacks argued that organizations linked to effective altruism are part of what he calls the “Doomer Industrial Complex,” pushing tougher AI regulation that could handicap the United States’ global competitiveness.

Truly, we are living in an age of titanic philosophical debates. Take that, Gore Vidal and William Buckley.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders insists on totally embarrassing himself like this and getting called out for it by podcaster Kate Willett:

So disappointing to see Bernie embrace the EA Evil Machine God narrative instead of focusing on the immense present harms that are right in his wheelhouse. https://t.co/9mjW2eANwi pic.twitter.com/Z1JoFQnm2m

— Kate Willett (@katewillett) September 21, 2026

And that exchange succinctly sums up the effective altruism scam in two tweets: the existential threats based on no evidence are a wonderful distraction from all the actual harm done by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers behind them: Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and SpaceX.

Maybe someone should buy Senator Sanders a subscription to the MIT Technology Review so he can at least give this piece by a scan:

Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.

It’s worth thinking about why there is so much attention on computer programming and math as fields in which to apply large language models and related technology. Not only are they often elevated as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, but they involve problems where answers, once suggested, can be verified. The former property helps AI hype mongers sell the idea that they are building everything machines. The latter makes math and coding problems easier to tune systems for, since system output (sequences of likely words or pieces of computer code) can be evaluated without having to pay data workers to look at and annotate each one.

Mathematicians in particular have warned against corporations using their field in this way. A statement signed by hundreds of them says there is “currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products” and asks policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.”

We echo this call and note that the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works, such as with Senator Bernie Sanders’s well-meaning but ultimately misguided proposed legislation to prevent the development of “artificial superintelligence.”

Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.

Those following “the discourse” might recognize one of the co-authors of the above, Timnit Gebru as one of the coiners of the phrase “stochastic parrots” to describe LLMs.

Which phrase must have hit the mark because there’s currently a coordinated campaign claiming “it’s not a stochastic parrot”:

Their “don’t fall for stochastic parrots line in 2026” thing is a coordinated talking point among all of them. That’s what they’re telling captured Dem politicians so that we can all help market their products as super powerful machine gods, ban competition & capture regulation.

— @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) (@timnitGebru) September 22, 2026

David Z. Morris, author of “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia“, tweeted:

“It’s not a stochastic parrot” is also a fundamental building block of their utilitarian-authoritarian moral framework.

They are making short-term tradeoffs for an imagined future of simulated brains on servers. Those brains must count as “humans” for the math to work.

But if an LLM can only ever be a representation – a stochastic parrot – then it can never have consciousness or agency. That means it can never have ethical equivalency to humans.

“It’s not a stochastic parrot” should always be read as “the robot is worth as much as your life.”

Also, “stochastic parrot” isn’t a comment on the utility of these tools … unless you want to believe they have creativity or imagination.

Parrotry can produce amazing outputs – but you need massive compute to do it because compared to *thinking,* it is wildly inefficient.

Morris also pointed out the innumeracy of “AI stans”: “The number of AI stans who can’t grasp really critical mathematical hard limits is truly mind-boggling.

“A lot of the failures of EA are because they don’t want to read books, but they obviously never took theoretical math, either.”

And this is relevant because, as Gregory Travis, a former fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, pointed out:

so-called ‘Recursive Self Improvement’ is not a thing that’s actually happening with AI, nor is a thing that can happen with statistical inference. Recursive self improvement is something that only a thinking machine can do and AI machines (linear algebra equation solvers) don’t and can’t think.

And that brings us to our headliner Ezra Klein, a former colleague of mine at Vox Media (boy those were the days) who recently devoted an entire column to calling for the banning of recursive self-improvement in his bold call to action “There Is Something We Have to Do Right Now About A.I.”

Warning About Non-Existent Problems Is a Great Distraction From Real Ones

Oh, Ezra’s on fire in this one:

Human beings need to control the frontier, and controlling the frontier means stopping the labs from doing something they are on the cusp of doing: recursive self-improvement, the process by which A.I.s begin autonomously building and improving new generations of more powerful A.I.s at ever more rapid speeds. We are not close to having sufficient control of the A.I. systems we have now to unleash them to build the A.I. systems of tomorrow.

I am not alone in this fear. Recursive self-improvement, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, wrote, “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”

As cybersecurity expert Gregory Travis pointed out above, “‘Recursive Self Improvement’ is not a thing that’s actually happening with AI, nor is a thing that can happen with statistical inference.”

But Ezra’s credulousness is exactly what’s made him a star.
When Obama and Rahm Emanuel’s Insurance Company Protection Act Affordable Care Act needed a court jester to pose easily answered questions, Ezra was there.

If you listen closely you can almost hear Obama say, “that’s one hell of a shine, boy,” as he tosses Klein a well-earned nickel, surely to be spent on a lolly at the very next candy store little Ezra came across.

Ezra’s Made This Crap a Centerpiece of His Career

Check it out:

Then there’s Future Perfect, a sub-section of Vox.com featuring Effective Altruism booster Dylan Matthews, who left Vox to become the associate program officer of Coefficient Giving’s Abundance & Growth Fund just in time for the Abundance roll out, and check out the funders:

What a noble and storied roster of great philanthropists. This makes Rockefeller handing out dimes to newsboys look like an old man handing out dimes to newsboys!

And now we’ll let one of the leading authorities on Silicon Valley nonsense rip Effective Altruism to shreds.

I Present: Émile P. Torres Reformed Transhumanist

Here’s Torres’ classic 2023 piece for Truthdig: “Effective Altruism Is a Welter of Lies, Hypocrisy, and Eugenic Fantasies”:

t’s been a no good, very bad year for Effective Altruism, or “EA” for short, the cultural movement that aims to use “evidence and reason” to figure out the best ways to do the “most good.”

One year ago, the EA community was flying high. Its poster boy, a philosopher named William MacAskill, had just published his book “What We Owe the Future,” which makes the case that we should be far more concerned about humanity’s long-term future — thousands, millions, even billions of years from now — than we ordinarily are. Effective Altruists call this “longtermism,” an idea built around a vision of the future in which we reengineer humanity, colonize space, plunder the vast resources of the cosmos, and ultimately maximize the total amount of “value” in the universe by creating huge numbers of “digital people” living “happy” lives in giant computer simulations.

If this sounds bizarre and potentially dangerous, that’s because it is. Yet MacAskill’s book, longtermism and the EA movement that he co-founded received mostly favorable coverage from leading news outlets like The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Time magazine. MacAskill himself was a guest on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, who was impressed with MacAskill’s claim that he gives away more than 50% of his income to EA-approved charities.

This was EA’s big opportunity to convince the public to join the movement and embrace the longtermist “ethic.” And boy did it backfire, due to a series of scandals that, as of this writing, starts and ends with a certain crypto heavyweight named Sam Bankman-Fried, whose criminal trial for perpetrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history recently concluded with seven guilty verdicts.

And since I’m running out of space and time (but not space/time, thankfully) I’ll bullet point more of Torres’ work on the set of interweaving Silicon Valley cult beliefs he calls TESCREAL:

• “Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo.”  AEON 2021
• Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (book, 2024)
• The TESCREAL bundle — transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism. First Monday, with Timnit Gebru 2024
• Under a Mask of AI Doomerism, the Familiar Face of Eugenics Truthdig 2025
•  Sam Altman’s Dangerous Singularity Delusions. Truthdig 2026
• The Tyrannical Race to Build Superintelligence Truthdig 2026
• The ASI Extinction Debate Is the Opposite of What You Think Realtime Techpocalypse 2026
• AI Safety, Explained Realtime Techpocalypse 2026

And that’s all for now, in a future installments we’ll learn about “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” co-authors Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares and their links to Peter Thiel, some things called MIRI and CFAR, the Zizian off shoot and more.

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• Will the Trump Admin Make OpenAI Its Lucky 31st Investment and Bailout Softbank?
• OpenAI, Amazon Colluding With Trump Against Anthropic
• Resistance Meets Reaction, Pope, Pension Funds, Data Centers, Trump Crypto Edition
• Abundance Bro Seth London & Lis Smith’s Caper Typifies State of the Art Dem Dark Money Schemes
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