“EA Adjacency as FTX Trauma” by Mjreard

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack.
Matt would like to add: "Epistemic status = incomplete speculation; posted here at the Forum team's request"

When you ask prominent Effective Altruists about Effective Altruism, you often get responses like these:

For context, Will MacAskill and Holden Karnofsky are arguably, literally the number one and two most prominent Effective Altruists on the planet. Other evidence of their ~spouses’ personal involvement abounds, especially Amanda's. Now, perhaps they’ve had changes of heart in recent months or years – and they’re certainly entitled to have those – but being evasive and implicitly disclaiming mere knowledge of EA is comically misleading and non-transparent. Calling these statements lies seems within bounds for most.[1]

This kind of evasiveness around one's EA associations has been common since the collapse of FTX in 2022, (which, for yet more context, was a major EA funder that year and [...]

---

Outline:

(03:32) Why can't EAs talk about EA like normal humans (or even normal executives)?

(05:54) Coming of age during the Great Awokening

(07:15) Bad Comms Advice

(08:22) Not understanding how words work (coupled with motivated reasoning)

(11:05) Trauma

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

April 8th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6NCYo7RFYfkEjLAtn/ea-adjacency-as-ftx-trauma

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

---

---

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.