I am 25% Effective Altruist

I've been interested in Effective Altruism for a long time now, but I've never been comfortable with a lot of the EA dogma.

In particular, I'm very skeptical about how much we can reason about the far future; I think there is just too much uncertainty about what the world will look like in 100 years to try to make some rational computation about how to effectively spend $100 today.

I'm also skeptical about how much to apply our moral intuitions to animals other than humans, and extremely skeptical of attempts to compare animal suffering and human suffering to come up with some sort of calculus of "X insect lives are worth Y sheep lives are equivalent to one human life (so we should spend N dollars to improve the lives of insects instead of spending them improving the lives of sheep or humans)." 

In my head I split the effective altruism movement into four quadrants, with short-term, human-focused charities being the ones I focus on.

(AI-generated image)

GiveDirectly is still my favorite charity, because they actually measure their effectiveness and can talk to the people they help to make sure what they are doing is actually helping.

I don't think anybody really knows how to measure the effectiveness of something like AI safety efforts, so if I was King of the Effective Altruists I'd tell the AI safety people to go march under a different banner. Same for the shrimp welfare folks. I don't think it helps the EA movement to be associated with causes that can't easily show their effectiveness.

I'm not saying that those causes are bad or that somebody shouldn't be working on them-- just that "Effective" is the key part of "Effective Altruism" and it is very easy to fool ourselves about our effectiveness when we're excited and working hard on something. I remember lots of times when I worked for hours "optimizing" a piece of code just to see it run 11% slower when I benchmarked it.

Grok tells me there's active discussion/debate in some EA forums about measuring effectiveness for AI safety work. Good! I'll just say that as a lazy effective altruist who doesn't spend any time keeping track of the latest discussions... I don't see much "epistemic humility" coming from the more speculative areas that are lumped under the EA umbrella.

Tipping is mostly price discrimination and status

I don't really like the US "tipping culture", but I think that's just because I'm a minimalist geek who wants everything to be as simple as possible. Tell me how much something costs up front and I'll pay it.

But I don't think tipping is evil corporations trying to rip off hourly wage workers, and more tipping might actually be a net positive for the world. I responded recently to this post on X:

Tipping used to be a reward for exceptional sit-down restaurant service. In 2026, you turn around a self-checkout screen at a self-service kiosk to buy a pre-packaged $6 bottle of water, and the software defaults to asking for a 22% tip. Corporations aren't using point-of-sale tipping systems to reward staff…..they’re using customer guilt to subsidize low hourly wages without raising their base pay.

I said:

Tipping is a way to get rich people to pay more so poorer people can pay less. Or, cynically, a way for wealthier people to feel superior to the losers who poke the zero button.

Maybe when tipping started it was a reward for exceptional service, although I kinda think that's probably just what the rich people that did the tipping back then told themselves when it was really about demonstrating their good breeding and high status.

Today I think tipping is mostly a painless way for companies to implement price discrimination -- a way to charge a higher price to people who are willing to pay more. People who can pay more often do pay more because humans are status-conscious primates.

People usually have a very negative reaction to price discrimination; it tickles the unfairness detector in our brains when a person or company figures out we're rich and decides to charge us more, even if that means less well-off people are charged less (which is what happens in a competitive market; greedy corporations can't overcharge or a competitor will drive them out of business). Tipping makes the price discrimination voluntary and invisible.