The only honest effective altruist would end up somewhere near what Elon Musk is doing (on some things).
1) Spread his superior genes as far as wide as possible and utilizing the latest genetic enhancement at his disposal.
In theory he should take it further, buying eggs and using surrogates to do mass breeding programs and raising them in orphanages. But the PR impact of that is probably too much for him (just paying willing sluts millions to have IVF babies with him already causes a lot of backlash).
2) Donate nothing to charity and try to obtain high ROI for your capital. To the extent that your personal involvement can raise the ROI, dedicate your life to that.
Of course if you want something obviously correct from an EA perspective but within the mainstream, smart people should just have as many kids as they can afford and invest any spare capital they have in index funds.
"1) Spread his superior genes as far as wide as possible and utilizing the latest genetic enhancement at his disposal."
'Superior genes'? In what manner are they superior? I don't believe being avaricious is superior. Musk won the internet boom lottery and used the winnings to gain government backing for numerous projects. He definitely has a knack for making money, but I see little benefit to humanity.
What percentage of people do you think could get to where Musk is today if they started with the wealth Musk had in 2004? Why did 99% of people who DID have at least the same amount of wealth as Musk in 2004 not achieve a fraction of his success? Were they not greedy enough? Were they too charitable?
Do you think you could buy yourself a SpaceX? Do you think if you paid who you thought were the right people and but otherwise provided no managerial oversight of your own, they would build SpaceX to what it is today?
Even "winning the internet lottery" requires being exceptional. To even "have a ticket" in the lottery you had to be smart and ambitious enough to work at a silicon valley start-up in the first place, so its not like most people would have ever stood a chance.
This is the greatest delusion of our time, thinking that entrepreneurialism and start-up management is trivial, and that the only factor is having enough money in the first place.
Yes, not greedy enough, and not as adept at using government subsidies.
"Do you think if you paid who you thought were the right people and but otherwise provided no managerial oversight of your own, they would build SpaceX to what it is today?"
There is no doubt that Musk has great managerial abilities...I never said he didn't. But again Musk is best at sucking at the government tit.
"To even "have a ticket" in the lottery you had to be smart and ambitious enough to work at a silicon valley start-up in the first place, so its not like most people would have ever stood a chance."
Not everything Musk invested in turned to gold, some turned to shit. But that is my point; the love of wealth drove him - Rapaciousness.
"This is the greatest delusion of our time, thinking that entrepreneurialism and start-up management is trivial, and that the only factor is having enough money in the first place."
It is not trivial, but it doesn't require a genius-level IQ.
Whatever you may think of Musk (I'm not personally much of a fan) he's certainly above-average in IQ and intelligence is highly heritable. Intelligence is the single most important resource for humanity. His overwhelming wealth will be dispersed to dozens of reasonably-high-IQ offspring when he dies. I think that's clearly good for humanity. Much better than turning it over to a state machine which just plows it back into the incompetent underclass.
I'd put him more in the 130-140 range. Whatever you think of him his accomplishments are objectively impressive. His kids will regress to the mean but still be well above average, on average. I mean I'd rather Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos was the one doing this but you take what you can get. At least it's not Soulja Boy.
"These are laudable humanitarian goals. However, they don't do anything to further humanity's long-term interests."
In 2021-23 I helped to restart Poland's chapter of Effective Altruism funding, at times, 50-80% of the organization's activities. To some extent the decision to stop was driven by the fact that the organization became more and more self-sufficient and self-funding, but there were other reasons as well.
My exact wording when I decided to stop supporting Polish EA org ~2 years ago were:
"For many years I have had doubts about what proportions of my activities should be for helping the weak and needy and what for pushing humanity forward. In the last year I have had more need to act for the latter type of activity."
> "These are laudable humanitarian goals. However, they don't do anything to further humanity's long-term interests."
EA could always look into promoting birth control, along with reducing mortality rates. I think there's probably *some* long-term net benefit to humanity in, e.g, Africa not forever being a malthusian pressure-cooker wracked by war and famine.
I mean... I don't have the loftiest opinion of black intelligence etc., but blacks are still human and their lives have nonzero value. And even if they're usually situated at the bottom of economic production chains there's also probably, e.g, some benefit to global trade if the continent is more-or-less peaceful.
Human children are "week and needy". It stands to reason as a successful species that we have a strong drive to nurture them (and comparable members of our group), but that is not the only reason for our success (so far).
It would be a misapplication of that intuition. Children are first and foremost your own progeny. You rightly have greater moral intuition and obligation toward them as the extension of your own lineage. Second, children grow up and become more intelligent, self sufficient, and productive. Groups like sub-Saharan Africans never do and more importantly never can without something as extreme as mass gene editing. Their persistent failure is primarily genetically driven, highly heritable, and stable over many generations, which is why they always have the same outcomes anywhere you find a large group of them anywhere on Earth.
The size of a market depends on the wealth of participants not on their number. Sub-Saharan Africa GDP for 2023 was 2 trillion US dollars, U.S. GDP for 2022 was 25 trillion US dollars.
Plus poor people can't afford innovative stuff. Things like PCs and smartphones were first adopted in the US which led to mass production and a drop in prices and eventually they become adopted in the Third World when they were cheap enough.
But they're only a "market" because we give them so much money in the first place!
You're literally saying we should give them vast sums of money so that....they give some of it back? It makes no sense whatsoever.
And the basis of innovation isn't having lots of consumers! It's fundamental research. If you want more innovation, you need scientific and technological progress. If you want more of this, you get it by funding it directly, not through some rube goldberg machine recycling of your money through african aid which causes most of it to not end up in innovation.
If those humans aren't themselves productive then their consumption can only come from cannibalizing the consumption of other, more productive, people. Progress is unlocked by the productive exchange of *value*, not just consumption. People have to earn the right to consume otherwise you're just feeding mouths.
"The bigger the number of humans the bigger the market is for products and therefore innovation.
There are lots of other things to trade off of course but a higher-population world is more likely to see technological progress."
Thanks to the normal distribution of intelligence, there are a larger number of people who occupy the far right region of the curve. And that is what creates innovation.
But they serve as a profitable market for those who do!
SSA will continue to do almost zero innovation and import every new technology as has been the case for the last 500 years. But SSA will still serve as a market for innovation done mainly in the US, Asia, and Europe.
Aid to Africa mostly makes things worse for Africans. If you trade with Africa they have the money to buy mosquito nets or whatever it is you want to give them.
There is nothing that Africa can produce at scale for export that creates value (except natural resources). EA would be subsidising loss making enterprises - better to just give them the money directly.
There's no reason for anything to be made at scale in Africa - anything Africa can do can be done better and cheaper elsewhere.
And even the natural resources side of thing is entirely dependent on foreign expertise and investment - western or chinese.
It's a terrible argument. There's nothing that Africa can produce at scale other than basically natural resources and coffee that can't be done better and cheaper in China or India.
What's the issue with 'their' in "a creature generally believed to be endowed with the propensity to ignore their [sic] own drowning children"? Seems fine to me as "creature" is implicitly plural, though I presume "their" should be "his or her".
> Since Africans keep being poor and keep multiplying, these projects will have to keep scaling up. If African fertility rates keep being higher than everybody else's, the end result of this applied morality is Africanmaxxing. It is hard to see how this leads to the world becoming a better place given that Africans are the least capable group of advancing science and technology, and human flourishing more generally.
Word of strategic advise: avoid making arguments that make you sound like a sociopath.
I'm serious, we spend nearly a century with Communism dominating intellectual circles because the anti-Communists of the early 20th century thought they should lead with the Malthusian argument that if the poor got more money, they would keep breeding until the Earth was overwhelmed by overpopulation.
BTW this Malthusian argument wasn't true than and its not true now.
@Eugine Nier - Emil's "sociopathic" argument must be reckoned with. Africa is by no means freed from Malthusian logic. Google Steve Sailer's "World's Most Important Graph." It's the UN population projections by region. Africa is projected to swamp the rest of the world. This runaway population growth would not be possible without Western charities. So the hard question must be asked: Is this aid good for humanity?
> Emil's "sociopathic" argument must be reckoned with.
Fertility is collapsing even in Africa.
> Africa is projected to swamp the rest of the world. This runaway population growth would not be possible without Western charities. So the hard question must be asked: Is this aid good for humanity?
You really aren't good at this whole not sounding like a sociopath thing.
Fertility in Africa is collapsing? Well, you're actually right that the rate has fallen. But you're wrong to say it's collapsed. According to the UN, women average 4.3 to 4.6 children in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's down from 2000 (when it was 5+), but it's still the highest in the world. And it's still Malthusian.
As for whether it's sociopathic to discuss these issues...No. Your womanly shaming tactics carry no weight with me.
whats wrong with letting the africans figure it out on their own? (except "on their own" in this case still involves a massive head start from the developed world even if we dont intentionally try. most of the tools have already been handed to them.) a whole lot of humans had to be very poor for a very long time before figuring out how not to be poor. if it takes africa several more generations, its a rounding error.
You're operating under a flawed assumption: that Sub-Saharan Africa's developmental trajectory is simply a delayed version of the West's, and that with enough time, or enough external aid, they'll naturally converge with us. This is the same fatal miscalculation that doomed both Rhodesia and South Africa: the belief that all populations share equal underlying potential, and that cultural or economic differences are merely circumstantial or historical.
But this notion of innate equality doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Sub-Saharan populations consistently show significantly lower average IQs, about two full standard deviations below the European norm, and even below African Americans, who themselves have substantial European admixture. These cognitive differences are not isolated but correlate with a broader profile of behavioral traits: higher time preference, lower impulse control, increased baseline aggression, and reduced conscientiousness.
These traits are not just temporary byproducts of environment. They're highly heritable, and they've proven remarkably stable across generations, even in radically different settings. The key factor is evolutionary selection. In northern climates, failure to plan ahead for harsh winters was lethal, imposing strong selective pressure for traits like foresight, cooperation, and long-term planning. In equatorial climates, those pressures were far weaker or absent. The result is not a moral failing, but an evolutionary divergence in behavioral tendencies.
Absent either intense and sustained selective pressure (over thousands of years) or direct genetic modification, these populations are not going to fundamentally change. Giving them smartphones or bank loans doesn't rewrite thousands of generations of adaptation. The tools of modern civilization may be handed over, but the psychometric and behavioral architecture to wield them effectively doesn't automatically follow.
So no, it's not simply a matter of "figuring it out on their own."
Believing that a bit more time or assistance will close the gap fundamentally misunderstands the root of the problem.
i agree with pretty much everything you said. and by "figure it out on their own" i did not mean to imply they would be able to reach western living standards or emulate western culture "on their own", only that they would be allowed to evolve as societies on their own to whatever standards and cultural norms they wish for and are capable of. and if this is not to our standards, that is not a "failure". naturally some of this "evolution" would be influenced by surrounding cultures (including ours) but directly "helping" by attempting to impose western culture and standards is destined to fail.
I agree. They have evolved a different life strategy more suited to their natural homelands.
Unfortunately that means that they are not genetically adapted to be able to create our level of civilization, to maintain it when handed to them, or even adequately function in our own.
They should be left to live in their own natural environment where they are more "at home", being biologically adapted to that climate, those people, predators, food sources, etc.
Not to go on too much of a digression, but I think you'll find this interesting.
In the early 20th century, the US military started doing cognitive testing on recruits and found out that Blacks had significantly lower IQs than Whites, consistently. This was backed up by years of psychometric studies showing consistently significantly lower IQs among Blacks, and especially in native Sub-Saharan Africans.
What puzzled some people was as to why they seemed more functional on the surface than a White person with the same IQ would be.
This goes along with the more recent idea of "Adaptive Functioning", where a group might be evolved to a specific social or environmental context.
For example Blacks are actually evolved to have specific cognitive abilities and behavioral traits. This is their actual natural and normal state.
But for Whites, who evolved to have much higher IQ and a different slate of behavioral traits, having an IQ that low generally means something went very wrong developmentally, and it usually coincides with an array of other disabilities, both physical and mental.
Make sense?
So a 60 IQ Sub-Saharan African from a group where the normal mean IQ is around 70 is likely to seem far less impaired than a 60 IQ White person whose normal IQ mean is around 100.
Hopefully I explained that clearly enough. (And hopefully I'm not telling you something you already know.)
it sounds like you may already be familiar with the ideas but the above article is especially credible (for lack of a better word) because it is coming from a nigerian.
also, the evidence for constitutional (genetic and neurological) african differences and their relative incompatibility with western culture is abundant. look at the usa and almost everywhere else they have been "assimilated" (or attempted to be). its a failure. this failure is always attributed to "oppression". this certainly accounts for some of the issues in some of the contexts, but it does not and cannot account for all. even when oppression is lifted, and further, advantages are given, they still largely fail. part of the issue that obscures the differences is that these are overlapping gaussian curves. consider men and women and physical strength. the curves DO overlap. SOME women are physically stronger than SOME men. but it would be insane to conclude that because of this, there is no difference.
south africa will be an interesting case study. the african community has been handed centuries of economic and political stability and strong institutions, all given to them by white europeans. what will happen when the blacks take over? we are beginning to see corruption and collapse. the question remains, are the institutions strong enough to withstand african constitutional and cultural and differences?
It seems to me there is a strong “natural developmental” and evolutionary case to be made for leaving much of Africa alone. To let its people become what they can and will, by and for themselves. This, in the long run, may be the most moral thing the “West” can do. Human flourishing via the development of civilization is a very long game. Much of Africa is further back on this curve than, say, Northern Europe, for obvious reasons. But I don’t see any realistic alternatives, as the “assistance” or charitable paths we’ve been on for a very long time appear counterproductive, if self-improvement is the long term goal.
There is not "leaving it alone" to its "natural development". Africa will continue to become a vassal of China, and the result will likely be improvements to material living standards but little economic development or opportunities. Essentially a low-level welfare state funded by Chinese production of its natural resources.
The most effective altruistic action is to invest in start-up companies that are developing products and services that, if successful, will enrich people's lives.
Doesn't utilitarianism also rely on the realist, normative claim that pleasure or happiness is the highest good and the ultimate goal? Seems to be a subjective moral intuition underlying utilitarianism, the same as any other moral system.
One could similarly set up a mathematical philosophy for calculating which outcomes result in the greatest amount of virtue distributed throughout the world. That wouldn't automatically make virtue ethics the greatest moral system in the world.
What I like about moral systems other than utilitarianism is that they have a built in restraint to them. Whereas utilitarianism is so convinced of its correctness and is so focused on maximizing happiness, that it justifies some craaaaazy shit... like Bentham's Bulldog writing an essay endorsing paving over nature because it'll minimize wild animals and therefore minimize suffering.
It's almost like utilitarians are reward maximisers, who end up misspecified and doing ludicrous shit, whereas other ethical agents are more akin to cybernetic minimizers who are more concerned with tracking and minimizing their own negative behaviour. Read this short page about the dangers of reward maximisers, vs cybernetic minimizers: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/04/10/the-mind-in-the-wheel-part-viii-artificial-intelligence/
In theory, utilitarianism allows for almost any concept of desirable states; In practice, hedonism as the primary measure of utils always seems to get smuggled in.
But hedonism applies to an individual while utilitarianism applies to the group of which the individual is a part. The extent of the group is what people argue over. ie family/kin/clan/ethnicity/nation/ thru to . . . . all living things.
Yes, but the group is made up of individuals, and the utils of the group gets measured as the sum of the utils of the individuals. So when making tradeoffs those individuals' utils matter, and individuals with particularly spikey util functions (up or down) get weighted more heavily. If the util generation for hedonic pleasure is particularly high for a few individuals there you go, their preferences get more weight.
A group cannot be separated from the contents of the group, nor can the welfare of the group be considered separately from the welfare of the individuals.
No, you are failing to appreciate the complexity of group behaviour.
When multiple individuals interact they create a society that is more than the sum of those individual actors.
This characteristic played out recently when the bond market stopped Trump's tariffs (for the time being?). Capitalism (and the emergent complexity of human society that it works with) is more effective at promoting growth than mercantilism for managing economic affairs among individual nations.
A society 'chooses' what individual characteristics to give preferential weight to ie favour. This is why some societies are more effective than other societies. Ones that overly weight individual hedonism are not preordained.
What are you on about? I do many disagree with the claims, but what does that have to do with utilitarianism and how it measures the “good” to be aimed at? I think you have rather lost the thread here.
You have a point. But there is a tradeoff between lives/suffering today and lives/suffering in the future. Weighing this is complicated if you take the exercise seriously. The alternative to not donating bed nets etc in these places is that many thousands of people, mostly young children, will die. How does one weigh this against the torture of billions of factory farmed animals? Or potentially trillions of future human lives in a prosperous future? Different people will have different preferences, and can allocate capital and resources accordingly.
> Effective Altruism, one might more aptly call it Effective Africanism. Since Africans keep being poor and keep multiplying, these projects will have to keep scaling up. If African fertility rates keep being higher than everybody else's, the end result of this applied morality is Africanmaxxing. It is hard to see how this leads to the world becoming a better place given that Africans are the least capable group of advancing science and technology, and human flourishing more generally. <
Excellent, spot-on post Emil.
This whole "Effective Altruism" nonsense strikes me as more "educated elite" virtue signaling, with an extra rationalist patina, giving EAs an ego boost beyond the yard-signers, so they can pat themselves on their backs for not just being "caring" but also more "rational" and "intelligent".
In fact, far from actually "intelligent" or "rational" this is obviously, bone-crushingly stupid.
Actual "effective altruism" is pro-civilizational--supports and strengthens civilized norms, structures and behaviors. The virtue of civilization over the un/less-civilized would appear to be about the most obvious comparison in history, yet somehow eludes these people. Or they confuse civilization with "being nice", when civilization is in fact based in social constraint.
From where we are pro-civilization means tearing down minoritarian ideology/policies and promoting strong, stable nations with their traditional social structures.
That--cohesive civilized nations of productive civilized people, people connected to their family, community, nation and productively engaged--is how you maximize human happiness and human flourishing.
I appreciate the article, especially the final point, which I think hits at something many in the Effective Altruism movement refuse to confront directly. I strongly agree that channeling disproportionate resources into sustaining high-fertility, low-contribution populations is a self-defeating strategy from a long-term civilizational perspective.
That said, I felt there was a deeper contradiction/omission in the philosophical framework underpinning the article, specifically the uncritical acceptance of Greene’s utilitarianism as "what’s left" after dismissing evolved moral intuitions. I’ve written a detailed response exploring that tension and offering a biologically grounded (and arguably superior) alternative to the utilitarian paradigm.
There is no real way to measure happiness, and the idea that a unified thing called “happiness” even exists is a realist artifact. You could just as easily fake-quantify virtue ethics with “virtils” or deontology with “justils”. Suffering in this world may be infinite, so it may actually be impossible to be a productive utilitarian even if you believe in utils
the third world will likely never “develop” in proper terms, but that won’t stop consistent increases in living standards as manufacturing becomes much more efficient.
most of the third world will likely end up in this bizarre place where they have cell phone ownership, electrification, etc. rates of near-100% but almost no one is actually involved in any kind of productive or useful work and real opportunity is nonexistent.
Basically: any good that can be produced by chinese factories en-masse with relatively low input costs will be widely available (solar for electric, cell phones, internet, etc) but the quantity of economic opportunity will likely *decrease*
there is almost no one predicting this it seems. everyone either seems to think that the third world will undergo some kind of complete collapse/will fall apart without aid or that Africa will be an economic superpower in 2100
I think the trajectory is very obvious though:
-relative increases in material abundance (Chinese factories)
-relative decreases in ‘opportunity abundance’ (AI kills off outsourcing, immigration restrictions)
Fukuyama in a certain sense is right, in my opinion.
"There isn't any good reason to believe anything is morally wrong, so here is a reason why X is morally wrong."
The only honest effective altruist would end up somewhere near what Elon Musk is doing (on some things).
1) Spread his superior genes as far as wide as possible and utilizing the latest genetic enhancement at his disposal.
In theory he should take it further, buying eggs and using surrogates to do mass breeding programs and raising them in orphanages. But the PR impact of that is probably too much for him (just paying willing sluts millions to have IVF babies with him already causes a lot of backlash).
2) Donate nothing to charity and try to obtain high ROI for your capital. To the extent that your personal involvement can raise the ROI, dedicate your life to that.
Of course if you want something obviously correct from an EA perspective but within the mainstream, smart people should just have as many kids as they can afford and invest any spare capital they have in index funds.
"1) Spread his superior genes as far as wide as possible and utilizing the latest genetic enhancement at his disposal."
'Superior genes'? In what manner are they superior? I don't believe being avaricious is superior. Musk won the internet boom lottery and used the winnings to gain government backing for numerous projects. He definitely has a knack for making money, but I see little benefit to humanity.
What percentage of people do you think could get to where Musk is today if they started with the wealth Musk had in 2004? Why did 99% of people who DID have at least the same amount of wealth as Musk in 2004 not achieve a fraction of his success? Were they not greedy enough? Were they too charitable?
Do you think you could buy yourself a SpaceX? Do you think if you paid who you thought were the right people and but otherwise provided no managerial oversight of your own, they would build SpaceX to what it is today?
Even "winning the internet lottery" requires being exceptional. To even "have a ticket" in the lottery you had to be smart and ambitious enough to work at a silicon valley start-up in the first place, so its not like most people would have ever stood a chance.
This is the greatest delusion of our time, thinking that entrepreneurialism and start-up management is trivial, and that the only factor is having enough money in the first place.
"Were they not greedy enough?"
Yes, not greedy enough, and not as adept at using government subsidies.
"Do you think if you paid who you thought were the right people and but otherwise provided no managerial oversight of your own, they would build SpaceX to what it is today?"
There is no doubt that Musk has great managerial abilities...I never said he didn't. But again Musk is best at sucking at the government tit.
"To even "have a ticket" in the lottery you had to be smart and ambitious enough to work at a silicon valley start-up in the first place, so its not like most people would have ever stood a chance."
Not everything Musk invested in turned to gold, some turned to shit. But that is my point; the love of wealth drove him - Rapaciousness.
"This is the greatest delusion of our time, thinking that entrepreneurialism and start-up management is trivial, and that the only factor is having enough money in the first place."
It is not trivial, but it doesn't require a genius-level IQ.
Agreed - the real benefit to humanity is people who produce nothing and are dependent on aid forever
Whatever you may think of Musk (I'm not personally much of a fan) he's certainly above-average in IQ and intelligence is highly heritable. Intelligence is the single most important resource for humanity. His overwhelming wealth will be dispersed to dozens of reasonably-high-IQ offspring when he dies. I think that's clearly good for humanity. Much better than turning it over to a state machine which just plows it back into the incompetent underclass.
"Whatever you may think of Musk (I'm not personally much of a fan) he's certainly above-average in IQ and intelligence is highly heritable."
An IQ of 110 or 120 is above average, but not outstanding.
"Intelligence is the single most important resource for humanity."
With that, I agree...kind of. Integrity is also a very desirable trait.
"His overwhelming wealth will be dispersed to dozens of reasonably-high-IQ offspring when he dies."
The fact that he has an above-average IQ does not mean his offspring will.
I'd put him more in the 130-140 range. Whatever you think of him his accomplishments are objectively impressive. His kids will regress to the mean but still be well above average, on average. I mean I'd rather Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos was the one doing this but you take what you can get. At least it's not Soulja Boy.
"I'd put him more in the 130-140 range."
Guessing IQs is frivolous.
The problem with the super-rich is that they are rapacious. Not a favorable trait.
Your class envy is showing. Everyone's rapacious. The rich at least have the advantage of not being retards most of the time.
Is Bill Gates rapacious? Is Buffett?
There's almost no chance that Elon Musk's IQ is 120 or below
These two sentences hit so close to home:
"These are laudable humanitarian goals. However, they don't do anything to further humanity's long-term interests."
In 2021-23 I helped to restart Poland's chapter of Effective Altruism funding, at times, 50-80% of the organization's activities. To some extent the decision to stop was driven by the fact that the organization became more and more self-sufficient and self-funding, but there were other reasons as well.
My exact wording when I decided to stop supporting Polish EA org ~2 years ago were:
"For many years I have had doubts about what proportions of my activities should be for helping the weak and needy and what for pushing humanity forward. In the last year I have had more need to act for the latter type of activity."
> "These are laudable humanitarian goals. However, they don't do anything to further humanity's long-term interests."
EA could always look into promoting birth control, along with reducing mortality rates. I think there's probably *some* long-term net benefit to humanity in, e.g, Africa not forever being a malthusian pressure-cooker wracked by war and famine.
I mean... I don't have the loftiest opinion of black intelligence etc., but blacks are still human and their lives have nonzero value. And even if they're usually situated at the bottom of economic production chains there's also probably, e.g, some benefit to global trade if the continent is more-or-less peaceful.
Human children are "week and needy". It stands to reason as a successful species that we have a strong drive to nurture them (and comparable members of our group), but that is not the only reason for our success (so far).
It would be a misapplication of that intuition. Children are first and foremost your own progeny. You rightly have greater moral intuition and obligation toward them as the extension of your own lineage. Second, children grow up and become more intelligent, self sufficient, and productive. Groups like sub-Saharan Africans never do and more importantly never can without something as extreme as mass gene editing. Their persistent failure is primarily genetically driven, highly heritable, and stable over many generations, which is why they always have the same outcomes anywhere you find a large group of them anywhere on Earth.
“However, they don't do anything to further humanity's long-term interests. Progress depends on technology and scientific advances.”
I disagree.
The bigger the number of humans the bigger the market is for products and therefore innovation.
There are lots of other things to trade off of course but a higher-population world is more likely to see technological progress.
The size of a market depends on the wealth of participants not on their number. Sub-Saharan Africa GDP for 2023 was 2 trillion US dollars, U.S. GDP for 2022 was 25 trillion US dollars.
Plus poor people can't afford innovative stuff. Things like PCs and smartphones were first adopted in the US which led to mass production and a drop in prices and eventually they become adopted in the Third World when they were cheap enough.
But they're only a "market" because we give them so much money in the first place!
You're literally saying we should give them vast sums of money so that....they give some of it back? It makes no sense whatsoever.
And the basis of innovation isn't having lots of consumers! It's fundamental research. If you want more innovation, you need scientific and technological progress. If you want more of this, you get it by funding it directly, not through some rube goldberg machine recycling of your money through african aid which causes most of it to not end up in innovation.
> "But they're only a "market" because we give them so much money in the first place!"
What percent of Africa's GDP do you think comes from foreign aid? Did you adjust for capital flight and debt repayments?
If those humans aren't themselves productive then their consumption can only come from cannibalizing the consumption of other, more productive, people. Progress is unlocked by the productive exchange of *value*, not just consumption. People have to earn the right to consume otherwise you're just feeding mouths.
"The bigger the number of humans the bigger the market is for products and therefore innovation.
There are lots of other things to trade off of course but a higher-population world is more likely to see technological progress."
Thanks to the normal distribution of intelligence, there are a larger number of people who occupy the far right region of the curve. And that is what creates innovation.
Demand exists across the IQ distribution though.
A billion 90-IQ people is more profitable than a million 110-IQ people.
the "demand" is caused by aid in the first place.
"Demand exists across the IQ distribution though."
Demand means nothing if there are no high-IQ people to innovate.
Scientific discoveries are not driven by demand.
"A billion 90-IQ people is more profitable than a million 110-IQ people."
People with an IQ of 90 do not demand things that do not exist. And people with an IQ of 110 do damn little innovation.
Of course they don’t.
But they serve as a profitable market for those who do!
SSA will continue to do almost zero innovation and import every new technology as has been the case for the last 500 years. But SSA will still serve as a market for innovation done mainly in the US, Asia, and Europe.
But that profit is being funded by the aid we're talking about in the first place!
If you want more innovation, take all that money you going to give africans and use it to fund research directly.
I mean, how much "profit" even comes from SSA markets? Almost none.
Aid to Africa mostly makes things worse for Africans. If you trade with Africa they have the money to buy mosquito nets or whatever it is you want to give them.
See e.g. this rant - https://magatte.substack.com/p/how-mrbeast-is-keeping-africa-poor
If EA people actually want to help Africans they need to use the aid money to buy African products
Goodhart's law (or whatever) would kick in immediately: they would create products that have little other value than selling them to charities.
So maybe the EA people should invest in businesses in Africa that create products for export
There is nothing that Africa can produce at scale for export that creates value (except natural resources). EA would be subsidising loss making enterprises - better to just give them the money directly.
There's no reason for anything to be made at scale in Africa - anything Africa can do can be done better and cheaper elsewhere.
And even the natural resources side of thing is entirely dependent on foreign expertise and investment - western or chinese.
https://nitter.poast.org/FavelaOverlord/status/1921775857162453069#m
Fake startups, then...
Africa is never going to be a major exporter or producer of anything other than natural resources and some coffee.
And they don't even use mosquito nets when they're given to them (or they use them for fishing). They're not buying them by themselves.
This is a much much better argument than the OP.
It's a terrible argument. There's nothing that Africa can produce at scale other than basically natural resources and coffee that can't be done better and cheaper in China or India.
https://nitter.poast.org/FavelaOverlord/status/1921775857162453069#m
You may want to look up the concept of Comparative Advantage.
A lot of work involved to contextualise that quote, but worth it I would say-Somewhat of a banger
What's the issue with 'their' in "a creature generally believed to be endowed with the propensity to ignore their [sic] own drowning children"? Seems fine to me as "creature" is implicitly plural, though I presume "their" should be "his or her".
> Since Africans keep being poor and keep multiplying, these projects will have to keep scaling up. If African fertility rates keep being higher than everybody else's, the end result of this applied morality is Africanmaxxing. It is hard to see how this leads to the world becoming a better place given that Africans are the least capable group of advancing science and technology, and human flourishing more generally.
Word of strategic advise: avoid making arguments that make you sound like a sociopath.
I'm serious, we spend nearly a century with Communism dominating intellectual circles because the anti-Communists of the early 20th century thought they should lead with the Malthusian argument that if the poor got more money, they would keep breeding until the Earth was overwhelmed by overpopulation.
BTW this Malthusian argument wasn't true than and its not true now.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
@Eugine Nier - Emil's "sociopathic" argument must be reckoned with. Africa is by no means freed from Malthusian logic. Google Steve Sailer's "World's Most Important Graph." It's the UN population projections by region. Africa is projected to swamp the rest of the world. This runaway population growth would not be possible without Western charities. So the hard question must be asked: Is this aid good for humanity?
> Emil's "sociopathic" argument must be reckoned with.
Fertility is collapsing even in Africa.
> Africa is projected to swamp the rest of the world. This runaway population growth would not be possible without Western charities. So the hard question must be asked: Is this aid good for humanity?
You really aren't good at this whole not sounding like a sociopath thing.
Fertility in Africa is collapsing? Well, you're actually right that the rate has fallen. But you're wrong to say it's collapsed. According to the UN, women average 4.3 to 4.6 children in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's down from 2000 (when it was 5+), but it's still the highest in the world. And it's still Malthusian.
As for whether it's sociopathic to discuss these issues...No. Your womanly shaming tactics carry no weight with me.
> And it's still Malthusian.
You keep using that word, it doesn't mean what you think it means.
> As for whether it's sociopathic to discuss these issues...No. Your womanly shaming tactics carry no weight with me.
And that is why the EA movement is going to completely dominate in the medium term at least.
Completely dominate the west maybe. China sees through this horseshit, and yet are never, ever scolded by people like yourself.
whats wrong with letting the africans figure it out on their own? (except "on their own" in this case still involves a massive head start from the developed world even if we dont intentionally try. most of the tools have already been handed to them.) a whole lot of humans had to be very poor for a very long time before figuring out how not to be poor. if it takes africa several more generations, its a rounding error.
You're operating under a flawed assumption: that Sub-Saharan Africa's developmental trajectory is simply a delayed version of the West's, and that with enough time, or enough external aid, they'll naturally converge with us. This is the same fatal miscalculation that doomed both Rhodesia and South Africa: the belief that all populations share equal underlying potential, and that cultural or economic differences are merely circumstantial or historical.
But this notion of innate equality doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Sub-Saharan populations consistently show significantly lower average IQs, about two full standard deviations below the European norm, and even below African Americans, who themselves have substantial European admixture. These cognitive differences are not isolated but correlate with a broader profile of behavioral traits: higher time preference, lower impulse control, increased baseline aggression, and reduced conscientiousness.
These traits are not just temporary byproducts of environment. They're highly heritable, and they've proven remarkably stable across generations, even in radically different settings. The key factor is evolutionary selection. In northern climates, failure to plan ahead for harsh winters was lethal, imposing strong selective pressure for traits like foresight, cooperation, and long-term planning. In equatorial climates, those pressures were far weaker or absent. The result is not a moral failing, but an evolutionary divergence in behavioral tendencies.
Absent either intense and sustained selective pressure (over thousands of years) or direct genetic modification, these populations are not going to fundamentally change. Giving them smartphones or bank loans doesn't rewrite thousands of generations of adaptation. The tools of modern civilization may be handed over, but the psychometric and behavioral architecture to wield them effectively doesn't automatically follow.
So no, it's not simply a matter of "figuring it out on their own."
Believing that a bit more time or assistance will close the gap fundamentally misunderstands the root of the problem.
i agree with pretty much everything you said. and by "figure it out on their own" i did not mean to imply they would be able to reach western living standards or emulate western culture "on their own", only that they would be allowed to evolve as societies on their own to whatever standards and cultural norms they wish for and are capable of. and if this is not to our standards, that is not a "failure". naturally some of this "evolution" would be influenced by surrounding cultures (including ours) but directly "helping" by attempting to impose western culture and standards is destined to fail.
I agree. They have evolved a different life strategy more suited to their natural homelands.
Unfortunately that means that they are not genetically adapted to be able to create our level of civilization, to maintain it when handed to them, or even adequately function in our own.
They should be left to live in their own natural environment where they are more "at home", being biologically adapted to that climate, those people, predators, food sources, etc.
Not to go on too much of a digression, but I think you'll find this interesting.
In the early 20th century, the US military started doing cognitive testing on recruits and found out that Blacks had significantly lower IQs than Whites, consistently. This was backed up by years of psychometric studies showing consistently significantly lower IQs among Blacks, and especially in native Sub-Saharan Africans.
What puzzled some people was as to why they seemed more functional on the surface than a White person with the same IQ would be.
This goes along with the more recent idea of "Adaptive Functioning", where a group might be evolved to a specific social or environmental context.
For example Blacks are actually evolved to have specific cognitive abilities and behavioral traits. This is their actual natural and normal state.
But for Whites, who evolved to have much higher IQ and a different slate of behavioral traits, having an IQ that low generally means something went very wrong developmentally, and it usually coincides with an array of other disabilities, both physical and mental.
Make sense?
So a 60 IQ Sub-Saharan African from a group where the normal mean IQ is around 70 is likely to seem far less impaired than a 60 IQ White person whose normal IQ mean is around 100.
Hopefully I explained that clearly enough. (And hopefully I'm not telling you something you already know.)
it sounds like you may already be familiar with the ideas but the above article is especially credible (for lack of a better word) because it is coming from a nigerian.
also, the evidence for constitutional (genetic and neurological) african differences and their relative incompatibility with western culture is abundant. look at the usa and almost everywhere else they have been "assimilated" (or attempted to be). its a failure. this failure is always attributed to "oppression". this certainly accounts for some of the issues in some of the contexts, but it does not and cannot account for all. even when oppression is lifted, and further, advantages are given, they still largely fail. part of the issue that obscures the differences is that these are overlapping gaussian curves. consider men and women and physical strength. the curves DO overlap. SOME women are physically stronger than SOME men. but it would be insane to conclude that because of this, there is no difference.
south africa will be an interesting case study. the african community has been handed centuries of economic and political stability and strong institutions, all given to them by white europeans. what will happen when the blacks take over? we are beginning to see corruption and collapse. the question remains, are the institutions strong enough to withstand african constitutional and cultural and differences?
https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/guest-post-the-global-iq-debate-a?r=42zuin&utm_medium=ios
hopefully this link works. i think you will find it very interesting.
Africamaxxing is sociopathic. Endless subsidisation of suffering.
Step back, touch grass, and re-read what you just wrote.
Edit: Never mind, I just saw this (https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/effective-africanism/comment/118595983) comment of yours.
Seems like your problem is that you are a sociopath.
I was expecting a stronger argument against utilitarianism or Effective Africanism in the end.
As usual, great stuff, clear and compelling.
It seems to me there is a strong “natural developmental” and evolutionary case to be made for leaving much of Africa alone. To let its people become what they can and will, by and for themselves. This, in the long run, may be the most moral thing the “West” can do. Human flourishing via the development of civilization is a very long game. Much of Africa is further back on this curve than, say, Northern Europe, for obvious reasons. But I don’t see any realistic alternatives, as the “assistance” or charitable paths we’ve been on for a very long time appear counterproductive, if self-improvement is the long term goal.
There is not "leaving it alone" to its "natural development". Africa will continue to become a vassal of China, and the result will likely be improvements to material living standards but little economic development or opportunities. Essentially a low-level welfare state funded by Chinese production of its natural resources.
https://nitter.poast.org/FavelaOverlord/status/1921775857162453069#m
Excellent points.
The most effective altruistic action is to invest in start-up companies that are developing products and services that, if successful, will enrich people's lives.
Doesn't utilitarianism also rely on the realist, normative claim that pleasure or happiness is the highest good and the ultimate goal? Seems to be a subjective moral intuition underlying utilitarianism, the same as any other moral system.
One could similarly set up a mathematical philosophy for calculating which outcomes result in the greatest amount of virtue distributed throughout the world. That wouldn't automatically make virtue ethics the greatest moral system in the world.
What I like about moral systems other than utilitarianism is that they have a built in restraint to them. Whereas utilitarianism is so convinced of its correctness and is so focused on maximizing happiness, that it justifies some craaaaazy shit... like Bentham's Bulldog writing an essay endorsing paving over nature because it'll minimize wild animals and therefore minimize suffering.
It's almost like utilitarians are reward maximisers, who end up misspecified and doing ludicrous shit, whereas other ethical agents are more akin to cybernetic minimizers who are more concerned with tracking and minimizing their own negative behaviour. Read this short page about the dangers of reward maximisers, vs cybernetic minimizers: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/04/10/the-mind-in-the-wheel-part-viii-artificial-intelligence/
No. You are on the wrong (railway) track.
In theory, utilitarianism allows for almost any concept of desirable states; In practice, hedonism as the primary measure of utils always seems to get smuggled in.
But hedonism applies to an individual while utilitarianism applies to the group of which the individual is a part. The extent of the group is what people argue over. ie family/kin/clan/ethnicity/nation/ thru to . . . . all living things.
Yes, but the group is made up of individuals, and the utils of the group gets measured as the sum of the utils of the individuals. So when making tradeoffs those individuals' utils matter, and individuals with particularly spikey util functions (up or down) get weighted more heavily. If the util generation for hedonic pleasure is particularly high for a few individuals there you go, their preferences get more weight.
A group cannot be separated from the contents of the group, nor can the welfare of the group be considered separately from the welfare of the individuals.
No, you are failing to appreciate the complexity of group behaviour.
When multiple individuals interact they create a society that is more than the sum of those individual actors.
This characteristic played out recently when the bond market stopped Trump's tariffs (for the time being?). Capitalism (and the emergent complexity of human society that it works with) is more effective at promoting growth than mercantilism for managing economic affairs among individual nations.
A society 'chooses' what individual characteristics to give preferential weight to ie favour. This is why some societies are more effective than other societies. Ones that overly weight individual hedonism are not preordained.
What are you on about? I do many disagree with the claims, but what does that have to do with utilitarianism and how it measures the “good” to be aimed at? I think you have rather lost the thread here.
You have a point. But there is a tradeoff between lives/suffering today and lives/suffering in the future. Weighing this is complicated if you take the exercise seriously. The alternative to not donating bed nets etc in these places is that many thousands of people, mostly young children, will die. How does one weigh this against the torture of billions of factory farmed animals? Or potentially trillions of future human lives in a prosperous future? Different people will have different preferences, and can allocate capital and resources accordingly.
> Effective Altruism, one might more aptly call it Effective Africanism. Since Africans keep being poor and keep multiplying, these projects will have to keep scaling up. If African fertility rates keep being higher than everybody else's, the end result of this applied morality is Africanmaxxing. It is hard to see how this leads to the world becoming a better place given that Africans are the least capable group of advancing science and technology, and human flourishing more generally. <
Excellent, spot-on post Emil.
This whole "Effective Altruism" nonsense strikes me as more "educated elite" virtue signaling, with an extra rationalist patina, giving EAs an ego boost beyond the yard-signers, so they can pat themselves on their backs for not just being "caring" but also more "rational" and "intelligent".
In fact, far from actually "intelligent" or "rational" this is obviously, bone-crushingly stupid.
Actual "effective altruism" is pro-civilizational--supports and strengthens civilized norms, structures and behaviors. The virtue of civilization over the un/less-civilized would appear to be about the most obvious comparison in history, yet somehow eludes these people. Or they confuse civilization with "being nice", when civilization is in fact based in social constraint.
From where we are pro-civilization means tearing down minoritarian ideology/policies and promoting strong, stable nations with their traditional social structures.
-- ending the immivasion of the West
-- eugenics, promoting eugenic fertility; suppressing low-IQ/low-competence fertility
-- encouraging productive endeavor and suppressing parasitism (criminal, scamy, financial, governmental etc.)
-- killing, expelling, jailing criminal parasites
That--cohesive civilized nations of productive civilized people, people connected to their family, community, nation and productively engaged--is how you maximize human happiness and human flourishing.
I appreciate the article, especially the final point, which I think hits at something many in the Effective Altruism movement refuse to confront directly. I strongly agree that channeling disproportionate resources into sustaining high-fertility, low-contribution populations is a self-defeating strategy from a long-term civilizational perspective.
That said, I felt there was a deeper contradiction/omission in the philosophical framework underpinning the article, specifically the uncritical acceptance of Greene’s utilitarianism as "what’s left" after dismissing evolved moral intuitions. I’ve written a detailed response exploring that tension and offering a biologically grounded (and arguably superior) alternative to the utilitarian paradigm.
If you’re interested, you can find it here: https://biopolitical.substack.com/p/greene-kirkegaard-and-the-biorealist
There is no real way to measure happiness, and the idea that a unified thing called “happiness” even exists is a realist artifact. You could just as easily fake-quantify virtue ethics with “virtils” or deontology with “justils”. Suffering in this world may be infinite, so it may actually be impossible to be a productive utilitarian even if you believe in utils
Somewhat relevant twitter threat
https://nitter.poast.org/FavelaOverlord/status/1921775857162453069#m
the third world will likely never “develop” in proper terms, but that won’t stop consistent increases in living standards as manufacturing becomes much more efficient.
most of the third world will likely end up in this bizarre place where they have cell phone ownership, electrification, etc. rates of near-100% but almost no one is actually involved in any kind of productive or useful work and real opportunity is nonexistent.
Basically: any good that can be produced by chinese factories en-masse with relatively low input costs will be widely available (solar for electric, cell phones, internet, etc) but the quantity of economic opportunity will likely *decrease*
there is almost no one predicting this it seems. everyone either seems to think that the third world will undergo some kind of complete collapse/will fall apart without aid or that Africa will be an economic superpower in 2100
I think the trajectory is very obvious though:
-relative increases in material abundance (Chinese factories)
-relative decreases in ‘opportunity abundance’ (AI kills off outsourcing, immigration restrictions)
Fukuyama in a certain sense is right, in my opinion.
This comment is hilarious to those of us old enough to remember when China and India were considered "third world".