Yarrow Bouchard 🔸
Bio
I got interested in effective altruism back before it was called effective altruism, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. I joined the Effective Altruism Forum to try to figure out where effective altruism could fit into my life these days and what it means to me. You can read my latest thoughts on effective altruism here.
I write on Substack, and used to write on Medium.
Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
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Topic contributions13
Three big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0:
- corruption (i.e., the quid pro quo between FTX and Manifund, in which Austin Chen traded Caroline Ellison a job out of prison for cash obtained in the course of stealing customer funds)
- cults (e.g., Leverage Research and Dragon Army Barracks, whose former members/leaders such as Tyler Alterman and Duncan Sabien still post on the EA Forum)
- misinformation (e.g., METR's use of fabricated data in the famous time horizons graph)
EA sadly seems sunk to me because dire problems keep mounting and most people seem to think doing nothing is the best solution. There is also a disturbingly loud chorus of voices saying no, no, corruption is actually good (it's what having principles looks like), cults are actually good (it's part of what makes the community unique), misinformation is actually good (we're smarter than everyone else and need to save the world), which makes EA seem doomed. The force of immorality in EA is too strong and there is no equally strong force to stand against it.
EA today is at best morally ambiguous, if not more evil than good. Things have gotten really rotten. No one is doing enough to clean it up. And there's apparently no floor to how much worse it can get.
One of my fears is that there will be an EA mass shooting or terrorist attack because this almost already happened with Stop AI, an EA-funded and EA-supported organization. Sam Kirchner, the Stop AI activist who threatened to do a mass shooting at OpenAI, is still missing. There is a warrant out for his arrest.
Besides that, a disturbing number of people in the EA community seem sympathetic to far-right, illiberal, racist views (e.g., the Manifest afterparties hosted by Curtis Yarvin, who holds authoritarian and white nationalist views).
So, really, that's five big unaddressed problems in EA 2.0, including violent extremism and authoritarian, racist, far-right political views.
People who want to focus on global poverty and global health and development should probably pour their energy into things not called "EA", like effective giving. Or more mainstream humanitarian movements like Rotary International, or Hank and John Green's fundraising through things like Project for Awesome.
I still like the term "EA 1.0", but it's probably too cryptic and confusing for anyone not deeply familiar with effective altruism. "EA 1.0" could possibly be used to describe something (e.g., in an FAQ), such as an effective giving org, but it would probably be too inaccessible to use in the name.
It can be extremely painful to think about cutting your losses with EA, but we are called on in this life to make difficult decisions, to sacrifice, and to suffer when it's the right thing to do. And, in the long run, that ultimately makes you feel more whole and right inside than ethically compromising and ethically compromising... There is a kind of joy in morality.
Pangram says this quick take is 51% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/01232a86-af15-43a2-8e6a-047896c47336?ucc=2RxEGYyJeZr
Is it?
Explained at length here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/im59y2Au7zC5ofuKe/is-the-ai-industry-in-a-bubble
GPT-6 Astra seems to fit a trend of diminishing marginal returns for R&D investment in LLMs. I don't know about coding, which is the most economically important domain for LLMs — and I also don't know about math research, which LLMs are helpful for but it's hard to imagine is economically important — but for the regular sort of prose-based web search tasks I use LLMs for, GPT-6 Astra is not (to me) noticeably better than the GPT-5.x Chain of Thought models, which are themselves not noticeably better than o3.
What are the odds the NYT, WSJ, FT, and Bloomberg all report — as part of their factual news reporting, not simply an opinion column or editorial — that the AI bubble has popped and the AI bubble has not actually popped? Surely those odds are minimal.
You could add in other news outlets like the Economist, the Washington Post, the BBC, and the CBC, or possibly other kinds of external judges such as economists or financial analysts (either surveys thereof or reputable organizations or individuals) who would all have to agree.
In terms of the definition of a financial bubble, the Wikipedia definition works perfectly well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_bubble
Exactly operationalizing what counts as the AI bubble popping is a task that can be deferred to judges. Requiring unanimous agreement among the selected judges means their verdict is unlikely to be wrong. (You can always spend the time trying to operationalize something like this yourself, but it's time-consuming and there's a meaningful risk you look back on your operationalization and realize you screwed up. I prefer the simplicity and elegance of just deferring it to judges. This is just a symbolic $20 bet for charity and honourable people can acknowledge if they won a bet unfairly.)
If you think a unanimous verdict among all the aforementioned judges and even more besides is likely to be wrong, then, yeah, this bet isn't for you. I'm always open to counteroffers, though.
Will anyone take the other side of this bet? By January 1, 2034, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg will all agree the AI bubble has popped. (As in, they will all report it as news, not just publish an opinion column saying so.)
The stakes: $20 to the charity of the winner's choice.
Why this bet? Mainly just for fun. But also to make a point.
I chose 7 years as the time horizon for the bet because I read that 5 to 7 years is the time horizon for many AI investments.
My hunch is that the AI bubble will pop within 3 years, but who knows. Markets can keep lending and investing in unprofitable ventures for a very long time.
Some may take the claims of a few experts or their own “vibes” as evidence that we should be very worried about existential risk, but it’s important to remember that humans have a natural proclivity towards believing that their generation could be the last. (According to Pew, “39% of adults believe that humanity is ‘living in the end times.’”)
On this topic, I can't recommend enough a talk given by sociologist and transhumanist James J. Hughes called "Avoiding Millenialist Cognitive Biases": https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/avoiding-millennialist-cognitive-biases?video=1
Hughes also wrote an essay on the same topic in the anthology Global Catastrophic Risks.
Hi Vasco. I think we know for sure the probability that people who've been convicted of crimes will reoffend is far greater than for people who have never committed a crime. We don't have to ask what if.
Beyond the risk of Caroline Ellison committing illegal or unethical acts at Manifund, and beyond the risk of Austin Chen encouraging such acts or covering them up — which are both serious, rational concerns — there is also the corruption aspect. This hire is explicitly a reward, a show of thanks, an act of loyalty on Austin Chen's part to reciprocate the crimes committed by Caroline Ellison.
The corruption aspect would still exist if the hire were for a non-financial role or if the reward came in some other form, such as cash given by Austin to Caroline. Usually people don't admit corrupt intent out loud but Austin took the unusual step of writing a public confession.
In my view, the effective altruist community is still underreacting to this even though the reaction has been strong and negative. This is brazen financial corruption and outright encouragement of financial crime. The underreaction of the EA community makes it seem like everything said in defense of EA about the crimes at FTX was a lie. The corruption is now happening in plain sight. No one can pretend they don't know what's happening. Where is the accountability? Where are the consequences? The Centre for Effective Altruism's sanction of Manifund is a good first step, but it's not enough.
I don't know what the wider world's reaction will be if or when the news spreads of just how tolerant the EA community is of financial corruption. But I can say for me, my trust in the EA community has been decimated by this. I personally no longer trust the EA community to not engage in unethical (or even illegal) financial conduct, such as self-dealing with money from EA charities, or covering up improper acts committed by others at EA charities. When a community is so tolerant of such brazen corruption, how can I trust them?
As Maya Angelou is reported to have said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
As recently as April 2025, Austin defended Sam Bankman-Fried on a podcast. In response to a host's assertion that Sam Bankman-Fried "did [things] badly and hurt a lot of people", Austin said:
I don't know, still debatable. I don't know how much we should go into the object level here, but everyone made their money back. Yes, some things broke for that to be able to happen, but all the people got 120% of the value of the crypto holdings at the time...
He followed-up by saying:
...I think we should free SBF and put him to work.
Continuing on this thread a bit later on, Austin said:
...yes, [Sam Bankman-Fried] made like big mistakes, but there were things that he did really right. Oh, I think this is a piece I talked about a lot in my post, and is important to me.
Like in some sense Sam made a lot of really, good decisions and maybe a few really bad ones. And I think it's easy to focus on oh, those bad decisions, I would never have made those bad decisions. But I think I have a lot more sympathy for somebody like Sam because I am sometimes in a position making a lot of decisions too.
And I think oh, the hard thing is not to avoid the couple of bad decisions. The hard thing is to actually have figured out what all the right decisions you could have made, were such that you are in the position to then have to think hard about the one or two bad decisions too. I'm like, many people never get to that place for the goals that matter to them. And I think it is like something somewhat instructive to learn from the perspective of, Sam Bankman-Fried having won a lot at something. Of course.
Austin goes on further in that vein. You can listen or read the full transcript.
Austin's post about hiring Caroline reads, to me, as if he's still downplaying the extent of crime and wrongdoing that FTX and Alameda executives committed, similar to what he said on this podcast in April 2025.
My interpretation is that Austin's views on this topic have not fundamentally changed since April 2025.
For context, Austin also defended Sam Bankman-Fried in November 2022, lambasting people in EA who spoke out against him:
EA leaders have posted denunciations of fraud, and distanced themselves from Sam; the most upvoted all-time EA Forum post is a community condemnation; the entire Future Fund team up and resigned.
Austin wrote that this showed a lack of "loyalty":
...from EA folks, this behavior strikes me as cowardly, coldhearted, opportunistic, bandwagon-y, two-faced and distasteful. ... Whatever happened to loyalty? To supporting those who have helped you in the past?
To my knowledge, he has never retracted these comments. On the contrary. On the April 2025 podcast, he reiterated this same point, saying:
I think if you abandon people who have what I viewed as earnestly try to support you and your movement. If you just turn tail on them, be like, "oh yeah, no, actually SBF he was not acting according to our principles and we do not endorse this" and we like give up on all of the stuff that he did. Then when some future billionaire is looking at your movement, what will they think?
And:
Maybe I am a person who someday hopes to be a billionaire and I was looking at the actions of people l in this space and be like, do I want to be their friends, their allies? If I feel like in like cases when things go badly, they will just not stand by me.
My interpretation is that Austin's view is some combination of 1) crime and wrongdoing did not occur at FTX or Alameda to the extent that most people believe and 2) some amount of crime and wrongdoing is good or acceptable in the service of Austin's goals and EA's goals. He both downplays the extent of what happened at FTX and also makes an argument along the lines of you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.