Is Effective Altruism Now Defective?

Commiserating with the do-gooders SBF made look bad.

- SIMON VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD

THERE HAS NOT BEEN a bad actor in history,” says Rocky Schwartz, “who hasn’t been able to couch their conduct behind some meaningful and generally positive ideology.”

It’s 9 p.m. at a bar in Kips Bay. Schwartz, 29, is drinking Sprite and pondering the role her philanthropic movement might have played in the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire—and the boomerang possibility that his downfall is about to wreak financial and reputational havoc on her field. She’s the executive director of Effective Altruism NYC, which is funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which is in turn supported by a $14 million grant from Bankman-Fried’s foundation. Or at least it was. Schwartz says she’s still hopeful that the good of EA can be quarantined from the bad of SBF. “There is a reason why, a decade into effective altruism, this is the most disastrous thing we’ve seen happen,” she says.

Schwartz’s predecessor at Effective Altruism NYC isn’t at the bar, but I reach him by phone. “I totally looked up to this guy, this motherfucker who I hate now,” he says of Bankman-Fried. “Three weeks ago, I would have sung his praises.” He’s been running a crypto hedge fund that caps his salary at $70,000 and donates most of its profits to charity. It relied on FTX, and when the exchange collapsed, the fund lost 80 percent of its holdings. He asks me not to print his name. “I’m still licking my wounds, and I’m sheepish and embarrassed.”