“My lover, effective altruism” by Natalie_Cargill

About this episode

Natalie_Cargill discusses misconceptions about effective altruism and its impact on global health and animal welfare.

Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series! On my way to my tenth EAG in a decade, my brother-in-law explained effective altruism to me. At first, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d heard the phrase before. But he searched the corners of his mind until the definition made itself known: “yeah, it's just a bunch of wankers who pretend to have social impact, but all they do is go to conferences and raise money and they’ve never had any impact at all.” I have never had any chill. I did not develop it in that moment. If anyone is going to say EA is just a bunch of wankers, it's going to be me, newbie. “That's interesting, Ben, but I think it's a serious misconception — you might not be aware that EA has literally raised billions of dollars for global health charities, which very likely saved hundreds of thousands of children's lives (do you hate children, Ben?) They have literally stopped millions of hens being tortured in cages too small for them [...] --- First published: April 17th, 2026 Source…

People in this episode

Guest: Natalie_Cargill

Topics covered

• effective altruism
• social impact
• global health
• charity
• personal narrative

Keywords

• effective altruism
• global health
• charity
• social impact
• EAG
• Inkhaven
• personal narrative

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Effective Altruism, Inkhaven, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts

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