Woman Discovers “Effective Altruism” Means Her Pussy Belongs to the Tribe

Elvis Dunderhoff February 4, 2023


It’s about time these sluts realized that being a really good person means having sex with everyone – not just very handsome men.

Time:

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan once considered herself an effective altruist. As a college student in India, she immersed herself in the social movement, reading its canonical texts like Doing Good Better, listening to its podcasts, and devouring effective altruism (EA) blogs in an attempt to figure out how to create a life of maximum moral impact. When the world started opening up from the COVID-19 pandemic, she moved to San Francisco and went to EA meetups, made friends with other EAs, and volunteered at EA conferences where they talked about how to use evidence and reason to do the most good in the world.

But as Gopalakrishnan got further into the movement, she realized that “the advertised reality of EA is very different from the actual reality of EA,” she says. She noticed that EA members in the Bay Area seemed to work together, live together, and sleep together, often in polyamorous sexual relationships with complex professional dynamics. Three times in one year, she says, men at informal EA gatherings tried to convince her to join these so-called “polycules.” When Gopalakrishnan said she wasn’t interested, she recalls, they would “shame” her or try to pressure her, casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach.

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan

After a particularly troubling incident of sexual harassment, Gopalakrishnan wrote a post on an online forum for EAs in Nov. 2022. While she declined to publicly describe details of the incident, she argued that EA’s culture was hostile toward women. “It puts your safety at risk,” she wrote, adding that most of the access to funding and opportunities within the movement was controlled by men. Gopalakrishnan was alarmed at some of the responses. One commenter wrote that her post was “bigoted” against polyamorous people. Another said it would “pollute the epistemic environment,” and argued it was “net-negative for solving the problem.”

Gopalakrishnan is one of seven women connected to effective altruism who tell TIME they experienced misconduct ranging from harassment and coercion to sexual assault within the community. The women allege EA itself is partly to blame. They say that effective altruism’s overwhelming maleness, its professional incestuousness, its subculture of polyamory and its overlap with tech-bro dominated “rationalist” groups have combined to create an environment in which sexual misconduct can be tolerated, excused, or rationalized away. Several described EA as having a “cult-like” dynamic.

Julia Wise, the longest-serving employee of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), an Oxford, England-based charity responsible for growing and maintaining the EA community, acknowledges that there have been reports of sexual harassment within the community. But she questions whether the movement itself is responsible. Sexual misconduct is a problem throughout society, after all, and EA leaders cannot control the behavior of everyone moving in and around it. “Some of the concerns that have come up are maybe made by people in EA, but the perpetrator attended an event a couple years ago but they’re not that involved,” says Wise. “How do you figure out what is a community problem versus what is a Bay Area problem or sex problem or something else?”

This story is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former effective altruists and people who live among them. Many of the women spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid personal or professional reprisals, citing the small number of people and organizations within EA that control plum jobs and opportunities. Much of the alleged abuse they detailed was concentrated in the Bay Area, but the women also described incidents that took place in three other states as well as overseas. Many of them asked that their alleged abusers not be named and that TIME shield their identities to avoid retaliation. Their accounts were corroborated by other parties to the incidents, by people to whom the women spoke shortly afterward, and by contemporaneous documents and screenshots. While a few women have raised these issues on online forums, many spoke to TIME about their experiences with sexual misconduct in EA communities for the first time.

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

Several women say that the way their allegations were received by the broader EA community was as upsetting as the original misconduct itself. “The playbook of these EAs is to discourage victims to seek any form of objective, third-party justice possible,” says Rochelle Shen, who ran an EA-adjacent event space in the Bay Area and says she has firsthand experience of the ways the movement dismisses allegations. “They want to keep it all in the family.”

In recent years, effective altruism morphed from a niche philanthropic community devoted to addressing worldwide poverty into a powerful global network of think tanks, nonprofit organizations and wealthy donors that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in annual charitable donations. The movement has grown rapidly, with monthly active users on the EA forum growing fivefold since 2019, more than 6,000 attendees at EA global conferences in 2022, and at least 371 active EA chapters across more than 40 countries. Most of the movement’s members—who are overwhelmingly white, more than 70% male, and skew young, according to a recent survey of members of the community in 2020—are idealists drawn to the promise of building a better world by applying rigorous logic to moral decisions. Thousands have signed a pledge to tithe at least 10% of their income to high-impact charities. From college campuses to Silicon Valley startups, adherents are drawn to the moral clarity of a philosophy dedicated to using data and reason to shape a better future for humanity. Effective altruism has become something of a secular religion for the young and elite.

But the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, EA’s billionaire patron and most famous acolyte, who is now facing federal fraud charges tied to the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has put effective altruism under increased scrutiny. Like other recent social movements spanning the political spectrum, EA is diffuse and deliberately amorphous; anybody who wants to can call themselves an EA. And even in a community of self-styled do-gooders, “there certainly have been cases where people were treated badly, including sexual harassment,” says Wise, of the Centre for Effective Altruism. “This is an essential problem that all social groups face.”

Wise, whose role at CEA involves overseeing community well-being, tells TIME she has fielded roughly 20 complaints per year in her seven years on the job, ranging from uncomfortable comments to more serious allegations of harassment and more. But with no official leadership structure, no roster of who is and isn’t in the movement, and no formal process for dealing with complaints, Wise argues, it’s hard to gauge how common such issues are within EA compared to broader society.

The women who spoke to TIME counter that the problem is particularly acute in EA. The movement’s high-minded goals can create a moral shield, they say, allowing members to present themselves as altruists committed to saving humanity regardless of how they treat the people around them. “It’s this white knight savior complex,” says Sonia Joseph, a former EA who has since moved away from the movement partially because of its treatment of women. “Like: we are better than others because we are more rational or more reasonable or more thoughtful.” The movement “has a veneer of very logical, rigorous do-gooderism,” she continues. “But it’s misogyny encoded into math.”

Women are so helpful.

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