Effective Altruism: Good Intentions, Bad Epistemics audio documentary cover
Ideas 37 min

Effective Altruism: Good Intentions, Bad Epistemics

A philosophy about saving lives produced a man who'd gamble the planet.

Effective altruism argued that doing good could be optimised like an equation — and that the most rational good should be pursued at the expense of the merely good. Sam Bankman-Fried was its most prominent practitioner. His logic and his fraud were, in the end, the same logic.

Free 7 day trial. New stories every day.
effective altruism Sam Bankman-Fried FTX philosophy cryptocurrency ethics Peter Singer longtermism William MacAskill utilitarianism expected value GiveWell fraud earning to give moral philosophy

One story, one sitting.

Mythio is a library of audio documentaries on the ideas, people, and events that shaped the world. Each episode is researched across the best sources, fact-checked, and told in full. Most run twenty to thirty minutes, long enough to go deep, short enough to finish in one sitting.