“I might be a cicada without feelings, but the rational thing is that I still love Usha,” said Cicada Vance.
Photo by Amit Roth
After successfully capturing power in the United States government with the in stallation of human-sized cicada husk JD Vance as vice president, the Silicon Valley-based community, eponymously named “Effective Altruists”, declared across all state-owned media that “morality has been officially solved.”
“The correct answer to the prisoner’s dilemma is to cooperate,” announced spokesperson and occasional Harry Potter fanfiction writer Eliezer Yudkowsky. “The correct answer to the trolley question is to flip the switch and kill the individual. The correct answer to all politics is voting via Polymarket bets. It’s just rational, as long as you have the right priors.”
Starting from humble origins as a collection of frequent Xeeters and aspiring vibe-coders — despite controversies such as the conviction of prominent member Sam Bankman-Fried on charges of wire fraud and “being an ideas guy” — the group has grown in prominence due to their “unorthodox” approach to ethics. Appealing to the startup culture of the Bay Area, the Effective Altruists argue that the “most optimal” and “morally correct” life course is to become as wealthy as possible, then donate exclusively to causes able to save the maximum amount of lives per dollar, supposedly inevitably resulting in utopic society. Through a combination of recruitment among the teenaged tech CEOs of San Francisco and East Bay “Molochdisrupting” venture capitalists,the group has successfully infiltrated several sectors of the economy, and most recently, the U.S. government.
Although the Effective Altruists lack a central leader, the group functions as a hive mind via a collection of Substack-spread high-frequency emissions described as “an incessant buzz.”
“It is immediately apparent to anyone who was an awesome-cool STEM major rather than a glorified high school dropout — humanities student — that it is incredibly simple to deduce all moral truths. It’s good we stepped in: philosophy as a subject has been collectively scamming humanity for the past 3,000 years,” claimed the buzz.
Reportedly, the most immediate concern of the Effective Altruists is competing moral paradigms. The buzz said, “We want Star Trek in real life. You want Star Trek in real life. The only way to accomplish this is if we all become venture capitalists and donate our earnings to buy lots of malaria nets. We risk the nonexistence of literally Star Trek irl [sic] if anything jeopardizes this.”
As a result, all publicly-funded universities have been instructed to redirect the majority of funding from their philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history departments to their business and computer science departments. One university administrator has declared they have reserved leftover funding for “preventing sentient AI, the only real threat humanity faces.”
“Think of what’s at stake. Potentially trillions of future Trekkies who would instead not exist, or worse, have to read nonfiction books. This cannot happen,” the buzz added.
Prominent academics in the affected fields have remained silent, allegedly out of fear of reminding their students of their existence, which has been previously correlated with increasing major transfer rates.
All national policy will now be logically deduced via Bayesian reasoning from the Effective Altruist moral framework, as determined by the hivemind. Any remaining political questions, which the buzz says only amount to one or two at most, will be resolved via “competing free-floating iceberg-based micro-civilizations”, where the “iceberg island that produces the most paperclips within the next five years will serve as the model for all American domestic and foreign policy moving forward.”
One splinter group of the Effective Altruists allegedly plans to reroute all EPA funding towards constructing a 600-foot robot snake in the Rocky Mountains for unknown reasons.
