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Elie Hassenfeld Q&A: ‘$5,000 to Save a Life Is a Bargain’
Here’s Elie Hassenfeld, your high school EA crush. As effective altruism spirals into self-doubt, the idealist quant is still at it, helping Silicon Valley richies give away hundreds of millions each year.
In WIRED this week, the philosopher Leif Wenar calls EA “ the secular religion of elites.” Indeed, every street-corner preacher in Silicon Valley seems to want to sermonize on it. In a bright conference room in Oakland, California, Hassenfeld and I discussed corruption in EA, the shortcomings of storytelling, and whether some lives are more worth saving than others. But we’ve allocated funding from donors to water projects, including$65 million in 2022 to a program that installs chlorine dispensers in rural areas in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda.
Or read this on Wired
