Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and Food Tech BS

With crypto's golden boy on trial, time to question the cult of EA

As someone who calls out BS, I just love to see Silicon Valley con artists get their comeuppance. I closely followed the trial of fallen Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes last year, which resulted in an 11-year prison sentence. As the time, I warned that cell-based meat companies such as Eat Just and Upside Foods are likely to follow in this trail of too-good-to-be-true tech start-ups led by charismatic founders whose main skill is getting rich, gullible investors to part with their money.

Now we can make even closer connections between the worlds of tech and food as the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried gets underway. In case you missed it, Bankman-Fried is the failed wunderkind founder of cryptocurrency platform FTX who now stands accused of engaging in an $8 billion fraud. As many have reported, Bankman-Fried was apparently an acolyte of effective altruism, the cult-like concept of giving away significant portions of one’s wealth based on math alone.

How does all this connect to the world of food tech? Very much so.

Effective altruism (EA) has infiltrated much of the thinking among animal rights donors and the vegan movement more broadly, as I explained in January, when I questioned why non-profits such as the Good Food Institute were holding onto donations from Bankman-Fried while others were returning the dirty money. The Good Food Institute (GFI) is the nonprofit arm of the cell-cultured meat sector.

The Open Philanthropy Project (also started by a tech founder) is a massive source of effective altruism funding including to farm animal welfare and “alternatives to animal products”. They are a major funder to GFI; for example, for $10 million in 2021. (Ironically, they also funded a scientific critique of cell-based meat, which was explained by the Counter that same year.)

I will be writing more about all these connections, but in the context of the trial currently underway, Bankman-Fried’s fraud represents the “ends justify the means” approach to doing business that is common among effective altruism cult members. Here is how one analysis put it:

Effective altruism looks great on paper – but many experts say the philosophy can ignore the nuances of human behavior. In some ways, they say Bankman-Fried is the ultimate cautionary tale of how the lofty goal to do good can quickly go bad.

For the best primer on the problems caused by the cult of effective altruism in the animal welfare movement, I highly recommend the collection of essays that form the book, “The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism”. I wrote one of the essays, and I am proud to be among so many esteemed co-authors and their stellar critiques. I am especially proud that the editors emphasized how EA perpetuates the white-maleness of the movement. (My essay is called “How ‘Alternative Proteins’ Create a Private Solution to a Public Problem” and you can read the abstract here.)

The editors include vegan feminist scholar Carol Adams. Adams and her co-editors penned this article soon after Bankman-Fried was arrested last November, in which they connect the dots to the book:

They explain:

The criticism that problems are inevitable when EA adherents follow the simplistic utilitarian idea that the ends justify the means, is correct as far as it goes. But the criticism says nothing about how EA is, at best, an utterly inadequate way of addressing global problems and, at worst, designed for the very sort of morally corrupt scandal in which it is now entangled. In the new collection, The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does, activists and scholars address the deeper problems that EA poses to social justice efforts. Even when EA is pursued with what appears to be integrity, it damages social movements by asserting that it has top-down answers to complex, local problems, and promises to fund grass-roots organizations only if they can prove that they are effective on EA’s terms.  

I share their concern that those who would question EA’s connection to blowhards like Bankman-Fried are not going deeper into the underlying flaws of effective altruism’s core philosophy. We desperately need this conversation.