Of course, the terminology I’m actually advocating is EA 1.0 and EA 2.0. I noticed that Daniel Frank (a board member of Giving What We Can Canada) already used this terminology in a post back in 2022. I also noticed one or two examples of other people using it organically.

To be clear, I didn’t come up with this terminology myself.

I think it should be fairly uncontroversial to say that the late 2000s, early 2010s version of EA focused almost exclusively on global poverty can be called EA 1.0. And that the late 2010s and 2020s version of EA focused largely on AGI safety, longtermism, and existential risk can be called EA 2.0. I think people generally agree that an important change happened, regardless of whether they think the change is good or bad.

Thanks.

I assume everyone who has donated to Stop AI, supported it, or been involved was shocked and horrified by Sam Kirchner’s threats to murder people. I can’t imagine anyone supported that.

Nothing I said was intended to imply that anyone who has supported Stop AI supported Sam Kirchner’s threats. It was just to establish that there is a meaningful connection between Stop AI and EA — that Stop AI is “in EA’s orbit”. 

I don’t believe Stop AI expelled Sam Kirchner. I think he resigned. After Sam Kirchner threatened to commit a mass shooting at OpenAI, a few people on the EA Forum expressed concern about what Stop AI said about it.

Someone should write a separate deep-dive post about Leverage Research and its infiltration of EA. (Although you’d be able to get a lot the same information just by reading the sources I cited.) A lot of people in EA are unaware of this story, but it’s important. It’s not exactly super secret or hidden — there seems to be general agreement that Leverage Research is a cult and the Centre for Effective Altruism describes its history with Leverage Research on its website under its “Mistakes we’ve made” page — yet people in EA don’t talk about it.

Maybe you could investigate the topic for yourself and write a deep dive post on it. Maybe someone else could.

The key thing is for people in EA to understand the truth about what happened. And to learn whatever lessons they think they should learn from that.

I’m a bit numb to procedural or formalistic critiques at this point because they always seem to just end up being another way to express substantive disagreement. It’s not like the EA community actually follows the writing and sourcing norms you’re advocating here.

The important thing is the substantive questions:

• Is Leverage Research a cult?

• Did it take over the Centre for Effective Altruism?

• Did it organize the EA Summits and the Pareto Fellowship? Did it play an important role in organizing the first EA Globals?

• If so, how could the EA movement, particularly the core international leadership, let this happen?

• If so, what might be the broader ramifications of this?

• What (if anything) is there to learn from this?

Similarly:

• Are there multiple cults (or cult-like groups) that have emerged from or been associated with the LessWrong community (rationalist community)?

• If so, why?

• Is the threat of a Stop AI co-founder to commit a mass shooting a concern for EA?

• If so, what could EA do in response? For instance, what could EA do to discourage extremist beliefs and behaviour, particularly violent behaviour?

• Does any of this point to deeper concerns with EA? Is it just a string of bad luck, or is there something more here?

• If it’s not just bad luck, what could be done better in the future?

Yes. It could just be a coincidence. But I don't think it's just a coincidence. I think the lack of critical thinking and lack of good norms you need to let a cult take over your movement is a bad sign, and may predict bad things to come. Particularly if there isn't an adequately large post-mortem, an adequate attempt to reckon with such a catastrophic mistake, such a catastrophic failure, and learn deep lessons from it.

This risks going down a rabbit hole, but I think one of the systemic problems with the EA movement is a consistent failure to do good post-mortems. (And while we're at it, good pre-mortems would probably help too.) Many movements, organizations, groups, individuals, etc. experience big failures. Sometimes they learn from them and turn things around. Sometimes they don't. There are several instances such as the Leverage Research infiltration, the Manifest racism scandal, and even the collapse of FTX where I think EA had opportunities to learn hard lessons and do things better in the future, but didn't.

But, of course, I can't prove any of this. It's all just my opinion.

But longtermism doesn't necessarily include AI safety, since many advocates of AI safety are not longtermists. If you think there's a 50%+ chance of superintelligence within a decade and a 5%+ chance of human extinction if superintelligence is created, you don't have to be concerned at all with anything that might happen 1,000+ years from now to treat that as an urgent priority.

In 2021, Will MacAskill, who coined the term longtermism, defined longtermism like this:

Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.

In the introduction to the 2025 anthology Essays on Longtermism, Hillary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad cite that definition from Will MacAskill. They also characterize longtermism like this:

A cluster of ideas going under the label ‘longtermism’ hold that considerations of the far future—on timescales of thousands, millions, or even billions of years—are highly significant for today’s decision-making.

Not all AI safety advocates are longtermists. Some are concerned with what will happen within the next 100 years and don't really think or care that much about the future 1,000+ years from now.

To accurately break down the EA 1.0 vs. EA 2.0 distinction by cause area, it would have to be something convoluted like: global health and development + animal welfare vs. AI safety + longtermism.

The post uses hyperlink citations. When a word or phrase is hyperlinked, that's a citation. You can open the links and see the evidence for yourself.

For example, I cited this comment from Oliver Habryka, who worked for the Centre for Effective Altruism during the 2010s:

I will again remind people that Leverage at some point had approximately succeeded at a corporate takeover of CEA, placing both the CEO and their second-in-command in the organization. They really were not very peripheral to EA, they were just covert about it.

I cited Zoe Curzi's account of her time at Leverage Research, which supports its characterization as a cult. I also cited the Centre for Effective Altruism's webpage which documents some of its historical relationship with Leverage Research, and notes that Leverage Research organized the EA Summit conferences and the Pareto Fellowship. An additional citation in the post is an EA Forum comment (with a reply corroborating it) that describes cult-like behaviour during the interview process for the Pareto Fellowship.

I've actually never heard anyone in EA either a) deny that Leverage Research is a cult or b) deny that it was deeply involved in EA and the CEA, although maybe some people do deny one or both of those things. I don't necessarily have my finger on the pulse.

By in EA's orbit, I mean, e.g., that if Stop AI's co-founder, Sam Kirchner, had committed a mass shooting at OpenAI (like he said he wanted to do) some of the Stop AI money — which the co-founder wanted to use to buy high-powered weapons and ammo, but was prevented from doing by other people at Stop AI — that bought those guns and those bullets that massacred people in the OpenAI offices might have been, in part, donated by people in the EA community who thought they were donating to an EA-aligned organization in an EA cause area (AI safety).

A 2024 GoFundMe fundraiser by Stop AI raised $9,111. Among the publicly listed donors is Stijn Bruers, who donated $578. His LinkedIn says he was the president of Effective Altruism Belgium for 8 years. Stijn Bruers has also been on the EA Forum since 2015 and has 1075 karma. So, we can confirm that Stop AI has been, in some part, funded by donations from people in the EA community.

A day after OpenAI's offices were locked down in response to the threat from the Stop AI co-founder, a post on the EA Forum debated whether to donate to Stop AI. It ultimately decided against, but not for the reason that Stop AI is likely to be too extremist or might end up killing people. Just that the evidence for the efficacy of its tactics is not strong enough. (I assume this post was written and published before the author heard the news about Stop AI.)

More evidence about Stop AI's connection to EA: another Stop AI member, Remmelt Ellen, has posted 86 times on the EA Forum since 2017, commented 280 times, and has 1439 karma. According to his LinkedIn, he co-founded Effective Altruism Netherlands in 2017. His EA Forum profile and his LinkedIn also say he's had a major role at an EA project called AI Safety Camp, which has in part been funded by Effective Altruism Funds and the FTX Future Fund. Apparently one of Remmelt Ellen's roles at AI Safety Camp has been to work on "Stop/Pause AI projects", but I don't know what connection (if any) that has with the organization Stop AI (with which he is involved). Stop AI is a splinter group off of PauseAI, which has a more prominent place in the EA community and on the EA Forum.

Here's a positive EA Forum comment about Stop AI from Greg Colbourn. Greg Colbourn created the EA Hotel. He's been on the EA Forum since 2014 and has 5972 karma. Greg Colbourn has also made a number of positive tweets about Stop AI: example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4.

Is this enough evidence to establish a meaningful connection between EA and Stop AI? I think so, but you may disagree.

The Zizians did not come from EA directly, but they came from the LessWrong community. There is so much overlap between EA and the LessWrong community these days that the distinction between the two is porous. The lead sentence of the Wikipedia article on the Zizians describes them like this:

The Zizians are an informal group of rationalists allegedly involved in six violent deaths in the United States, three in 2022 and three in 2025.

The Wikipedia article on the rationalist community (or LessWrong community) describes the Zizians as a “splinter group” off of the rationalist community.

Whether that's "in EA's orbit" or what the phrase "in EA's orbit" means is something you can feel free to disagree with me on. Would it have been better if I said "adjacent to EA" or "only one or two degrees separated from EA"? The core point is that Leverage Research was not just a totally random, out-of-the-blue fluke. New groups with extreme views and violent behaviours are still not that far separated from EA. This is not normal and doesn't typically happen.

Note (2026-06-05 at 00:56 UTC): I made substantial edits to this comment after posting. Use the Wayback Machine to see version history.

Okay, so I'm advocating two things. The first is a new piece of terminology. The second is online discussion spaces oriented around EA 1.0 (and not EA 2.0).

If people can articulate the distinction better by having this terminology, it might mean people talk past each other less, which might mean they have fewer frustrating discussions where neither person feels like they're getting their point across. In that way, making the distinction could help people get along better rather than worse.

I'm totally against echo chambers, but the EA Forum is mostly an EA 2.0 echo chamber and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. I think there should be EA 1.0 spaces for discussion that make room for all the pro-EA 1.0 and anti-EA 2.0 conversations that can't happen on the EA Forum. You risking winding up in just another echo chamber if you do that, so it will be up to whoever gets involved to make sure that doesn't happen. And if people who prefer EA 1.0 want to engage with EA 2.0 discourse, the EA Forum will still be around for them to do it.

The philosopher David Thorstad has an exemplary post on peer review, with strong evidence and arguments for its effectiveness — both as a means of increasing research quality and as a means of persuasion of expert communities.