Hard Feelings: The Effective Altruist Imagination

Effective altruists have been coming together since the early 2000s over a shared sense that the crises of our time could be improved if those with the desire to “do good” learned to be more efficient with their time and money. Through a feminist discourse analysis of posts on the EA Forum, this paper explores the effective altruist imagination, inspired by activist-writer adrienne maree brown’s assertion that we are in an imagination war: How do effective altruists envision themselves, the public, and our collective future? What does this imagining move them to do?