Effective Altruism, in their own words

Reading note. Every line here is a verbatim quote from a public post, shown with its surrounding context and linked to the original. But people think out loud on these forums: some quotes are ideas an author was weighing, forecasting, or steelmanning — not necessarily a settled belief. Read them as "this is a view that circulates in EA," not "this person definitely holds this." Where we could identify quotes in which the author was arguing against the idea, we've excluded them.

Every quote is verbatim and links to its source.

Method & caveats

Source. Public posts on LessWrong, the EA Forum, and the Alignment Forum. Blockquotes were stripped before excerpting, so no one is ever shown saying words they were quoting from someone else. Multi-speaker dialogue posts were re-attributed to the actual speaker where the transcript made it verifiable.

Selection. Candidate passages were flagged and then reviewed for which of fourteen recurring "power themes" they express, keeping the most revealing line verbatim. This surfaces the eyebrow-raising veins the taxonomy could reach — it is representative, not exhaustive, and it leans toward the striking over the mundane.

Context & stance. Every displayed quote was re-verified as an exact substring of its source post. We also reviewed quotes against their surrounding paragraphs to gauge whether the author was endorsing a view or arguing against it, and excluded the clear "arguing-against" cases where we could identify them. Even so, some quotes may be hypotheticals or steelmen — see the reading note above. When in doubt, click through to the full post.

Editorial. The quotes are theirs; the ranking, the topic names, and the taglines are ours. The searchable Quotes lens is the neutral backstop — read it unfiltered to form your own view.