“Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies” by Connor Blake

From the end of high school to after my sophomore year of college, I considered myself an effective altruist. I was on the board of my college EA club, ran an EA intro fellowship, and went to EA retreats. I was vegetarian, regularly donated to GiveWell, and generally tried to proselytize EA ideas. I was never fully convinced to pursue a career as an AI safety researcher or in animal welfare, but I found the ideas around agency, counterfactual impact, and a life structured around a single coherent philosophical vision compelling.

If I had to attribute my exit from EA to a single event, it would be reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. For an author who has written an essay provocatively titled "The Virtue of Selfishness" and is known for relentlessly bashing altruism, one might expect that Rand's philosophical ideal is entirely disjoint from EA and that I had merely been turned away from altruism altogether.

Instead, it clarified to me that EA constitutes a bundle of distinct belief systems, each of which is rare in modern philosophical and cultural discourse but is typically presented in a single tight argument.

My goal for this post is to explain [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) Unbundling Effective Altruism

(09:13) Objectivism and Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hoR4mWkaPKKgstioX/rational-agentic-maximalist-philosophies

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.