Earn to give, MacAskill called his idea. His final slide was an invitation: “If you are convinced to any extent by the arguments given above, please come up and speak with me afterwards.” Even before he was done, he knew the sort of person who’d be coming up to speak with him: the sort of person who scored an 800 on their math SAT, and understood that the test was too crude to capture their full aptitude. Like Jane Street Capital, the effective altruism movement had come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a reason. Roughly three in four of the people who approached MacAskill after one of his
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