“Effective Altruism, Seen From Slytherin” by Xylix

Epistemic status: Left as an exercise for the reader. I was thinking of EA outreach and its optics this week. And was inspired to glance at a specific part: What does EA look like from the lens of a Slytherin? People keep being surprised about Effective Altruist Slytherins Surprise means your model has error. I'll point out the confusions. First confusion: But Slytherins don't care for altruistic goals! I think we can divide the Hogwarts Houses into methods houses [1] : Slytherin values social shrewdness. Understanding the status game. Knowing who holds the stakes. Ravenclaw values well-crunched analysis. Intellectualism. Academicness. and value houses: Gryffindor values courage and doing what's right Hufflepuff values kindness and loyalty And this naturally leads into an explanation for why Slytherins would want to do EA: Slytherins have a pretty normal amount of variance in their values, accounting for their backgrounds. Methods are (to a significant degree) orthogonal to values. If it's a methods house, why do even the non-reprehensible Slytherins often get called evil? I think it's largely because the Slytherin-virtuous methods are considered reprehensible by the [...] ---Outline:(00:25) People keep being surprised about Effective Altruist Slytherins(00:38) But Slytherins dont care for altruistic goals!(01:56) But why are there so few Slytherin EAs?(02:00) 1. Selection effects(04:06) 2. You just dont see them(04:28) Case study The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 14th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vEtDRyhfCNBKBiiy7/effective-altruism-seen-from-slytherin --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.