In a recent podcast interview with Griftonomics about the increasingly influential ideology known as "longtermism," I was asked at the end "So, what's the grift?" The difficulty in answering this is not what to say but where to start.
Longtermism emerged from a movement called "Effective Altruism" (EA), a male-dominated community of "super-hardcore do-gooders" (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement's members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future.
