From the article:

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 piece is to explain the uniquely appealing aspects of the EA movement that have likely fueled its growth and what they might mean for the future of adjacent philosophical ideals.

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EA philosophy is a big tent, and I will not attempt to consider every possible variant. I will instead use the term Aggregate Utilitarian Rationalist Effective Altruism (AUREA) to denote a “mainline denomination” of EA commonly promoted by philosophers like MacAskill, Ord, Bostrom, and Bentham's Bulldog and pitched in EA intro fellowships. The case for AUREA is built on four separate arguments:

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Now, whether or not you agree with the axiology of Rand, the syllogistic structure of Rand’s ethics is shockingly close to AUREA’s — both involve some value function coupled to a framework for execution. What has been left out of both syllogisms as written is the side constraints which both philosophies at least claim to uphold. AUREA would say, particularly post-FTX, “don’t do things that are illegal or ‘common sense bad’ or generate bad optics (like sacrificing few for the many) for the sake of maximization.” Rand would say that pursuing rational self-interest by lying, cheating, stealing, and unprovoked force is irrational and goes against the notion of rights. It is telling, however, that both must tack on these kinds of statements to slightly hedge their claims to avoid absurd conclusions.

Objectivism and AUREA are perhaps the two most pure modern Rational Agentic Maximalist Philosophies (RAMPs). Some of the most ridiculed individualistic beliefs of Rand, including the idea that heroic characters like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are like Atlas holding up the country (which promptly collapses when they leave), are not so far off from AUREA’s valorization of figures like Norman Borlaug and Viktor Zhdanov for their enormous counterfactual impact.

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My point in making this parallel, however, is that if you can take the same execution framework and plug in self-consistent yet diametrically opposed value systems, then what you really have is a philosophical gun ready to be loaded with any unbounded V. This may be the most lasting impact of EA if it inspires similarly passionate and driven movements. A neo-Objectivist movement would be appealing in exactly the same way EA has been -- providing meaning, licensing ambition, and “weaponizing autism” as they say -- for values that are on the opposite end of the individual-collective spectrum. E/acc, which most EAs despise, is a direct descendant of the same framework, differing mainly on the sign it assigns to the expected value of powerful AI. I expect an increasingly secular world to generate many more EA-flavored movements by loading the chamber with a variety of maximizable V’s.