Giving up on EA after 13 years
webAuthor
Jackson Wagner
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
A personal essay from a long-term EA insider expressing disillusionment; relevant context for understanding tensions within the EA and AI safety communities around longtermism, funding priorities, and institutional culture post-FTX.
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eaforum
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April Fools' DayEffective giving
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Importance: 35/100commentary
Summary
A long-term Effective Altruism community member reflects on their decision to disengage from EA after 13 years of involvement, critiquing the movement's culture, priorities, and institutional failures. The post explores disillusionment with EA's trajectory, particularly around longtermism, AI safety focus, and community dynamics.
Key Points
- •Author details a 13-year journey within EA before concluding the movement has lost its way or failed to live up to its founding ideals.
- •Raises concerns about EA's cultural insularity, hero-worship dynamics, and concentration of decision-making power among a small elite.
- •Critiques the pivot toward longtermism and AI safety as potentially misallocating resources away from more tractable near-term interventions.
- •Reflects on the FTX/SBF scandal as a symptom of deeper institutional and ethical failures within the EA ecosystem.
- •Serves as a prominent example of insider critique and community self-reflection within the EA and AI safety funding landscape.
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# Giving up on EA after 13 years
By Jackson Wagner
Published: 2026-04-01
*Donating my shares to Lightcone Infrastructure, the Good Food Institute, and the Long-Term Future Fund, because EA refuses to make Mirror's Edge 3.*
[Leaning into EA disillusionment](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MjTB4MvtedbLjgyja/leaning-into-ea-disillusionment): Why I no longer believe in EA
=============================================================================================================================================================
I bought this EA stock almost thirteen years ago:
Leopold Aschenbrenner once said that “people with [situational awareness](https://situational-awareness.ai/) have a lower cost basis in Nvidia than you do”. I’m not sure if this is *exactly* what he meant… but close enough, right?
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, EA was a great company pumping out groundbreaking games:
* [Mirror’s Edge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1TJP1cxmo) had a striking art style that's still remembered fondly today, plus it pioneered a whole new style of first-person parkour gameplay.
* Crysis infamously pushed graphical technology to such extremes that it was like getting a preview of videogame technology 5-10 years in the future.
* Spore was… weird and bad, but its ambition and uniqueness was inspiring.
* The Dead Space games (including the almost weirdly good [point-and-shoot Wii spinoff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_lbXES1Zg)) were pretty creative, and the realism of Battlefield 3 felt like a valuable counterpoint to an increasingly-cartoony Call of Duty series. Both series felt like they were crafted with a lot of care, despite their big-budget action vibes.
* This was a hidden gem even at the time, but I genuinely loved the bizarre 2005 strategy game [Black & White 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_2). In particular, I thought that its lead programmer [Demis Hassabis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis#Career_and_research) had some intriguing gameplay ideas about artificial intelligence; I also appreciated its story/themes about what it would be like to be an all-powerful godlike being ruling over mankind. (I wonder if someday he will ever return to exploring those themes…)
* Right around the time I bought these shares, [Mass Effect 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1fs0_Rbbk) had just come out, and -- contra all the haters -- I thought it was actually [really incredible](https://badassdigest.com/2012/08/06/film-crit-hulk-smash-a-few-words-on-the-ending-of-mass-effect-3/).
Haters will say it’s false, but this was actually a great game. Most of all, it's one of the few big action games that truly seemed to care about having coherent philosophical
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