The Train to Crazy Town - by Richard Y Chappell
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The Train to Crazy Town<br>How to Ride Without Losing Your Mind
Richard Y Chappell<br>Jun 29, 2026
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Five years ago, Ajeya Cotra memorably described Effective Altruist reasoning as a “train to crazy town”—with longtermists in particular staying on the train for longer than their nearterm-focused colleagues. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but what I suspect resonates for a lot of people is the sense that EA-style abstract reasoning can push you in directions you may not antecedently want to go (i.e., against your natural sympathies), and there’s something potentially alienating or even threatening about that.1<br>Earlier still, back in 2015, Scott Alexander wrote about the dilemma that either we shouldn’t care about non-human animals at all, or they should totally swamp every other moral concern. There’s no realistic chance that the correct moral weighting conveniently turns out to be that precise value needed to justify a balanced approach on first-order grounds. His response was to “safeword out” of that whole line of abstract reasoning for the sake of his sanity. I actually think that’s a pretty good response, but would like to try to give it a more principled backing—one that turns out to carry a surprising upshot: that moral theories may not be meant to guide us directly at all.<br>As a first step, I want to highlight how important it is that people feel free to not act on their beliefs. It might not sound ideal, but it’s a practical guardrail that’s essential for protecting unbiased inquiry. Teaching applied ethics, especially topics like charitable giving or eating meat, I find that undergraduate students engage in the most transparently motivated reasoning because they feel like they need to defend their current actions. My bet is that we’d make more moral progress as a society if people felt more comfortable saying, “Yeah, I don’t do as much as I should in this arena. It’s on my moral to-do list.” And then make sure your to-do list is sensibly prioritized. Your next step may then involve doing a lot more good than would be likely to happen if you were just stuck rationalizing your existing behavior, unwilling to even consider where it might improve, let alone prioritizing among the many such opportunities for moral improvement.<br>So: let your beliefs roam free, and if you don’t like where they end up, just don’t act upon it. That’s your prerogative. But I do think we should make serious efforts to be intellectually honest and try to figure out what’s true. And hopefully that’ll help us to identify significant marginal improvements that we can make for others at low personal cost.<br>Returning to the train of abstract reasoning, there are the two big worries:<br>(1) Swamping effects, leading to the neglect of current people’s interests<br>(2) Motivating fanatical or extremist behavior (neglecting downside risk)<br>My thesis is that both can be successfully addressed by suitable application of the distinction between ideal theory and imperfect practice — which you’ll notice we’ve already applied once in the discussion above. The remaining core challenge is to introduce suitable guardrails on how we put theory into practice that limit downside risk without symmetrically2 capping the upside of rational reflection.<br>Meet my foil. One prominent longtermist famously endorsed “double or nothing” existence gambles: he said he’d accept a 49% chance of destroying the world for a 51% chance of doubling it and all the value it contains. He later became even more notorious for gambling with customer deposits, riding the train all the way to federal prison.<br>As a moral philosopher, I’m interested in the question of when it’s helpful to be guided by abstract moral reasoning, and when we should be more cautious and conservative. If there’s one thing philosophers know, it’s that human minds often struggle to identify the flaw in a chain of superficially-plausible reasoning. If we were committed to accepting any conclusion whose argument we couldn’t logically refute, we would be easy dupes , at the mercy of anyone more analytically skilled than ourselves.<br>But if there’s a second thing we know, it’s that historically, unreflective deference to socially conventional common sense has enabled moral disasters—slavery, homophobia, factory farming. It would be an extraordinary coincidence if our generation were the first whose conventional wisdom was morally perfect. So we have two opposing failure modes to protect against—the easy dupe and the dogmatist —my question is how best to balance these risks.<br>I view Effective Altruism as basically “applied moral philosophy”. Whereas most social movements are pushing certain predefined interests or values, EA’s cause neutrality and concern for the abstract good makes it open to an unusually wide range of concrete goals. The usual first stop, combining cosmopolitan moral concern with a concern for real evidence...