Kelsey Piper

Piper attended Stanford University, where she majored in computer science. At Stanford she discovered effective altruism, pledging to donate 30% of her lifetime income to charity and founding a campus advocacy organization.[2]

Since 2018, Piper has written the Vox column Future Perfect, which covers "the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism".[3][4] Piper is concerned about global catastrophic risks, and treats journalism as a way to popularize these risks and advance the cause of addressing them,[5] which is part of effective altruism's broader concern regarding the relevance of immediate action.[6] Specifically, Piper has discussed the possibility that society is living on a historical precipice, where immediate action needs to be taken to avoid global catastrophic risks, and what implications that has for effective altruism and her own journalism.[6]

Piper is also an outspoken defender of billionaire philanthropy, including writing on how to assess where very-wealthy philanthropists should donate.[7] Others have questioned whether this is ethically dubious, both as a symptom of systematic issues with income inequality, and as potentially permitting the wealthy disproportionate influence over those issues they philanthropize.[8]

Piper was also an early responder to the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing the risk of a serious global pandemic in February[9] and recommending measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing in March.[10][11] Since then, she has discussed the societal risk posed by inaccurate study preprints[12] and analyzed the impact of the pandemic on the historical scale, deeming it one of the ten deadliest in human history.[13]