effective americanism

The current pinned tweet of the Department of War CTO Twitter account states the intention of the federal government — or at least the Department of War — to pursue Americanism in lieu of effective altruism.

Department of War CTO@DoWCTO

Americanism, not effective altruism.

The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT! 🇺🇸

Sep 14, 2026

I would like to make a friendly amendment. I believe that America should pursue Effective Americanism: we should impartially calculate and triage possible interventions, heeding the three key considerations of importance, neglectedness, and tractability, with our target being to maximize Americanism — understood to refer to the American spirit, rather than something like “being an American citizen” or whatever¹¹ Not to say that trying to make there be one billion Americans or whatever would necessarily not be a reasonable Effective Americanist cause area. I just think, if that is a reasonable Effective Americanist cause area, it would be because there being one billion Americans is an effective way to further American values and the American spirit, rather than because the goal of Americanism is definitionally that there be a large number of Americans..

According to Grok²² Chosen for this particular task on the basis of being generally perceived as the least woke / Effective Altruist AI (among American AIs). One could argue that this perception is incorrect, and that Elon Musk is in fact part of the Effective Altruist movement. I think many would disown him (though still hope to coordinate on common interests like AI safety when possible), but fine, here’s (after wracking my brain for what the least Effective Altruist American AI company) whatever Meta’s free chatbot is. It’s like, basically the same list, maybe with a few extra entries. This isn’t that controversial a question, it doesn’t matter that much. Maybe some people would fight over the fine details but the broad strokes are agreed upon., the core American values are:

• liberty

• equality (of opportunity and civic standing)

• individualism³³ In high school I had a social studies teacher who emphasized specifically rugged individualism as an American value. One can read more about this particular conception of individualism on Wikipedia.

• democratic self-government under law

• pursuit of happiness / opportunity

• family

• justice

• religious freedom

Effective Altruists have one key advantage over Effective Americanists: they can simply measure interventions in the QALY, or perhaps in estimated dignity points or something. American values aren’t quite so easy⁴⁴ I say this as if there aren’t probably tons of criticisms of the QALY framework or of the estimated dignity points or something framework. to quantify. A critical first priority of the Effective Americanism movement is therefore to identify effective methods for quantifying liberty⁵⁵ Wikipedia has a list of freedom indices which might provide a place to get started. You can also find, like, democracy indices and so on. I have no strong opinions about whether any of them are any good., equality, individualism, and other core American values. One would also hope to be able to estimate how many liberty points trade off against each equality point⁶⁶ And to estimate how much that parameter changes under different possible conditions — if you’re really starved for equality, maybe it takes unusually many liberty points to be worth a marginal equality point, etc. and such, and therefore to be able to collate liberty points and equality points and so on into Americanism points.

I do not know what all the most important Effective Americanist cause areas are. I cannot copy them from a list of cause areas the way I might were I to try to list Effective Altruist cause areas. The Effective Americanist movement has not had enough time to ponder and propose different avenues.

It does seem likely to be that letting America be destroyed by artificial superintelligence would be pretty bad for America, though. Existential risks, AI or otherwise, are a risk to America just as much as to any of the other great things humanity has created. So probably Effective Americanism ought to be interested in existential risk prevention as a key priority for much the same reasons that Effective Altruism is.

It might then deprioritize malaria nets in favor of some other sorts of social interventions — or then again, maybe not, as presumably reducing malaria risk increases equality of opportunity, people’s ability to pursue happiness, and so on? But even if that’s not a horribly ineffective way of doing Americanism, perhaps there’s something more closely targeted. We will have to see what sorts of policies Effective Americanists propose.