What Effective Altruism means to me

How do we know we're doing good & how do we do good better?

Last night, I shared mole and mezcal with 6 incredible people during a bustling Sunday night in Mexico City. One person was a cofounder of a high impact nonprofit based in Colombia, another was a CEO in NYC, two were global health program experts, all were cool people. We talked about topics ranging from social entrepreneurship and being on local community boards to our love stories and songs in Spanish without the word "corazon," all of it flowing between English, Spanish, and Portuguese. If you had asked me 5 years ago what I'd think of this scenario, I'd say it sounds like a scene in a movie. It is certainly not a place I'd imagine to be. The thing that we all shared in common, that brought us all together, was Effective Altruism, an idea and a community surrounding this idea, of wanting to do good, and wondering "how do we do good better?" I am returning from the high of the Effective Altruism global conference in Mexico City, where around 200 people, mostly from Latin America, who share this passion to try to do the most good shared their stories and exchanged ideas. Inspired by them, I want to share more about effective altruism because I think these ideas and this community have changed my life for the better, and probably made me better at doing good for the world.

Graphic by Martina Pepiciello, see this post!

What is Effective Altruism?

The ideas are: how do we know we're doing good? And how do we do good better?

Imagine, first, a charity that has existed for 20 years with the goal of raising awareness for a disease. It spends 80% of its budget on overhead. Maybe they pay their CEO as much as they spend on implementation. Whether it survives is not a factor of whether it delivers on its mission, but whether it is good at getting grants & donations and calcifying itself into the system of getting grants.

So how do we know that the charities we donate to are actually doing good? We have to evaluate that by some metrics, is it the number of lives saved, how many people we raise out of poverty, how much suffering we prevent?

Around 15 years ago, a couple of people wanted to know what the best charities to donate to would be. Let's say if you had $5000, should you donate to your local food bank? It turns out, if you want to save lives, you get the most cost effectiveness when you donate to global health interventions like anti-mosquito bed nets in Africa to prevent malaria, where $5000 could feasibly save a whole life—not just prevent someone from dying once, but could prevent so many people from dying that it saves the equivalent of an entire lifetime.

As with companies, where some fail and some make billions of dollars, some charities are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than others. We should prioritize donating our money to those ones. See GiveWell¹

At the same time, a handful of moral philosophers² were interested in how we should act if we valued everyone equally, no matter where they are in the world, or perhaps, in time (the people of the future), or not people at all (living beings that could suffer). The intersection of these applied moral philosophies and those questions about how to prioritize where we should put our money & time is where Effective Altruism (EA) was born.

This moral philosophy sometimes brings us to weird conclusions. For example, kidney donations. Around 4000 people die every year waiting for a kidney.³ If I value myself equally to everyone, and I have two kidneys, and the chances of something going wrong in my donation operation is 1/10,000, unless I value my life 10,000x more than another person's, I should donate my kidney to a stranger. I have friends who have donated their kidneys to strangers, which is great! But of course not everybody will do that.

Another case is longtermism, where if you value the lives that have yet to exist, and you expect humanity may persist for another 1 million years, the numbers of humans yet to exist, if humanity doesn't go extinct, is an order of magnitude unimaginable to us, and so we should primarily work to prevent human extinction from things like nuclear annihilation, pandemics, AI, or other existential risks. If you wanted to live your life in any part by this moral valuation, you would work or donate to organizations that try to reduce existential risk. I now work in pandemic prevention policy, in part because of this. I knew about pandemic prevention as a career path years before COVID because people in the EA community have been talking for a while about pandemic prevention as an important field to work in.

The Community around these ideas are people who are kind, generous, ambitious, scientific, weird, nerds, truth seekers, contrarians. It's a big tent. Not always people I agree with, but we're all trying to do good better.

I have friends who founded charities for global health, animal welfare.
Friends who work in pandemic prevention policy like me, or in AI safety policy, or nuclear risk reduction.
Friends who have donated their kidneys to strangers and signed up for clinical trials to infect themselves with viruses.
Friends who donate 10% or more of their income every year to effective charities
Friends who work at EA movement-building organization to help support the community or research what EA priorities should be.
Friends who advise others on impactful jobs to work in.
The list goes on and on and on.

I've gotten to meet people in Mexico City, in London, Boston, San Francisco. I have a mentee who's a professor in Nigeria. I will visit some of them in Lima and Medellín. Some have come to visit me in Baltimore!

I first discovered EA through my undergrad roommate Ben Williamson, but I didn't get involved in the larger community until 2021, during my master's program, when I attended my first EA Global conference. Sometimes I wonder if I would have found it otherwise. I think maybe. I had bumped into the blog of Scott Alexander through the Internet, as well as Lesswrong, the rationalist forum that linkposts to the Effective Altruism forum. It's unclear though whether it would have taken without a person.

*For this reason, I'd love to talk with you about Effective Altruism & answer any questions you have*

I'm telling you about Effective Altruism in case you might not have otherwise found it, or it might not have stuck without an extra friendly conversation. And there’s a LOT more conversation to be had about EA, and I am not without critiques of it. Want to hear my hot takes? Want to learn more?

The Effective Altruism website. They have a free intro course! (that I haven’t done)

80,000 hours for career advice. You have 80,000 hours in your career, which makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

City groups and University groups! Find the next time they meet & meet them!

Thank you to Finan Adamson, Caitlin Walker, and Biak Tial for reviewing the draft of this.

1. An organization that evaluates charities & recommends high-impact charities to donate to.

2. The philosophers I’m thinking of are Peter Singer, Toby Ord, William Macaskill. Their works that I’ve read are respectively: The Life You Can Save, The Precipice, and What We Owe the Future.

3. At any given time, nearly 90,000 people in the United States are waiting for a kidney transplant, and 11 people die every day waiting for a kidney. Link