Introduction to Effective Altruism

This is adapted from effectivealtruism.org. If you want to learn more, we recommend reading the Effective Altruism Handbook or participating in our effective altruism introductory seminar.

Most of us want to make a difference. We see suffering, injustice and death, and are moved to do something about them. But working out what that ‘something’ is, let alone actually doing it, can be a difficult and disheartening challenge.

Effective altruism is a response to this challenge. It is a research field which uses high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It is also a community of people taking these answers seriously, by focusing their efforts on the most promising solutions to the world's most pressing problems.

An outstanding opportunity to do good

History contains many examples of people who have had a huge positive impact on the world:

• Norman Borlaug conducted research into disease-resistant wheat, helping to bring about the ‘Green Revolution’; he has been credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.

• Stanislav Petrov may have prevented all-out nuclear war simply by staying calm under pressure and being willing to disobey orders.

• Grace Eldering, Pearl Kendrick, and Loney Gordon worked through the Great Depression to develop a vaccine that has since prevented millions of deaths from whooping cough.

• Irena Sendler and Paul Rusesabagina risked their own lives to save thousands of people from genocidal regimes.

These people might seem like unrelatable heroes who were enormously brave or skilled, or who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But many ordinary people can also have a tremendous positive impact on the world, if they choose wisely.

This is such an astonishing fact that it’s hard to appreciate. Imagine if, one day, you see a burning building with a small child inside. You run into the blaze, pick up the child, and carry them to safety. You would be a hero. Now imagine that this happened to you every two years - you’d save dozens of lives over the course of your career.

This sounds like an odd world. But current evidence suggests it is the world that many people live in. If you earn the typical income in the US, and donate 10% of your earnings each year to the Against Malaria Foundation, you will probably save dozens of lives over your lifetime.

In fact, the world appears to be even stranger. Donations aren't the only way to help: many people have opportunities that are higher-impact than donating to global poverty charities. How? First, many people can have a greater impact by working directly on important problems than by donating. Second, other causes might prove even more important than global poverty and health, as we’ll discuss below.

Many attempts to do good fail, but the best are exceptional

In most areas of life, we understand that it’s important to base our decisions on evidence and reason rather than guesswork or gut instinct. When you buy a phone, you will read customer reviews to get the best deal. Yet we are not always so discerning when we work on global problems.

Below is a chart displaying data from Disease Control Priorities, second edition, showing the number of years of healthy life (measured using DALYs) you can save by donating $1,000 to a particular intervention to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS. The chart shows figures for five different strategies.

The first intervention, surgical treatment, can’t even be seen on this scale, because it has such a small impact relative to other interventions. And the best strategy, educating high-risk groups, is estimated to be 1,400 times better than that.

We suspect that the difference in intervention effectiveness is similarly large in other cause areas, though we don’t have as clear data as we do in global health. Why do we think this? Partly because most projects (in many domains for which we have data) don’t have a statistically significant positive impact. And, more optimistically, because there appear to be some interventions which have an enormous impact. But without knowing which experts to trust, or which techniques to trust in your research, it can be very hard to tell these apart.

Which interventions have the highest impact remains an important open question. Comparing different ways of doing good is difficult, both emotionally and practically. But these comparisons are vital to ensure we help others as much as we can.

It’s important to work on the right problems

The media often focuses on negative stories.

But in many ways, the world is getting better. Concerted efforts to improve the world have already had phenomenal success. Let’s consider just a few examples. The number of people living under the World Bank’s poverty line has more than halved since 1990. The Cold War saw thousands of nuclear weapons trained across the Atlantic, but we survived without a single nuclear strike. Over the last few centuries, we have criminalized slavery, dramatically decreased the oppression of women, and, in many countries, done a great deal to secure the rights and acceptance of people who are gay, bi, trans, or queer.

Nevertheless, many problems remain. Around 700 million people live on less than $2 per day. Climate change and disruptive new technologies have the potential to harm billions of people in the future. Tens of billions of land animals per year spend their lives suffering in factory farms. There are so many problems in the world, so we are forced to choose what to work on.

The cause that one chooses to work on is a large factor in how much good one can do. If one chooses a cause where it’s not possible to help very many people (or animals), and where there just aren’t any good ways to solve the relevant problems, one will significantly limit the impact they can have.

On the other hand, if you choose a cause where you can provide a lot of help, you may have an enormous impact. For instance, some attempts to reduce the suffering of animals appear to be incredibly effective. Through strategic campaigns against large food corporations, a small group of campaigners with limited budgets have since 2015 improved the living conditions of hundreds of millions of chickens who were suffering in US factory farms.

Many people are motivated to do good, but have already chosen a cause before they do any research. Choosing a cause because it is salient to us may cause us to overlook the problems where we can make the biggest difference. We can do more good if we carefully consider many causes, rather than stopping at the first one we're drawn to.

This matters because:

1. Lots of people want to do good.

2. Some ways of doing good achieve much more than others (given the same amount of resources).

3. These differences are not widely known or acted upon.

By searching for the most effective ways to do good, making them widely known, and acting on them, people interested in doing good can do far more to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Promising causes

How can we figure out which causes we should focus on?

One useful framework is as follows. Working on a cause is likely to be highly impactful to the extent that the cause is:

• Great in scale (it affects many lives, by a great amount)

• Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and

• Highly solvable or tractable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).

(If you’re interested, you can find a more formal, quantitative definition of these factors here.)

On the basis of this reasoning, several cause areas appear especially likely to be highly impactful.

These areas are not set in stone. As new evidence comes to light that suggests different causes are more promising, we should consider working on those instead. It’s also worth keeping in mind that if we move to a better cause, even if we aren't sure it's the best cause, our impact can still be much larger than it might have been.

Read more about three main areas: alleviating global poverty, improving animal welfare, and trying to ensure a good long-term future.

What does this mean for you?

HOW TO TAKE ACTION

People interested in effective altruism most often attempt to apply the ideas in their lives by:

• Choosing careers that help tackle pressing problems, or by finding ways to use their existing skills to contribute to these problems, such as by using advice from 80,000 Hours.

• Donating to carefully chosen charities, such as by using research from GiveWell or Giving What We Can.

• Starting new organizations that help to tackle pressing problems.

• Helping to build communities tackling pressing problems.

The above are not exhaustive. You can apply effective altruism no matter how much you want to focus on doing good, and in any area of your life – what matters is that, no matter how much you want to contribute, your efforts are driven by the four values above, and you try to make your efforts as effective as possible.

Typically, this involves trying to identify big and neglected global problems, the most effective solutions to those problems, and ways you can contribute to those solutions – with whatever time or money you’re willing to give.

By doing this and thinking carefully, you might find it’s possible to have far more impact with those resources. It really is possible to save hundreds of people’s lives over your career. And by teaming up with others in the community, you can play a role in tackling some of the most important issues civilization faces today.

CHOOSING A CAREER

For most of us, a significant amount of our productive waking life — over 80,000 hours on average — is spent working. This is an enormous resource that can be used to make the world better.

80,000 Hours is an organization dedicated to helping people figure out in which careers they can do the most good. They provide a set of tools to help people make decisions. They also seek out especially promising career opportunities and share them on their job board.

Get involved in the community

There’s already a growing global community of people who take these ideas seriously, and are putting them into action. Since 2009, more than 5,000 people have taken the Giving What We Can pledge. Hundreds of people have made high-impact career plan changes on the basis of effective altruism. And there are over two hundred community groups for people interested in effective altruism, including Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech!

Further reading

See the resource page to learn more about these ideas; it features our favorite articles, books, videos, and podcasts about effective altruism. You can also see frequently-asked questions about EA, including critiques of EA.

Finally, if you want up-to-date content on the latest news in effective altruism (global progress, new charities, job opportunities, and more), you should sign up for the Effective Altruism Newsletter. They send one newsletter per month, and they don't use that mailing list for anything else.