Effective Altruism is good

Unarguably so

I recently attended an effective altruism conference. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I met and talked to a multitude of interesting people about many interesting topics, relating to philosophy, AI, the crazy things Brian Tomasik says, existential risks, nuclear winter, and many others. This description of the conference might sound bleak. I assure you, it was not bleak. If anything, my hope for the future of humanity is heightened by the conference.

For those of you who are currently on the fence about whether or not to go to an EA meetup I have a piece of advice: do it. It was a super cool experience, despite being online. In person it would no doubt be much better.

So inspired was I by the conference that I decided to take to my blog to passionately defend effective altruism (as I’ve done before). Effective altruism is an incredibly important social movement. The basic idea of EA is that we should try to figure out how to maximally improve the world. Controversial, I know.

Let’s consider EA by contrasting it with the play pump. As Will Macaskill says “Yeah. The now infamous PlayPump was a program that got a lot of media coverage in the 2000s and even won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award. The idea was based on identifying a true problem — that many villages in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to clean drinking water. The idea was to install a kind of children's merry-go-round or roundabout, for children to push, jump on, and spin around. That would harness the power of children's play in order to provide clean water for the world. By pushing this merry-go-round, you would pump up water from the ground. It would act like a hand pump, providing clean water to the village. 

Some people loved this idea. The media loved it, and said, “Providing clean water is child's play,” or pun on it [in some other way]. It was a little hit. But this intervention was a disaster. None of the local communities were consulted about whether they wanted a pump. They liked the much cheaper, more productive, easier-to-use Zimbabwe hand pumps that were sometimes, in fact, replaced by these PlayPumps. Moreover, the PlayPumps were sufficiently inefficient that one journalist estimated the children would have to play on the pump for 25 hours per day in order to provide enough water for the local community, but obviously children don't want to play on a merry-go-round all of the time. So, it would be left to the elderly women of the village to push this brightly colored play pump around and around.”

So ideally, we want our charities to not be like the playpump. Charities shouldn’t just seem nice to western people half a world away; they should actually make the world better. Some charities can be much better than other charities. The cost to save a life is about 4500 dollars. Thus, if you donate 4500 dollars a year, you can save one life per year. This is an amazing opportunity. Knowing that there’s one child every year whose life you saved is an awesome feeling. There’s a reason that more charitable people are happier. Making the world better makes ones life better. It’s like having the opportunity to save a child from a burning building every year but with no risk to yourself. We should donate to these organizations instead of other less effective organizations.

One might worry that donating money to other countries does more harm than good. However, even if foreign aid is often bad (which I don’t think it is, but that’s a separate question) there is no controversy over the type of aid given by effective altruist organizations. As Karnofsky says “We believe that the most prominent people known as “aid critics” do not give significant arguments against the sorts of activities our top charities focus on, particularly with respect to health interventions. Instead, their critiques tend to focus on the harms of government-to-government aid, particularly when it is not effectively targeting those most in need and not effectively focusing on interventions with strong track records.” He then goes on to identify that all of the prominent critics of foreign aid have explicitly come out in favor of the type of foreign aid promoted by EA organizations.

Effective altruism promotes a culture of rigorous analysis which carefully looks at the costs and benefits of various policies. EA organization have often changed their top recommendations when better data has come in. They’re extremely willing to look at what their critics say and change their advice accordingly.

Imagine a person made investment decisions totally at random, without looking at projected interest rates. That would obviously be foolish. Well, the common approach to charity is basically a copy of that. If one does not look at any data relating to effectiveness of an organization then they’re no more likely to give to charities that actually help people than ones that don’t do any good. Don’t give to organizations like the organization homeopaths without borders. (Note, this isn’t making fun of Doctors without borders. There is an actually organization called homeopaths without borders).

To the extent that we’re utilitarians we should obviously care greatly about helping people as much as we can. Yet even if we’re not, all plausible moral views say that if you’re helping others, you should try to help them as much as possible. That’s all you have to accept to be in favor of effective altruism. And we should all surely accept that.

What can you do? Well, there are lots of good charities listed by GiveWell. Give to them! You can save lots of lives and make the world dramatically better.

If you’re earlier in your career, sign up for 80,000 hours career advising. Different jobs can do different amounts of good. There are lots of ways of leveraging particular careers for good. It’s also generally very helpful job advice. 80,000 hours can also get those who sign up for their career advice in contact with other people in their field and provide helpful opportunities—they certainly did for me.

The best ways of helping the world aren’t just about helping current humans. There are also great ways of helping non human animals. You can give to the Humane League which can positively impact 10 years of hen life per dollar received. Given the horrific ways we treat animals, it is absolutely crucial that we reduce their misery. If you’re not Vegan and feel guilty about it, give to these organizations. If you do so, even if you’re not vegan, you can have an overall positive impact on animals. Just give 50 dollars a year—the animals will thank you.

Use the opportunities given to you to make the world as good of a place as you can! Be like Sam Bankman Fried who became motivated by effective altruist ideas and became the richest person under 30, with a net worth of $22.5 billion, has given away vast amounts of money, and plans to give away the overwhelming majority of his fortune over the course of his life. Reading EA ideas convinced him to try to fund a startup—which he did very successfully. Additionally, Fried has an excellent anecdote, recounted here.

“When Bankman-Fried was about 14, his mother says, she noticed that—completely on his own—he had been reading up in this area intensively.

“He emerged from his bedroom one night and said to me, ‘Mom, what kind of person labels an argument he disagrees with ‘the repugnant conclusion?’” Bankman-Fried had stumbled upon the writings of philosopher Derek Parfit, who had used that phrase in criticizing a certain strain of utilitarian thought.

“Sam was mad at Parfit for being wrong,” Barbara Fried recounts, “but madder at Parfit for the cheapness of his argument. ‘If you’re gonna take this on, you damn well need to grapple with the argument’” and not merely label it “repugnant.””

The world has lots of opportunities to do good. People like Norman Borlaug saved millions of lives through his agricultural research, and Petrov averted a nuclear war between the US and soviet union. We should act on those opportunities, not merely strive to live a decent life. If you have the opportunity so save hundreds or thousands of lives, you should damn well take it.

Yet there’s one other area of effective altruism that I haven’t mentioned yet. A third area that’s less widely discussed, one of the three pillars, in addition to global health and animal welfare. That one plausibly offers the most opportunities to do good.

That one will be discussed in the next post.

Gotta keep you in suspense.