Growing Effective Altruism

Why we should and how to do it

Suppose you’re an effective altruist interested in donating to have the highest impact. Where should you give? There are many different good options: global health charities, farmed animal welfare charities, shrimp charities, wild animal charities, insect charities, and many more. Many of these are effective in very different ways and to unclear degrees—if you care about insects, is it better to save human lives or to fund research on insects directly? And how does this compare to existential risk reduction? It’s all so complicated!

I don’t know the answers to a lot of these questions. My tentative guess is that Longtermist charities outweigh other stuff in expectation if you’re a full-on utilitarian robot, but I’m not super confident in that. I also, as a purely psychological matter, find it hard to be a full-on utilitarian robot and spend all my money on existential threat reduction when there are people and animals currently suffering and dying (I don’t mean to suggest this is rational—I don’t think it is). We are constantly in triage. Countless sentient beings are suffering in horrible ways, in multitude ways, and we can help them.

The EA forum is having its marginal funding week, wherein people put some money in a pot and then vote on how it’s allocated across various highly effective charities. I highly encourage you to chip in (I just gave $50). One thought that struck me when I read the pieces explaining what the various charities do was just how many different ways effective altruists are doing good, and how much more good EAs could do with more money and more organizations.

As I say, I’m not super sure which of these altruistic efforts is best. But what I am sure about is that we want more people thinking about these questions. We want more thoughtful people working on these problems, as well as giving money to address the world’s most severe and tractable problems. A larger effective altruism movement with more funding to address more of these important issues is vital. Movement growth is vital.

For this reason, I think one good bet for a cause to donate to is growing the EA movement. Good organizations (that you can fund) doing this include the EA infrastructure fund, Giving What We Can, Effektiv spenden, the CEA community builders program, and regional EA programs like EA Netherlands. A dollar given to Giving What We Can returns around 6 dollars of donations to effective charities, and effektiv spenden’s estimated returns were over 13 dollars per dollar raised. Note: these estimates were explicitly counterfactual, not just taking into account the amount of money raised, but how much extra money is likely to have been raised that wouldn’t have if these organizations hadn’t existed.

If there was ten times as much funding in effective altruism, then we’d have more than enough money to fund all these valuable projects and more. Effective altruism is both funding and talent constrained. We neither have enough money nor enough talent to do all we need to do. That can change if the movement grows.

It is talent constrained in that there are shockingly few full-time animal activists. There is only a single group working on improving the welfare of shrimp, the most farmed animal. Despite soil arthropods outnumbering people by a factor of about a billion to one, there’s basically no funding being spent figuring out how to improve their welfare.

Now, I want to address one objection which is: doesn’t this make EA into sort of a Ponzi scheme? If people donate to grow EA, and then the new EAs grow EA more, isn’t EA just spending all its money growing? But this conflates your marginal impact with the movement as a whole. Obviously the movement shouldn’t just be about self-promotion, but in light of the fact that the movement is currently way too small, there should be more growing of it at the margins. Both growth and concrete action are an important part of any movement.

But I don’t just want people to donate to grow the movement. I think that we, as a community, are taking way too little individual action to grow the movement. Despite having 10,000 people who have pledged to give 10% of their incomes to effective charities, Rob Miles and Liv Boeree are, as best as I can tell, the only big explicitly EA YouTubers. I want smart, video-savvy young people to be flooding the internet with extremely well-made videos about core EA ideas!

We have a few EA blogs, but we need MOAR. I want dozens of people blogging about EA ideas—and not just EA ideas, but a mix of EA and non-EA ideas so that they can attract audiences that aren’t just effective altruists. I want effective altruists to conquer the internet so that many more people are exposed to the core ideas.

The core effective altruist idea is that we should strive to do good as effectively as possible. That idea is simply correct. It’s almost an analytic truth. And yet very few people act on it seriously. From that core conviction, lots of interesting and debatable sub-questions open up—questions that can capture the mind of a smart person for many years.

My sense is that if you’re in the Bay Area, you’ll almost invariably be exposed to effective altruist ideas. We need that same kind of exposure everywhere. EAs need to conquer the world, and make it clear to everyone that they can save dozens of lives and improve conditions for tens of thousands of farmed animals.

This is especially important in light of future global challenges. We’re reaching an age of transformative AI where many new issues will be on the table. AI welfare, model specification, and alignment are all crucial issues. We need smart people thinking about these. Moreover, we need smart people with influence so that they’re not just writing blog posts but actually getting their ideas enacted.

High-profile EAs should be going on podcasts, exposing people to the core ideas (if anyone wants to have me on their podcast, reach out). High-profile EAs who don’t spend that much time talking about effective altruism should talk about it more. If you’re a high-profile EA, I think you should clearly have at least one article or video encouraging people to take the Giving What We Can Pledge.

If you’re at a university, join your EA club—or start one if it doesn’t already exist. This is hugely impactful for getting more people involved. Start a blog or a YouTube channel. Talk to your friends and family about these core ideas. Annoy all the people around you by telling them about shrimp welfare. Help bring EA into the public consciousness.

This will have three major important effects.

First, it will increase the amount of money going to effective charities. These charities save lives. Fewer people will die horribly if there are more people donating. Talking people into donating to effective charities is eminently doable—while it’s hard to get them to donate only to effective charities, it’s not impossible to get them to give some. I’ve talked my parents and grandparents—who’d never heard about effective altruism before—into donating some to GiveWell charities. Most people are surprisingly receptive to the pitch “here’s a great way to save lives cheaply.”

Second, it will increase the number of people doing impactful work. It will mean more people working in AI safety, animal welfare, and global health. It means more people spending their careers trying to do as much good as possible. The EA movement has done insane amounts of good despite being pretty small. We’ve saved about 50,000 lives a year, for starters. By increasing the number of people involved, we can do more.

But third, we can make EA a more influential social and political force. EAs can become a real political coalition that will penalize politicians who vote to gut foreign aid or torture more wild animals. There is influence in numbers. An EA movement comprised of many smart, scrupulous, well-motivated people—both young and old—is an EA movement that’s influential. The world would be a better place if EA was as influential everywhere as it is in the bay. Such a future has a much better chance of reaching the world’s full potential, or close to it.

Whether the future flourishes—whether we reach our potential—will depend, to a considerable degree, on the decisions we make soon. It will depend on whether we allow space resources to be dominated by whomever gets to them first or whether we think carefully about how to spend them. The next century could lock the world in to whichever values we give to the AIs that will likely control the future. Having people reflect carefully before deciding how to populate the universe could be one of the most consequential decisions humans ever make. We need more EAs thinking seriously about these problems to make sure we do this right.

The stakes are astronomical. The decisions we make in the next century could be far more consequential than any made before. To get them right, we’ll need people to be thinking carefully about bringing about astronomical value. To do that, ensuring EAs concerned with value are among those making the decisions is one of the top priorities. But EA needs to be larger and more influential for that to happen. Ideally the EA movement would be hundreds or thousands of times larger!

So go out and make disciplEAs of all nations.