Ecneladis
The Effective Altruism Handbook
Jan 11, 2017

Avalaible online at effective-altruism.com (pdf)

Notes

I. What is Effective Altruism?

Effective altruism is a growing community based around the idea of aiming to do the most good that one can. It involves:

  1. Being open to all the possible ways to do good and pursuing the path with the biggest positive impact;
  2. Using evidence to figure out how to do the most good; and
  3. Choosing to make altruism a significant part of one’s life.

1. The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle

Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? (…) we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert (…)


The ancients knew of the “paradox of hedonism”, according to which the more explicitly we pursue our desire for pleasure, the more elusive we will find its satisfaction.

3. Scope Neglect

Scope neglect has been shown to apply to human lives. Carson and Mitchell (1995) report that increasing the alleged risk associated with chlorinated drinking water from 0.004 to 2.43 annual deaths per 1,000 (a factor of 600) increased SWTP from $3.78 to $15.23 (a factor of 4). Baron and Greene found no effect from varying lives saved by a factor of ten. 1

4. Tradeoffs

II. Charity Evaluation

5. Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others

  • Give well - does founding best charity scales indefinitely? Or after some amount of money it’s better to fund second charity?

6. “Efficiency” Measures Miss the Point

Two fatal errors:

  • The first is that high administrative efficiency equals high impact. It doesn’t.
  • The second is that the admin-to-program ratio is measuring efficiency. If it isn’t measuring impact, it’s axiomatic that it isn’t measuring efficiency, because the only efficiency that matters is the efficiency associated with impact. Take the frugal breast cancer charity that consistently fails to find a cure for breast cancer. The last word a woman dying of breast cancer would use to describe it would be “efficient.” Not if she factors in the value of her life

8. Estimation Is the Best We Have

9. Our Updated Top Charities

Over the next 2 years, AMF received more than $10 million on the basis of our recommendation but struggled to identify opportunities to use the funds it had received.

III. Career Choice

10. To Save the World, Don’t Get a Job at a Charity: Go Work on Wall Street

11. High Impact Science

The Population Bomb: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…


The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who developed new and more effective methods of plant breeding, used them to develop the key strain of wheat, and brought about expansion of his methods to other crops and deployment in South Asia, played a pivotal role. Some credit him with saving a billion lives, referring to the number of people fed by the increased agricultural production of the Green Revolution.


However, tremendous impacts are possible through speeding the pace of progress, even slightly. According to the WHO, malaria killed over 781,000 people in 2009. If current trends continue, advances in vaccines, bednets, mosquito control and increased deployment efforts will likely eventually drive fatalities down to zero. But leaping ahead in this process by a single year could save 781,000 lives. A single day’s speedup would save 2,139 lives. Advancing the process by even 40 seconds would save a life. The question therefore becomes: by how many seconds can you expect to advance your field over your career?

12. How to Assess the Impact of a Career

The standard view is that to make a difference with your career, you need to work in organizations with a social mission, such as charities, hospitals and schools. But this view is overly simplistic. Many of the highest-impact people in history were politicians, entrepreneurs, and academics (think Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug). And there’s a lot of variation in the good done by different charities: some aren’t effective at all.


You “make a difference” whenever you contribute to solving important social problems, enabling others to flourish now and in the long-run.

The four factors
  1. Role Impact: “We typically consider three types of influence: the direct impact you achieve through your work itself; the earnings that you can donate to charity or invest in training; and the potential to advocate for important causes through your work.”
  2. Career Capital: “Career Capital is the extent to which a role enables you to amass valuable skills, connections and credentials to get into better positions in the long run.”
  3. Personal Fit: “if you’re good at and enjoy what you’re looking to do, you’re likely to have a greater impact and build better career capital.”
  4. Exploration Value: “Exploration Value is the extent to which an option will help you to learn about your options so you can make better decisions in the future in order to maximize your impact.”

So in which careers can you make the most difference? - Career reviews

IV. Cause Selection

13. Your Dollar Goes Further Overseas

We understand the sentiment that “charity starts at home”, and we used to agree with it, until we learned just how much less effective US charity is than charity aimed at the poorest people in the world.

14. The Haste Consideration

The first lesson is that influencing people to become effective altruists is a pretty high value strategy for improving the world. The second lesson is that you can do more good with time in the present than you can with time in the future.

15. Preventing Human Extinction

The search is, however, not yet complete. The new B612 foundation has recently begun a project to track the remaining asteroids in order to “protect the future of civilization on this planet.” Finding one of these asteroids could be the key to preventing a global catastrophe.


So far, surprisingly little work has been put into systematically understanding the risks of human extinction and how best to reduce them. There have been a few books and papers on the topic of low-probability, high-stakes catastrophes, but there has been very little investigation into the most effective methods of reducing these risks: we know of no in-depth, systematic analysis of the different potential strategies. It follows that a reasonable first step toward reducing the risk of human extinction would be to investigate these issues more thoroughly, or support others in doing so.


Pessimists like the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, or the contemporary South African philosopher David Benatar accept this conclusion. But if parents have a reasonable expectation that their children will have happy and fulfilling lives, and having children would not be harmful to others, then it is not bad to have children. More generally, if our descendants have a reasonable chance of having happy and fulfilling lives, it is good for us to ensure that our descendants exist, rather than not. Therefore we think that bringing future generations into existence can be a good thing.

16. Speciesism

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I myself have entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that they are on a par with ourselves…but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or persons of others.

17. Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism

Focus area 1: Poverty reduction

Focus area 2: Meta effective altruism

  • 80,000 Hours
  • CFAR
  • Leverage Research
  • Rational Altruist blog
  • GiveWell and others often write about the ethics and epistemology of effective altruism in addition to focusing on their chosen causes.

Focus area 3: The far future

  • The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
  • The Centre for Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge and the Future of Life Institute in Boston
  • The Machine Intelligence Research Institute
  • NASA
  • GCRI
  • Holden Karnofsky, Paul Christiano

Focus area 4: Animal suffering

The only organization of this type so far (that I know of) is Animal Charity Evaluators, which currently recommends supporting Animal Equality International, Mercy for Animals and The Humane League.” “Peter Singer, David Pearce, and Brian Tomasik.

Other focus areas

I’ve left “effective environmental altruism” off the list, though perhaps a popular focus on effective environmental altruism could arise in the future.

Part V: Organisations

18. GiveWell

19. Giving What We Can

20. The Life You Can Save

21. 80,000 Hours

Our proposed solution is to become the best source of advice in the world for these talented graduates, so they can make far more of a difference with their careers.

22. Charity Science

23. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute

From a global perspective, what matters most (in expectation) is that we do what is best (in expectation) for the general trajectory along which our descendants develop over the coming millions, billions, and trillions of years.

24. Animal Charity Evaluators

  1. Baron, Jonathan, and Joshua D. Greene. 1996. “Determinants of Insensitivity to Quantity in Valuation of Public Goods: Contribution, Warm Glow, Budget Constraints, Availability, and Prominence.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2.2 (1996), 107–125 [return]

From Cracow with 💜 by ecneladis.