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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, sometimes called effective altruists,
may choose careers based on the amount of good that they expect the
career to achieve or donate to charities based on the goal of maximising
positive impact. They may work on the prioritization of scientific
projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and policy initiatives estimated to
save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.
Effective altruists aim to emphasize impartiality and the global equal consideration of interests when choosing beneficiaries. Popular cause priorities
within effective altruism include global health and development, social
inequality, animal welfare, and risks to the survival of humanity over
the long-term future.
The movement developed during the 2000s, and the name effective altruism was coined in 2011. Philosophers influential to the movement include Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. What began as a set of evaluation techniques advocated by a diffuse coalition evolved into an identity.
With approximately 7,000 people active in the effective altruism
community and strong ties to the elite schools in the United States and
Britain, effective altruism has become associated with Silicon Valley and the technology industry, forming a tight subculture.
The movement received mainstream attention and criticism with the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX as founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a major funder of effective altruism causes prior to late 2022. Within the Bay Area,
it received criticism for having a culture that has been described as
toxic and sexually exploitative towards women, which led to
conversations inside the community about how to create an environment
that can better prevent and fight sexual misconduct.
History
Beginning in the latter half of the 2000s, several communities centered around altruist, rationalist, and futurological concerns started to converge, such as:
In 2011, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours decided to incorporate into an umbrella organization and held a vote for their new name; the "Centre for Effective Altruism" was selected. The Effective Altruism Global
conference has been held since 2013. As the movement formed, it
attracted individuals who were not part of a specific community, but who
had been following the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer's work on applied ethics, particularly "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), Animal Liberation (1975), and The Life You Can Save (2009). Singer himself used the term in 2013, in a TED talk titled "The Why and How of Effective Altruism".
Sam Bankman-Fried, the eventual founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, had a seminal lunch with philosopher William MacAskill
in 2012 while he was an undergraduate at MIT in which MacAskill
encouraged him to go earn money and donate it, rather than volunteering
his time for causes. Bankman-Fried went on to a career in investing and around 2019 became
more publicly associated with the effective altruism movement, announcing that his goal was to "donate as much as [he] can".
Bankman-Fried founded the FTX Future Fund, which brought on MacAskill
as one of its advisers, and which made a $13.9 million grant to the Centre for Effective Altruism where MacAskill holds a board role.
Notable publications and media
A
number of books and articles related to effective altruism have been
published that have codified, criticized, and brought more attention to
the movement. In 2015, philosopher Peter Singer published The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.[20] The same year, the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill published Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.
In 2018, American news website Vox launched its Future Perfect section, led by journalist Dylan Matthews, which publishes articles and podcasts on "finding the best ways to do good".
In 2019, Oxford University Press published the volume Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, edited by Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer.
More recent books have emphasized concerns for future generations. In 2020, the Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, while MacAskill published What We Owe the Future in 2022.
In 2023, Oxford University Press published the volume The Good it Promises, The Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen.
Controversies
After the collapse of FTX in late 2022, the movement underwent additional public scrutiny.
Bankman-Fried's relationship with effective altruism has been called into question as a public relations strategy, while the movement's embrace of him proved damaging to its reputation. Some journalists asked whether the effective altruist movement was
"complicit" in FTX's collapse, because it was convenient for leaders to
overlook specific warnings about Bankman-Fried's behavior or
questionable ethics at the trading firm Alameda.
However, several leaders of the effective altruism movement, including William MacAskill and Robert Wiblin, condemned FTX's actions. MacAskill emphasized that bringing about good consequences does not justify violating rights or sacrificing integrity.
Critiques arose not only in relation to Bankman-Fried's role and
his close association with William MacAskill, but also concerning issues
of exclusion and sexual harassment.
A 2023 Bloomberg article featured some members of the effective
altruism community who criticized the philosophy as masking a culture of
predatory behavior. In a 2023 Time
magazine article, seven women reported misconduct and controversy in
the effective altruism movement. They accused men within the movement,
typically in the Bay Area, of using their power to groom younger women for polyamorous sexual relationships.
The accusers argued that the majority male demographic and the
polyamorous subculture combine to create an environment where sexual
misconduct can be tolerated, excused or rationalised away. In response to the accusations, the Centre for Effective Altruism
said that some of the alleged perpetrators had already been banned, and
the organization would address the ones they were made newly aware of.
The organization also defended itself by noting it is challenging to
discern to what extent sexual misconduct issues were specific to the
effective altruism community or reflective of broader societal problems
of the exploitation of women.
Propelled by the situation, members of the community discussed how to
create an environment more capable of preventing and fighting sexual
misconduct.
Philosophy
Effective altruists focus on the many philosophical questions related to the most effective ways to benefit others.[44][45] Such philosophical questions shift the starting point of reasoning from "what to do" to "why" and "how".
There is little consensus on the answers, and there are differences
between effective altruists who believe that they should do the most
good they possibly can with all of their resources and those who only try do the most good they can within a defined budget.
According to MacAskill, the view of effective altruism as doing
the most good one can within a defined budget can be compatible with a
wide variety of views on morality and meta-ethics, as well as traditional religious teachings on altruism such as in Christianity.
Effective altruism can also be in tension with religion where religion
emphasizes spending resources on worship and evangelism instead of
causes that do the most good.
Other than Peter Singer and William MacAskill, philosophers associated with effective altruism include Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves, and Derek Parfit. Economist Yew-Kwang Ng conducted similar research in welfare economics and moral philosophy.
The Centre for Effective Altruism lists the following four
principles that unite effective altruism: prioritization, impartial
altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit.
To support people's ability to act altruistically on the basis of
impartial reasoning, the effective altruism movement promotes values and
actions such as a collaborative spirit, honesty, transparency, and
publicly pledging to donate a certain percentage of income or other
resources.
Impartiality
Effective altruism aims to emphasize impartial reasoning in that everyone's well-being counts equally. Singer, in his 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", wrote:
It makes no moral difference whether the person I can
help is a neighbor's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose
name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away ... The moral point of
view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society.
Impartiality combined with seeking to do the most good leads to
prioritizing benefits to those who are in a worse state, because anyone
who happens to be worse off will benefit more from an improvement in
their state, all other things being equal.
Scope of moral consideration
One
issue related to moral impartiality is the question of which beings are
deserving of moral consideration. Some effective altruists consider the
well-being of non-human animals in addition to humans, and advocate for
animal welfare issues such as ending factory farming. Those who subscribe to longtermism include future generations as possible beneficiaries and try to improve the moral value of the long-term future by, for example, reducing existential risks.
Criticism of impartiality
The drowning child analogy in Singer's essay provoked philosophical debate. In response to a version of Singer's drowning child analogy, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
in 2006 asked whether the most effective action of a man in an
expensive suit, confronted with a drowning child, would not be to save
the child and ruin his suit—but rather, sell the suit and donate the
proceeds to charity. Appiah believed that he "should save the drowning child and ruin my suit". In a 2015 debate, when presented with a similar scenario of either saving a child from a burning building or saving a Picasso
painting to sell and donate the proceeds to charity, MacAskill
responded that the effective altruist should save and sell the Picasso.
Psychologist Alan Jern called MacAskill's choice "unnatural, even
distasteful, to many people", although Jern concluded that effective
altruism raises questions "worth asking".
MacAskill later endorsed a "qualified definition of effective altruism"
in which effective altruists try to do the most good "without violating
constraints" such as any obligations that someone might have to help
those nearby.
William Schambra has criticized the impartial logic of effective altruism, arguing that benevolence arising from reciprocity and face-to-face interactions is stronger and more prevalent than charity based on impartial, detached altruism. Such community-based charitable giving, he wrote, is foundational to civil society and, in turn, democracy. Larissa MacFarquhar
said that people have diverse moral emotions, and she suggested that
some effective altruists are not unemotional and detached but feel as
much empathy for distant strangers as for people nearby. Ross Douthat of The New York Times criticized the movement's "'telescopic
philanthropy' aimed at distant populations" and envisioned "effective
altruists sitting around in a San Francisco skyscraper calculating how
to relieve suffering halfway around the world while the city decays
beneath them", while he also praised the movement for providing "useful
rebukes to the solipsism and anti-human pessimism that haunts the
developed world today".use prioritization
A key component of effective altruism is "cause prioritization". Cause prioritization is based on the principle of cause neutrality,
the idea that resources should be distributed to causes based on what
will do the most good, irrespective of the identity of the beneficiary
and the way in which they are helped.
By contrast, many non-profits emphasize effectiveness and evidence with
respect to a single cause such as education or climate change.
One tool that EA-based organizations may use to prioritize cause areas is the importance, tractability, and neglectedness
framework. Importance is the amount of value that would be created if a
problem were solved, tractability is the fraction of a problem that
would be solved if additional resources were devoted to it, and
neglectedness is the quantity of resources already committed to a cause.
The information required for cause prioritization may involve data analysis, comparing possible outcomes with what would have happened under other conditions (counterfactual reasoning), and identifying uncertainty.
The difficulty of these tasks has led to the creation of organizations
that specialize in researching the relative prioritization of causes.
Criticism of cause prioritization
This practice of "weighing causes and beneficiaries against one another" was criticized by Ken Berger and Robert Penna of Charity Navigator for being "moralistic, in the worst sense of the word" and "elitist".
William MacAskill responded to Berger and Penna, defending the
rationale for comparing one beneficiary's interests against another and
concluding that such comparison is difficult and sometimes impossible
but often necessary.
MacAskill argued that the more pernicious form of elitism was that of
donating to art galleries (and like institutions) instead of charity.
Ian David Moss suggested that the criticism of cause prioritization
could be resolved by what he called "domain-specific effective
altruism", which would encourage "that principles of effective altruism
be followed within an area of philanthropic focus, such as a specific
cause or geography" and could resolve the conflict between local and
global perspectives for some donors.
Cost-effectiveness
Some
charities are considered to be far more effective than others, as
charities may spend different amounts of money to achieve the same goal,
and some charities may not achieve the goal at all. Effective altruists seek to identify interventions that are highly cost-effective in expectation. Many interventions have uncertain
benefits, and the expected value of one intervention can be higher than
that of another if its benefits are larger, even if it has a smaller
chance of succeeding. One metric effective altruists use to choose between health interventions is the estimated number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) added per dollar.
Some effective altruist organizations prefer randomized controlled trials as a primary form of evidence, as they are commonly considered the highest level of evidence in healthcare research.
Others have argued that requiring this stringent level of evidence
unnecessarily narrows the focus to issues where the evidence can be
developed. Kelsey Piper
argues that uncertainty is not a good reason for effective altruists to
avoid acting on their best understanding of the world, because most
interventions have mixed evidence regarding their effectiveness.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and others have warned about the "measurement problem",
with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on
"one grinding step at a time", and results being hard to measure with
controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk
being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.
As effective altruism emphasizes a data-centric approach, critics say
principles which do not lend themselves to quantification—justice,
fairness, equality—get left in the sidelines.
Counterfactual reasoning
Counterfactual
reasoning involves considering the possible outcomes of alternative
choices. It has been employed by effective altruists in a number of
contexts, including career choice. Many people assume that the best way
to help others is through direct methods, such as working for a charity
or providing social services.
However, since there is a high supply of candidates for such positions,
it makes sense to compare the amount of good one candidate does to how
much good the next-best candidate would do. According to this reasoning,
the marginal impact of a career is likely to be smaller than the gross
impact.
Differences from utilitarianism
Although EA aims for maximizing like utilitarianism, EA differs from utilitarianism in a few ways; for example, EA does not claim that people should always maximize the good regardless of the means, and EA does not claim that the good is the sum total of well-being.
Toby Ord has described utilitarians as "number-crunching", compared
with most effective altruists whom he called "guided by conventional
wisdom tempered by an eye to the numbers".
Cause priorities
The
principles and goals of effective altruism are wide enough to support
furthering any cause that allows people to do the most good, while
taking into account cause neutrality.
Many people in the effective altruism movement have prioritized global
health and development, animal welfare, and mitigating risks that
threaten the future of humanity. Global health and development.
The alleviation of global poverty and neglected tropical diseases
has been a focus of some of the earliest and most prominent
organizations associated with effective altruism. Charity evaluator
GiveWell was founded by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 to address poverty, where they believe additional donations to be the most impactful. GiveWell's leading recommendations include: malaria prevention charities Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium, deworming charities Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Deworm the World Initiative, and GiveDirectly for direct cash transfers to beneficiaries. The organization The Life You Can Save, which originated from Singer's book of the same name,
works to alleviate global poverty by promoting evidence-backed
charities, conducting philanthropy education, and changing the culture
of giving in affluent countries.
Animal welfare
Improving animal welfare has been a focus of many effective altruists. Singer and Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) have argued that effective altruists should prioritize changes to factory farming over pet welfare. 60 billion land animals are slaughtered and between 1 and 2.7 trillion individual fish are killed each year for human consumption.
A number of non-profit organizations have been established that
adopt an effective altruist approach toward animal welfare. ACE
evaluates animal charities based on their cost-effectiveness and
transparency, particularly those tackling factory farming. Other animal initiatives affiliated with effective altruism include Animal Ethics' and Wild Animal Initiative's work on wild animal suffering, addressing farm animal suffering with cultured meat, and expanding the circle of concern so that people care more about all kinds of animals. Faunalytics focuses on animal welfare research. The Sentience Institute is a think tank founded to expand the moral circle to other species.
Long-term future and global catastrophic risks
The ethical stance of longtermism,
emphasizing the importance of positively influencing the long-term
future, developed closely in relation to effective altruism.
Longtermists have proposed that the welfare of future individuals is
just as important as the welfare of currently existing individuals, as
the prioritization of the former is coextensive with the wellness of the
latter.
Toby Ord has stated that "the people of the future may be even more
powerless to protect themselves from the risks we impose than the
dispossessed of our own time".
Existential risks, such as dangers associated with biotechnology and advanced artificial intelligence, are often highlighted and the subject of active research.
Existential risks have such huge impacts that achieving a very small
change in such a risk—say a 0.0001-percent reduction—"might be worth
more than saving a billion people today", reported Gideon Lewis-Kraus in
2022, but he added that nobody in the EA community openly endorses such
an extreme conclusion.
Organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for
improving the long-term future, and have connections with the effective
altruism community, are the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Future of Life Institute. In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow mission of managing advanced artificial intelligence.
Approaches
Effective
altruists pursue different approaches to doing good, such as donating
to effective charitable organizations, using their career to make more
money for donations or directly contributing their labor, and starting
new non-profit or for-profit ventures.
Donation
Financial donation
Many effective altruists engage in significant charitable donation. Some believe it is a moral duty to alleviate suffering through donations if other possible uses of those funds do not offer comparable benefits to oneself. Some even lead a frugal lifestyle in order to donate more.
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is an organization whose members pledge
to donate at least 10% of their future income to the causes that they
believe are the most effective. GWWC was founded in 2009 by Toby Ord,
who lives on £18,000 ($27,000) per year and donates the balance of his
income. In 2020, Ord said that people had donated over $100 million to date through the GWWC pledge.
Founders Pledge
is a similar initiative, founded out of the non-profit Founders Forum
for Good, whereby entrepreneurs make a legally binding commitment to
donate a percentage of their personal proceeds to charity in the event
that they sell their business. As of April 2023, nearly 1,800 entrepreneurs had pledged over $9 billion and nearly $900 million had been donated.
An estimated $416 million was donated to effective charities identified by the movement in 2019, representing a 37% annual growth rate since 2015. Two of the largest donors in the effective altruism community, Dustin Moskovitz, who had become wealthy through co-founding Facebook, and his wife Cari Tuna, hope to donate most of their net worth of over $11 billion for effective altruist causes through the private foundation Good Ventures. Others influenced by effective altruism include Sam Bankman-Fried, as well as professional poker players Dan Smith and Liv Boeree. Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian billionaire founder of Skype, is known for donating to some effective altruist causes.
Organ donation
EA has been used to argue that humans should donate organs, whilst alive or after death, and some effective altruists do.
Career choice
Effective altruists often consider using their career to do good, both by direct service and indirectly through their consumption, investment, and donation decisions. 80,000 Hours is an organization that conducts research and gives advice on which careers have the largest positive impact.
Earning to give
Earning to give
involves deliberately pursuing a high-earning career for the purpose of
donating a significant portion of earned income, typically because of a
desire to do effective altruism. Advocates of earning to give contend
that maximizing the amount one can donate to charity is an important
consideration for individuals when deciding what career to pursue.
Founding effective organizations
Some effective altruists start non-profit or for-profit organizations to implement cost-effective ways of doing good. On the non-profit side, for example, Michael Kremer and Rachel Glennerster conducted randomized controlled trials
in Kenya to find out the best way to improve students' test scores.
They tried new textbooks and flip charts, as well as smaller class
sizes, but found that the only intervention that raised school
attendance was treating intestinal worms in children. Based on their
findings, they started the Deworm the World Initiative. From 2013 to August 2022, GiveWell designated Deworm the World (now run by nonprofit Evidence Action) as a top charity based on their assessment that mass deworming is "generally highly cost-effective";
however, there is substantial uncertainty about the benefits of mass
deworming programs, with some studies finding long-term effects and
others not. The Happier Lives Institute conducts research on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in developing countries; Canopie develops an app that provides cognitive behavioural therapy to women who are expecting or postpartum; Giving Green analyzes and ranks climate interventions for effectiveness. The Fish Welfare Initiative works on improving animal welfare in fishing and aquaculture; and the Lead Exposure Elimination Project works on reducing lead poisoning in developing countries.
Incremental versus systemic change
While
much of the initial focus of effective altruism was on direct
strategies such as health interventions and cash transfers, more systematic social, economic, and political reforms have also attracted attention. Mathew Snow in Jacobin
wrote that effective altruism "implores individuals to use their money
to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says
nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are
produced and distributed in the first place". Philosopher Amia Srinivasan criticized William MacAskill's Doing Good Better for a perceived lack of coverage of global inequality and oppression,
while noting that effective altruism is in principle open to whichever
means of doing good is most effective, including political advocacy
aimed at systemic change.
Srinivasan said, "Effective altruism has so far been a rather
homogeneous movement of middle-class white men fighting poverty through
largely conventional means, but it is at least in theory a broad
church." Judith Lichtenberg in The New Republic said that effective altruists "neglect the kind of structural and political change that is ultimately necessary". An article in The Ecologist
published in 2016 argued that effective altruism is an apolitical
attempt to solve political problems, describing the concept as
"pseudo-scientific". The Ethiopian-American AI scientist Timnit Gebru
has condemned effective altruists "for acting as though their concerns
are above structural issues as racism and colonialism", as Gideon
Lewis-Kraus summarized her views in 2022.
Philosophers such as Susan Dwyer, Joshua Stein, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
have criticized effective altruism for furthering the disproportionate
influence of wealthy individuals in domains that should be the
responsibility of democratic governments and organizations.
Arguments have been made that movements focused on systemic or institutional change are compatible with effective altruism. Philosopher Elizabeth Ashford posits that people are obligated to both donate to effective aid charities and to reform the structures that are responsible for poverty. Open Philanthropy has given grants for progressive advocacy work in areas such as criminal justice, economic stabilization, and housing reform, despite pegging the success of political reform as being "highly uncertain".
Psychological research
Researchers in psychology
and related fields have identified psychological barriers to effective
altruism that can cause people to choose less effective options when
they engage in altruistic activities such as charitable giving.
Other criticism of the movement
While
originally the movement leaders were associated with frugal lifestyles,
the arrival of big donors, including Bankman-Fried, led to more
spending and opulence, which seemed incongruous to the movement's
espoused values. In 2022, the Centre for Effective Altruism purchased the estate of Wytham Abbey for the purpose of running workshops.
Other prominent people
Businessman Elon Musk described MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future as "a close match for my philosophy".
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has publicly stated he would like to bring the ideas of effective altruism to a broader audience.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has called effective altruism an "incredibly flawed movement" that shows "very weird emergent behavior". Effective altruist concerns about AI risk were present among the OpenAI board members who fired Altman in November 2023.