#cause prioritization

Effective Altruism is a philosophy and social movement that emphasizes using evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world and help others. It combines the altruistic desire to do good with a rigorous, results-oriented approach to maximize the positive impact of charitable actions.

Key Principles of Effective Altruism:

Maximizing Impact:

Effective altruism focuses on ensuring that the time, money, and effort devoted to helping others yield the greatest possible impact. This involves identifying causes, interventions, and charities that provide the most benefit per unit of resources.

Evidence-Based Approach:

Central to effective altruism is the use of evidence and data to assess which interventions and organizations are most successful. This often involves evaluating scientific research, performing cost-effectiveness analyses, and assessing the tangible results of various efforts to help.

Cause Prioritization:

Rather than spreading resources across all causes, effective altruism advocates prioritizing certain areas where the need is greatest, or where the most lives can be saved or improved. This could include global poverty, animal welfare, or existential risks such as climate change or artificial intelligence.

Long-Term Thinking:

Effective altruism often involves consideration of the long-term consequences of actions, including potential effects on future generations. Altruists might consider how present actions can help reduce future risks or improve the well-being of future individuals.

Moral Cosmopolitanism:

Effective altruism operates on the principle that all human lives (and sometimes animal lives) are of equal value, regardless of where a person is born or lives. This means that people should focus on causes that provide the most help to those in the greatest need, even if they are far removed geographically.

Personal Responsibility and Earning to Give:

Some proponents of effective altruism believe that individuals can do more good by earning a high income and donating a significant portion of it to highly effective causes, a concept known as "earning to give."

Openness to Self-Improvement:

Effective altruists constantly seek feedback and are willing to change their actions or strategies based on new evidence or better reasoning. The movement emphasizes flexibility and continuous improvement in pursuing altruistic goals.

Criticisms of Effective Altruism:

Narrow Focus: Some critics argue that the focus on measurable outcomes can lead to neglecting important, but harder-to-quantify, causes such as systemic social change or cultural initiatives.

Elitism: The emphasis on high-income individuals "earning to give" can create perceptions that effective altruism is only accessible to wealthy or highly educated people.

Overemphasis on Utilitarian Calculations: The movement's utilitarian focus on maximizing good outcomes can lead to difficult ethical decisions, such as favoring saving a large number of lives in the future over addressing pressing issues in the present.

I’ve been giving 10% to the Against Malaria Foundation for a couple years. I started before I was aware of EA as a movement. I’d read a PDF by an organization called GiveWell, which seemed trustworthy, and the normal worries I might normally have about a charity didn’t seem to apply, and the estimates for impact looked pretty encouraging.

Giving 10% eventually embedded into my identity, such that I signed a pledge to do it permanently, and met a bunch of cool people at a conference, and got access to a much cooler facebook ecosystem, and started thinking differently in a serious way about my priorities and career trajectory. But it started with giving 10%, and being confident that my 10% was going to a charity I endorsed.

So it’s been interesting for me recently to read several arguments against choosing various categories of giving opportunity, often with AMF as the example for the worse-off option. A good argument about how we should optimize for expectation, even if it means donating to an intervention that plausibly does nothing (but could do MUCH more). Several arguments about how we should prioritize existential risk, because the negative utility in failing to address it is so high. A few about the value of finer-grained research in general, and understanding the importance of using comparative advantage to find the best opportunities as an individual, or else just donating to the organization whose recommendation you trust in the first place.

I’ve enjoyed reading these arguments. Some I find more persuasive than others, but they are all valuable considerations. I do, however, feel a twinge of nervousness with how high a proportion I see this kind of argument taking in my local spectator’s bubble of EA discourse. Epistemic virtue is good and we should keep striving for better options, but looking back at when I started giving 10%, I’m glad I wasn’t privy to this sort of debate. It was important to me to be able to, independently of belonging to any community, say “ok, this charity looks like an unusually safe (but yes, still imperfect) bet, and I’m pretty sure it’s doing a kind of good that’s intelligible to me. Here goes my money.” A year or two later, I have a basis to look at arguments that use that kind of choice as a floor function. But at the time, the straightforwardness and current-child-death-prevention-emotionality of AMF were necessary to get my foot in the door at all.