Effective altruism is really extraordinarily good at telling people where to give money, and pretty okay at telling people how to create less animal suffering. Guidance on how to do anything else is substantially more opaque.
Effective altruism is really extraordinarily good at telling people where to give money, and pretty okay at telling people how to create less animal suffering. Guidance on how to do anything else is substantially more opaque, because EA discourages a lot of traditional volunteering (at least as a way of improving the world. As a hobby most people are still okay with it). That’s a shame, because there’s a lot left to do.
There are an enormous number of unsolved problems in effective altruism, and philanthropy in general. And there’s actually a fair amount of support for you, if you want to research or attempt a solution. But the support is not very discoverable. A lot of the information spreads via social osmosis, and if you’re more than two degrees out from one of the big EA hubs the process is slow and leaky. It’s not always obvious from the outside how approachable many people and organizations in EA are, or what problems are waiting for solutions. But once you have that knowledge, it’s really hard to remember what it was like when you didn’t, which makes it hard to figure out what to do about the problem.
This is my attempt to address that. Below I have listed info on the major EA organizations, with emphasis on what problems they are interested in, how to learn more about them, and what kind of contact they encourage. I would be surprised if this was enough to enable someone to go from 0-to-implementation on its own, but my hope is that it will provide some scaffolding that speeds up the process of learning the rest of it.
