The folks at Charity Navigator get a lot of heat from people who care about charity evaluation. Their approach, up till now, has been mostly of the lamentable fundraising is evil variety. Things are about to change.
We often confuse our true impact with what we do directly. Instead of focusing on what you do directly, ask yourself what would have happened if I hadn’t been there? The real difference we make is the difference between what happened because of us, and and what would have happened otherwise. Thinking about change like that opens up lots of new ways to make the world a better place.
There’s an easy way to tell a smart dog from a stupid dog. There’s a fence in front of you, and behind it is a delicious juicy bone. You’re starting to salivate just thinking about how amazing it will feel between your teeth. Now you have a choice. If you’re a stupid dog, you’ll run at the fence, stand in front of the bone and start to bark. If you’re a smart dog, you’ll look along the fence, find the gate, run happily through it and devour your prize.
Humans also have a hard time finding the gate. It’s easy to get preoccupied with the bone. It can look so inviting that you don’t take the time to look around, take things in, and choose the best path. Sometimes that path is indirect. It often means getting other people involved. But by spending the time, you can have far more impact…
Most employers rely heavily on interviews in recruiting. However, research suggests that the interview process is far from perfect. This is pretty worrying when we think about how much difference hiring the best candidate for an important job can make. It might sound crazy, but maybe we should stop interviewing people…
In my last post we looked at sunk costs. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think about it later on.
This is a very common experience in career decisions. You might be in a degree course you don’t want to be on, or climbing the ladder in a company you aren’t sure about, or find out that the dream job you’ve spent years working for isn’t as good as expected. It is only by forgetting these sunk costs that you can make the right career decisions and have as much impact as you can.
But if you find yourself in this situation what can you do?
Lots of volunteering is definitely not actually about helping people. It usually doesn’t hurt, but neither does going for a walk. If what you really want is to volunteer your time to make the world a better place, what should you do?
Net Impact, a US charity, has released a report on attitudes towards ethical careers. The report contains hopeful news for the high-impact career market, but the findings must be treated with caution. The report suggests that current students are more inclined to go into ethical careers, and that they will be happier if they do. Having an impact with their job is very important to current students. 31% of students describe making an impact as essential, compared to only 15% of older generations. This is higher than the percentage of students who say wealth (13%) or prestige (19%) are essential.
In November 1914 Winston Churchill proposed a campaign to turn the tide of war on the Eastern Front. The plan was to fight a land war up the Gallipoli peninsula, secure safe passage for warships up the Dardanelles, and give the Russians access to the Mediterranean.
The land war was a total failure. After landing in April 1915 the Allied troops lost momentum quickly. By August Ottoman forces had tied them into static trench warfare. The Allies couldn’t make any more progress, they had achieved nothing and 220,000 soldiers had died. It was at this point that the allied troops were ordered to evacuate.
Some soldiers said they hoped their dead comrades wouldn’t notice them leaving. The 220,00 soldiers died “in vain”. And yet it was a great decision by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro to let them die in vain. Better that than lose even more men pointlessly.
Most fundraisers don’t raise extra money for charity. Rather, they shift money from one charity to another. This means that many fundraisers could actually be making people worse off…
Not long ago, there were zero organizations focused on effective altruism. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the topic. More and more of us are finding each other to ask not only “How can I help?” but “How can I help better?”
There’s a new organization asking these questions:. The High Impact NetworK, THINK’s goal is to introduce people to ideas and skills that will help them do good more effectively.
We recently interviewed Joshua Pearce, a professor at Michigan Tech and member of 80,000 Hours, about open source appropriate technology as a promising high impact research area. Here’s what we found…
The problem with volunteer labour is that it’s free, so a charity has an incentive to recruit volunteers as long as they contribute some value to the charity. In the case of Feed My Starving Children, volunteer labour isn’t just free; it’s a source of revenue. Feed My Starving Children don’t use volunteers in the US for their adept food-handling skills or their convenient location: they use them to attract donations, which volunteers are encouraged to make.
In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. This list heavily influenced mathematical research over the 20th century: if you worked on one of Hilbert’s problems, then you were doing respectable mathematics.
There is no such list within moral philosophy. That’s a shame. Not all problems that are discussed in ethics are equally important. And often early graduate students have no idea what to write their thesis on and so just pick something they’ve written on for coursework previously, or pick something that’s ‘hot’ at the time. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine the same is true of many other academic disciplines.
The author, Tim Ferriss, promises to teach you how to cut your working week down to just four hours, using a careful combination of Indian virtual assistants, the 80/20 principle and automatic email responders. But Ferriss has nothing on us. If your goal is to help others, then you can cut your entire working year down to just four hours.
People often think it’s bad for their charity of choice to spend money fundraising. This has always been a mystery to me. If a charity can use your money to go out and raise even more money, that’s great! They’ve just multiplied the impact of your donation. It turns out that charities are being pretty rational after all.
Every 48 seconds someone dies of malaria. Every one of those deaths is a human being with passions and loves and feelings. When we talk about quantifying our impact on the world it is important not to forget what those numbers mean. They mean people. Every single year of happy life we can give, is a joyful thing to the person living it. This is ultimately why we what to have as much impact as possible. Because more people living happy joyful lives is better than fewer.
Many academics want to do important research that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, there’s virtually no guidance out there.
We’re aiming to build a resource of strategies and ideas for finding high impact research questions, as well as practical information about how to get involved with them.
In this post, we take a first step and explore how to find research questions that need your talent.
I recently came accross Taylor Conroy, who’s using an innovative fundraising technique to let ordinary people to raise $8,500 to build a school with just an evening’s work. The method has since been expanded to include water pumps and libraries. The fundraising is amazing, but I can’t help slightly regretting the goal towards which Taylor has directed his considerable talents. Building a school is a motivating, tangible project, which seems to obviously be a good thing. They can send you pictures of it after it’s built. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts?
Late one evening a police officer comes across a man on the way home from a party. He is quite drunk and looking for something under a lamppost. “What are you looking for?” asks the policeman. “My keys,” the man replies, pointing down the road a little way, “I dropped them over there.” The policeman is baffled, “Then why are you looking for them here?”. “Because there’s no light over there.”
The joke is old but it gets to the heart of the debate over quantification. Is it best to look for keys under lampposts?
If I become a doctor, I won’t increase the total number of doctors by one. The NHS has a limited budget, so it can’t just hire every qualified person who applies; medical schools have limited places by law, and there are more applicants who are ‘good enough’ than there are places. If I become a doctor, then I’ve just displaced someone else who would have taken the job.