Building effective altruism

Why are the ideas of effective altruism important?

Many attempts to do good fail

Working out how to help others is difficult, and many attempts to make a difference fail. Most large US social programmes that have been rigorously evaluated, including those backed by expert opinion, turn out to produce weak or no effects, and in some cases negative effects.³ Within US education, 90% of interventions evaluated by the Institute of Education Sciences have weak or no effects.⁴ Within international aid, many projects fail, and for most programmes the effects are unknown. This suggests that if you get involved with a charitable programme without looking at the evidence, there’s a decent chance you’ll have no impact.

Large differences in effectiveness between successful approaches

Avoiding programmes which are harmful or which have no effect is obviously the right call. But even if you consider only strategies which have a positive effect, there are large differences in how much they help others.

First, let’s consider different global problems. If you want to help others, should you work on climate change, US education, animal welfare, or something else? When we used our framework to compare different global problems we found that you can do far more good working on some problems than others.

For example, within US education, providing one year’s worth of pre-kindergarten education costs between $6,400 and $8,000 per child.
By contrast, in international health and development, the same amount of money can save a child’s life through providing bed nets that protect people malaria, or deworm 6,000 children, or double the income of around 30 people for a year.⁵ And we think there are even more neglected and important problems than international development.

But there are also large differences between different ways of working on a specific problem. For example, if we look at interventions that treat illnesses in the developing world, we find that the best interventions are vastly more effective at reducing disease than others:

For instance, according to estimates in the Disease Control Priorities Report, $1,000 spent on treating HIV with antiretroviral therapy creates one extra year of healthy life, whereas $1,000 spent on educating high-risk groups about HIV creates 27 extra years of healthy life.⁶

The lesson here is that you can increase the amount of good you do many times over by changing which global problem you work on, and by focusing on the very best interventions. These large differences in impact are why one of the core principles of effective altruism is to use evidence and reason to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.

This makes it different from evidence-based policy (which only focuses on finding proven interventions within a given policy area) and evidence-based development (which only focuses on finding evidence-based approaches within international development). Effective altruism also considers the question of which area to work on in the first place, and doesn’t restrict itself to approaches for which there’s hard empirical evidence — rather, it aims to focus on whatever approaches produce the best results in expectation.

If more people made a significant commitment to helping others with their lives, and devoted those resources to the most effective approaches, they could each have far more positive impact on the world, and make a major contribution to ending challenges such as extreme poverty, factory farming, and risks to the future such as catastrophic pandemics and extreme climate change.

If you think effective altruism is a good idea, is there a case for taking an indirect approach of promoting it, rather than following effective altruist principles directly?

Why work on promoting effective altruism?

Multiplier effect

How could you double your lifetime impact?

Consider the following two options:

1. Pledge to give 10% of your income to effective charities.
2. Pledge to give 10% of your income to effective charities, and persuade a friend to do the same as well.

The second path does more good — probably about twice as much — and this illustrates the power of promoting important ideas. By promoting effective altruism you multiply your social impact because you increase the number of other people who take effective actions to help others.

This is exactly what the founders of Giving What We Can realised in 2009. Rather than just donating to effective charities themselves, they created Giving What We Can — a community of people who pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities. As of 2014, for every $1 Giving What We Can had spent on creating and growing its community, its members had already given more than $6 to effective charities. In total, in 2014, Giving What We Can members had pledged to donate over $1 billion over their lifetimes, which is vastly more than the founders could have ever given individually. Membership has about doubled in the years since.

We chose to start 80,000 Hours for the same reason. Rather than take whichever careers we thought would be highest impact, we thought we might be able to help hundreds of other people have a high-impact career, and so achieve hundreds of times as much.

These examples illustrate an important lesson: for whichever actions are highest impact, it’s always even more effective if you can mobilise more people to take them.

Flexibility

We don’t know which global problems will be the most pressing in the future, or which interventions will best solve them. So, if you commit to something today, you’re likely to be wrong — and have less impact in the long term. Instead, it’s useful to keep your options open.

Building the effective altruism community is one way to do this (another is working on global priorities research). One of the core principles of effective altruism is to change what you’re working on in response to changing circumstances and in light of new ideas and research.

For example, Giving What We Can promotes donating to the most effective charities, whatever those turn out to be. This means that future donations of members will change in response to new evidence (at least in part). This makes Giving What We Can far more flexible than organisations focused on a specific problem.

More generally, building the effective altruism community increases the number of people willing to switch into whichever problems are understood to be the most pressing problems in the future, and to tackle them in the most effective ways known at the time.

So promoting effective altruism is not only a multiplier on whichever problems are most pressing today; it’s also a multiplier on whichever problems turn out to be most pressing in the future.

Highly neglected

The ideas of effective altruism only coalesced in the 21st century, and the term was only coined in 2012. It’s currently highly neglected, and few people know about the ideas.

For comparison, this combined budget is similar to the annual operating budget of a single nonprofit dedicated to promoting conservative legal practice in the US — the Federalist Society.

The above figures overestimate spending on promoting effective altruism because these organisations also spend a significant part of their budgets on research and other programmes.

Why might you not want to work in this area?

The ideas of effective altruism are incorrect, or will be badly implemented

Some people think that the ideas of effective altruism are wrong in important ways. We think many objections are based on misconceptions about what effective altruism involves, but there are also more substantive criticisms. We won’t go over them here, but here’s a summary of the main objections, along with responses to them.

We think the most powerful objections are not that the ideas are wrong, but that the effective altruism community, as it currently exists, is going to fail to live up to them. For example, the community may end up focused on the wrong problems if it is too biased or lacks diverse perspectives; or it will lack the skills to build a successful movement that puts effective altruist ideas into practice.

There’s a specific problem that’s much more pressing

Promoting effective altruism has the effect of getting more people to work on the problems which the effective altruism community thinks are most pressing. Currently these are mainly international health and development, animal welfare, and ensuring a long and positive future for human civilisation. So, if you help to promote effective altruism, your impact will be spread out over these areas.

If, however, you think that one of these problems is much more pressing than the others and will remain so in the future, or that a different problem is much more pressing, it may be more effective to work on that problem directly, rather than promoting effective altruism in general.

There’s a better opportunity for advocacy

The multiplier effect isn’t unique to promoting effective altruism — you can increase your social impact by getting people to work on any problem. For example, you can get a multiplier through mobilising other people to work on climate change, nuclear war, risks from artificial intelligence, factory farming, and other global problems.

To think that promoting effective altruism gives you a higher value multiplier, you have to think that the problems effective altruism will prioritise over time are more pressing than other problems, or that it is easier to get people to work on them than on other problems. Hopefully the former is true, because the community will keep updating where it focuses as the situation changes, but you might disagree if you think the community is importantly mistaken about where to focus.

There’s a better way to gain flexibility

If you’re uncertain about which global problems to focus on, then instead of growing the effective altruism community, it may be better to:

• Build some other kind of capital (e.g. saving money which you can donate in the future)
• Do more global priorities research
• Work on a broad intervention that will help in many different scenarios in the future, such as:
  • Reducing the chance of great power conflict
  • Improving incentives and governance for global public goods
  • Improving democracy
  • Improving incentives and norms in academic research to better advance human knowledge
  • Improving collective decision making
  • Improving reasoning and cognition

Read some about these issues and others.

There is already a large amount of work being done on improving democracy and cooperation between countries, making it harder to make a significant contribution to them. But improving academic research, collective decision making, and improving reasoning and cognition are more neglected. If you have better personal fit for working on these areas than for promoting effective altruism, they may be better for gaining flexibility.

Widespread promotion of the current ideas of effective altruism may be premature

The current ideas of effective altruism are primarily based on research done by a handful of research groups over the last 15 or so years. Given that the effective altruism research programme has been relatively small in scale so far, it may be premature to promote its ideas and push for widespread adoption of its current recommendations.

One risk is that some of the current recommendations of effective altruism will have unintended harmful consequences, which could be discovered with more research. If this turns out to be true, then promotion of current recommendations would be harmful. Future research could also show some of the current recommendations to be misguided (even if not harmful) — and if these are aggressively promoted, the credibility of effective altruism might be damaged, and its brand could be significantly tainted. This would limit the future potential of the movement. (This is one reason we favour a high-fidelity model of movement growth — which promotes quality of outreach over speed of growth.)

Finally, it’s plausible that further research will uncover new recommendations that are many times more effective than current recommendations. If this is true, then promoting current recommendations is premature, and it would be better to invest more in global priorities research first. (Although it’s worth noting that effective altruism is one of the main ways people get involved in global priorities research, so these areas are not separate.)

It’s hard to know whether advocacy works

As with any advocacy work, it is hard to measure how successful past promotion efforts have been, and what has worked in the past may not continue to work with new audiences. To work on promoting effective altruism, you should be comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with advocacy work.

How to solve this problem

What are some top career options within this area?

There are several ways you can use your career to promote effective altruism:

• Working at organisations that figure out how to best promote the ideas of effective altruism, and spread them to their full potential. Read more about this option in our career review on working at effective altruist organisations.
• Promoting the ideas of effective altruism as a public intellectual — in journalism, UK party politics, UK civil service, or think tanks.
• If you have deep expertise in areas relevant to effective altruism — for example, in disciplines relevant to global catastrophic risks like AI research, biology, biosecurity, disaster risk, forecasting, and governance — use your position to strengthen the connections between your field and the effective altruism community.
• There’s also a need for founding new organisations. To do that, it’s best to get involved with the community first, then you might spot a good opportunity.

Which organisations do we recommend?

We recommend applying to work at the following organisations, which work directly on promoting effective altruism:

• The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is the organisation that coined the term ‘effective altruism.’ It’s the leading organisation in charge of growing and strengthening the movement. It helps to run Effective Altruism Global conferences, local effective altruism groups, and effectivealtruism.org. It’s led by William MacAskill, who wrote the book Doing Good Better, an introduction to effective altruism. CEA includes the project Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge 10% of their income to the most effective organisations for helping others. If you want to promote effective altruism, CEA may be the best place to work. See current vacancies.
• 80,000 Hours — yes, that’s us. We do research into which careers do the most good and help people pursue them. See current vacancies.
• Founders Pledge encourages entrepreneurs to make a legally binding commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. It raised over $200 million in legally binding pledges in under two years. Read more about Founders Pledge in our interview with the founder.

The roles currently most needed at the above organisations include managers, web developers, operations staff, and marketing and outreach specialists.

Note that most effective altruist organisations have fewer than 30 staff, which means they don’t always advertise vacancies publicly. As a result, your best bet is to get in touch through a referral and try to do a trial or meet the people involved.

Example of someone pursuing this path

Find opportunities on our job board

Our job board features opportunities in building effective altruism:

View all opportunities

How to enter this area

How to get started

If you’re new, learn more about effective altruism by joining the Effective Altruism Newsletter, joining an Effective Altruism Virtual Program, or reading the Effective Altruism Forum.

To get involved in person, apply to attend an Effective Altruism Global conference to meet people who work at effective altruist organisations. You can also find a local group to meet other people in the community.

How to get a job within the community

If you’d like to get a job at one of the organisations, try to do freelance work, an internship, volunteer work, or a project with someone else in the community. The organisations usually only hire people who have a track record of working in the community and have referrals from other community members.

One type of volunteering that can be very high impact and also helps you get started promoting effective altruism is helping organise a local group. This gives you experience in talking about effective altruism, and you can easily get a couple of people to take the Giving What We Can pledge.

If you’re not yet ready to apply for work in these organisations, try to build one of the skills most in demand by working for a couple of years in a relevant area. The organisations mostly hire people with at least a few years experience. Alternatively, you could find your best earning to give option and donate to support the growth of effective altruism.

To get updates on the latest job openings each month, join the Effective Altruism Newsletter or our newsletter. You can also join the Effective Altruism Job Postings Facebook group.

We’re also happy to help people one-on-one who want to get a job at one of these organisations. Apply for our free careers advising.

How to help out part time

There are a few options if you just want to help build effective altruism part time:

• If you already have a public platform or expertise in areas relevant to effective altruism, get in touch with us.
• Help run a local group, as above.
• Apply to be a facilitator for an Effective Altruism Virtual Program.

Where to donate to help promote effective altruism?

If you’d like to start helping right away, you can donate to effective altruist organisations.

Finding promising donation opportunities in this area is especially challenging for individual donors, because existing charity evaluators (such as GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators) don’t evaluate organisations working on promoting effective altruism. As a result, we recommend donating to the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.

Donate to the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund

Disclosure: 80,000 Hours has been a recipient of donations to this fund.

Otherwise, you can do your own analysis of the organisations listed above and donate to where you think is best.

Learn more

• Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (cofounder of 80,000 Hours) is an introduction to effective altruism.
• Podcast: Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?
• Podcast: You want to do as much good as possible and have billions of dollars. What do you do?
• Podcast: Why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause
• Article: Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism
• Career review: Help build the effective altruism community
• Leaders survey: What are the most important talent gaps in the effective altruism community?