Or at least try to be…
Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.
I find the central arguments of EA and the achievements they have led to extremely inspiring and they’ve changed how I live my life. For me this means spending some significant amount of my resources (both time and money) trying to have a positive impact.
To tell the truth, I never really had to be convinced of EA, once I found the ideas they just made sense to me. I think some people are unusually pre-disposed to it, but I also believe that the majority of people would be on board if they heard the right explanation. This is an attempt to explain why I’m an EA.
Why altruism?
TL;DR: There are lots of important problems, I have an extremely fortunate life, I can contribute to solving these problems without a big sacrifice to what I care about and so I should do that.
Imagine a mother hands you a baby who’s choking on some food. How would you would react? I don’t know how to administer first aid to a choking baby, but I do know that figuring it out would immediately become my one and all-consuming priority. It would be immediately and intuitively obvious to me that helping this baby should
Thousands of children die every year from malaria, a disease we can prevent very cheaply. In writing the previous sentence I felt only weak emotions in response to that awful fact, why?
I feel little emotion because I’ve never met these children, I’ve never been confronted with their suffering and because my brain is wired to respond to suffering right in front of me and not the idea of it in the abstract. I could manufacture a stronger emotional reaction by imagining an individual child but even then it’s nothing close to how I feel if I saw the child dying in front of me.
The key point here is that my emotional reaction is not a reliable indicator of how important something is. Do I think that the life of a baby I will never meet in Nigeria is less valuable than one of a child I’m holding in my hands?
I think a child dying of a preventable disease is a tragedy regardless of whether I’m there to see it. So if I would drop everything I was doing to
Why effective?
TL;DR: To the extent that your primary goal is altruism, your giving or work should be focused on the beneficiaries. All else equal helping more people by a larger amount is better and this may not correlate with how salient the helping is to you or how that makes
The causes EA tends to focus on are often global, somewhat in personal and have little direct connection to me as the donor.
Chris Rouse 