Introduction to effective altruism
Lately I have been wondering how I can really make a substantial positive impact on the world. Obviously it's not a trivial question, and I still have a lot to learn about it, but I found an interesting piece of the puzzle to help me inform my decisions, it's called effective altruism.
The last half year I've been working with an effective altruism group in Hamburg to provide donation advice and create a web app to help people decide which charities to donate to. I've met a lot of great people there and became convinced that effective altruism can have a big positive impact on the world (I would say it already has, but there is a lot room for growth!).
Effective altruism uses evidence-based methods to find out how to do the most good. Of course a lot of what "good" means to you is determined by your personal values. Effective altruism can't provide premade solutions to difficult problems, but it can compare and evaluate different ways of helping.
One obvious way of helping is to donate. GiveWellevaluates charities that help humans right now (as opposed to focusing on the future of humanity). Animal Charity Evaluatorsis doing the same for charities that help animals. There are also fundsmanaged by experts concerning specific field such as the long-term future of humanity.
Examples for criteria for the evaluation of charities are how many beings a charity helps with a given amount of money, how severe the problem they try to solve is, and how much more money a charity can actually make use of.
Of course donating is not the only way to do good, you can also do good with your time, specifically your choice of career. 80,000 hoursprovides a lot of valuable resources how to have the biggest positive impact with your career.
I hope I could give you a bit of an overview of what effective altruism is, and perhaps inspire you to look into it more deeply.
If you want to donate a few dollars to effective charity and get something in return, check out the science e-book bundle and the Daedelic game bundle from Humble Bundle.
If there is interest in the concept of effective altruism, I will write more about it. Feel free to ask questions!
(pictures from Pixabay)
Hi @benjaq, well this is extremely exciting, it looks like we have a shared interest in Effective Altruism. @alexdory pointed me in your direction when he saw my profile (he seems like a good'n). I'm part of the London EA community group, so I'm assuming we are only 1 or 2 degrees of separation irl. Good to have you here, hopefully we can build an equally great community here on steemit! Feel free to get in touch if you ever want to work together on anything.
Awesome, sounds like we have a great foundation for future cooperation, I've followed you. :)
If you are active on reddit I've created the subreddit /r/SteemitDiscussion/. I think that might become a good platform for community building and project discussion.
Oh and I almost forgot I'm using the tag #effectivealtruism. May be useful to keep all our posts in one place in case others show up here in the future.
Wonderful! I never really got into Reddit but I still have an account I set up (same name) so I'll make sure to check back in there from time to time.
Tkank you for sharing this, my brother. Its something I was searching for without knowing it exists :)
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon the word "prosocial" and I was confused. It seemed like something I never saw, but somehow it was like and old friend. And the word made perfect sense because we have social, antisocial and of course prosocial is in that family. So I did some digging and this is not a well researched subject and got a little upset. There is way more knowledge about antisocial behavior that prosocial behavior, and that explains a lot about how things run today. This word resonated so much with me that I started down this journey of understanding and building prosocial behavior.
I really am very happy I found you and your content. Thanks @alexdory. I've read more about effective altruism and its the most concrete and coherent prosocial concept I came across since starting this journey. I am really excited to find out more, I will give the whole website a read and I'm already subscribed to the newsletter.
Thank you for your kind words!
I'm excited that after being somewhat ignored for a while someone actually clearly benefitted from this post. :)
I, too, wonder why this concept isn't more widely known. I think sometimes effective altruism markets itself a bit too much to the "hardcore rationalists", at least that's my impression. The word itself can sound slightly "cold".
But nonetheless it's a movement with an incredible potential and I am glad I found it.
The people I work with are incredibly "pro-social" and inspiring . :)
Seems steemit's incentive structure isn't particularly rewarding towards prosocial behaviour.
I hope I can strike a balance between being helpful and nourishing towards the community, and not leaving all the profit for the exploitative people on here.
After all, I could use the profit to bring important ideas like these to a larger audience.
There are ways of balancing it for sure. The most effective would be starting a curation process for this type of content and search for SP delegation to create an income for the people that write about these sorts of things :)
You mean trying to find someone to delegate me SP so I can curate people with this type of content? How could I find someone to do that?
Maybe not to just one account, but maybe we can create a prosocial project and find SP for that account and we can do curation from there. I would like to talk on discord, my id is lishu#0022
Ah, OK, sounds like an interesting idea, I'll keep it in mind.
If you are active on reddit I've created the subreddit /r/SteemitDiscussion/. I think that might become another good platform for community building and project discussion.
I am only active on steemit, but I'll kepp an eye out for reddit.
I'm all for finding meaning in the things we do and helping the less fortunate can be very rewarding though it's not really my cup of tea. I do however like the concept of venture philanthropy which i feel is something cryptocurrency can really assist with where we raise funds using a type of ICO method to set up sustainable businesses and teach kids STEM skills and empower communities to create value generation that they will use to firstly repay the investment and then basically run on their own and any dividends from it can then be used repeat the process with localised funds
Sounds interesting!
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