What is effective altruism?

Contents

• Introduction
• What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?
  • Preventing the next pandemic
  • Providing basic medical supplies in poor countries
  • Helping to create the field of AI alignment research
  • Ending factory farming
  • Improving decision-making
• What principles unite effective altruism?
• How can you take action?
• FAQ
• What are some common objections to effective altruism?
• What’s next?

Introduction

Introduction

Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.

This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.

This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.

Effective altruism was formalized by scholars at Oxford University, but has now spread around the world, and is being applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.¹

People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic.

They’re not united by any particular solution to the world’s problems, but by a way of thinking. They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way. Here are some examples of what they've done so far, followed by the values that unite them:

What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?

Preventing the next pandemic

Why this issue?

People in effective altruism typically try to identify issues that are big in scale, tractable, and unfairly neglected.² The aim is to find the biggest gaps in current efforts, in order to find where an additional person can have the greatest impact. One issue that seems to match those criteria is preventing pandemics.

Researchers in effective altruism argued as early as 2014 that, given the history of near-misses, there was a good chance that a large pandemic would happen in our lifetimes.

But preparing for the next pandemic was, and remains, hugely underfunded compared to other global issues. For instance, the US invests around $8bn per year preventing pandemics, compared to around $280bn per year spent on counterterrorism over the last decade.³

Preventing terror attacks is certainly important. But the scale of the issue seems smaller. For instance, just to focus on the number of deaths, in the last 50 years, around 500,000 people have been killed by terrorism. But over 21 million people were killed by COVID-19 alone⁴ – or consider the 40 million killed by HIV/AIDS.⁵

Not to mention, a future pandemic could easily be much worse than COVID-19: there’s nothing to rule out a disease that’s more infectious than the Omicron variant, but that’s as deadly as smallpox. (See more on the comparison in footnote 4.)

In effective altruism, once a big and neglected problem has been identified, the community then looks for solutions that have a chance of making a big contribution to solving the problem, and are neglected by others working on that issue, which brings us to...

Some examples of what’s been done

In 2016 Open Philanthropy – a foundation inspired by effective altruism – became the largest funder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is one of the few groups doing research to identify better policy responses to pandemics, and was an important group in the response to COVID-19.⁶

When COVID-19 broke out, members of the community founded 1DaySooner, a non-profit that advocates for human challenge trials. In this type of vaccine trial, healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with the disease, enabling near-instant testing of the vaccine. As one of the only advocates for this intervention, 1DaySooner has signed up over 30,000 volunteers,⁷ and played an important role in starting the world’s first COVID-19 human challenge trial. This model can be repeated when we face the next pandemic.

Members of the effective altruism community helped to create the Apollo Programme for Biodefense, a multibillion dollar policy proposal designed to prevent the next pandemic.

Providing basic medical supplies in poor countries

Why this issue?

It’s common to say that charity begins at home, but in effective altruism, charity begins where we can help the most. And this often means focusing on the people who are most neglected by the current system – which is often those who are more distant from us.

Over 700 million people live on less than $1.90 per day.⁸

In contrast, an American living near the poverty line lives on 20 times as much, and the average American college graduate lives on about 107 times as much. This places them in the top 1.3% of income, globally speaking.⁹ (These amounts are already adjusted for the fact that money goes further in poor countries.)

Global inequality is extreme. Because of this, transferring resources to the very poorest people in the world can do a huge amount of good. In richer countries like the US and UK, governments are typically willing to spend over $1 million to save a life.¹⁰ This is well worth doing, but in the world’s poorest countries, the cost of saving a life is far lower.

GiveWell is an organization that does in-depth research to find the most evidence-backed and cost-effective health and development projects. It discovered that while many aid interventions don’t work, some, like providing insecticide-treated bednets, can save a child’s life for about $5,500 on average. That's 180 times less.¹¹

These basic medical interventions are so cheap and effective that even the most prominent aid sceptics agree they’re worthwhile.

Some examples of what’s been done

Over 110,000 individual donors have used GiveWell’s research to contribute more than $1 billion to its recommended charities, supporting organisations like the Against Malaria Foundation, which has distributed over 200 million insecticide-treated bednets. Collectively these efforts are estimated to have saved 159,000 lives.¹²

In addition to charity, it’s possible to help the world’s poorest people through business. Wave is a technology company founded by members of the effective altruism community, which allows people to transfer money to several African countries faster and several times more cheaply than existing services. It’s especially helpful for migrants sending money home to their families, and has been used by over 800,000 people in countries like Kenya, Uganda and Senegal. In Senegal alone, Wave has saved its users hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees – around 1% of the country’s GDP.¹³

Helping to create the field of AI alignment research

Why this issue?

People in effective altruism often end up focusing on issues that seem counterintuitive, obscure or exaggerated. But this is because it’s more impactful to work on the issues that are neglected by others (all else equal), and these issues are (almost by definition) going to be unconventional ones. One example is the AI alignment problem.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. The leading AI systems are now able to engage in limited conversation, solve college-level maths problems, explain jokes, generate extremely realistic images from text, and do basic coding.¹⁴ None of this was possible just ten years ago.

The ultimate goal of the leading AI labs is to develop AI that is as good as, or better than, human beings on all tasks. It’s extremely hard to predict the future of technology, but various arguments and expert surveys suggest that this achievement is more likely than not this century. And according to standard economic models, once general AI can perform at human level, technological progress could dramatically accelerate.

The result would be an enormous transformation, perhaps of a significance similar to or greater than the industrial revolution in the 1800s. If handled well, this transformation could bring about abundance and prosperity for everyone. If handled poorly, it could result in an extreme concentration of power in the hands of a tiny elite.

In the worst case, we could lose control of the AI systems themselves. Unable to govern beings with capabilities far greater than our own, we would find ourselves with as little control over our future as chimpanzees have control over theirs.

This means this issue could not only have a dramatic impact on the present generation, but also on all future generations. This makes it especially pressing from a “longtermist” perspective, a school of thinking which holds that improving the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.

How to ensure AI systems continue to further human values, even as they become equal (or superior) to humans in their capabilities, is called the AI alignment problem, and solving it requires advances in computer science.

Despite its potentially historical importance, only a couple of hundred researchers work on this problem, compared to tens of thousands working to make AI systems more powerful.¹⁵

It’s hard to sum up the case for the issue in a few paragraphs, so if you’d like to explore more, we’d recommend starting here, here and here.

Some examples of what’s been done

One priority is to simply tell more people about the issue. The book Superintelligence was published in 2014, making the case for the importance of AI alignment, and became a New York Times best-seller.

Another priority is to build a research field focused on this problem. For instance, AI pioneer Stuart Russell, and others inspired by effective altruism, founded The Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley. This research institute aims to develop a new paradigm of AI development, in which the act of furthering human values is central.

Others have helped to start teams focused on AI alignment at major AI labs such as DeepMind and OpenAI, and outline research agendas for AI alignment, in works such as Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

Ending factory farming

Why this issue?

People in effective altruism try to extend their circle of concern – not only to those living in distant countries or future generations, but also to non-human animals.

Nearly 10 billion animals live and die in factory farms in the US every year¹⁶ – often unable to physically turn around their entire lives, or castrated without anaesthetic.

Lots of people agree we shouldn’t make animals suffer needlessly, but most of this attention goes towards pet shelters. In the US, about 1,400 times more animals pass through factory farms than pet shelters.¹⁷

Despite this, pet shelters receive around $5 billion per year in the US, compared to only $97 million on advocacy to end factory farming.¹⁸

Some examples of what’s been done

One strategy is advocacy. The Open Wing Alliance, which received significant funding from funders inspired by effective altruism, developed a campaign to encourage large companies to commit to stop buying eggs from caged chickens. To date, they have won over 2,200 commitments, and as a result over 100 million birds have been spared from cages.¹⁹

Another strategy is to create alternative proteins, which if made cheaper and tastier than factory farmed meat, could make demand disappear, ending factory farming. The Good Food Institute is working to kick-start this industry, helping to create companies like Dao Foods in China and Good Catch in the US, encouraging big business to enter the industry (including JBS, the world’s largest meat company) and securing tens of millions of dollars of government support.²⁰

Open Philanthropy was an early investor in Impossible Foods, which created the Impossible Burger – an entirely vegan burger that tastes much more like meat, and is now sold in Burger King.

Improving decision-making

Why this issue?

People who want to do good often prefer to directly tackle problems, since it’s more motivating to see the tangible effects of their actions. But what matters is that the world gets better, not that you do it with your own two hands. So people applying effective altruism often try to help indirectly, by empowering others.

One example of this is by improving decision-making. Namely: if key actors — such as politicians, private and third sector leaders, or grantmakers at funding bodies — were generally better at making decisions, society would be in a better position to deal with a whole range of future global problems, whatever they turn out to be.

So, if we can find new, neglected ways to improve the decision-making of important actors, that could be a route to having a big impact. And it seems like there are some promising solutions that could achieve this.

Some examples of what’s been done

Many global problems are exacerbated by a lack of trustworthy information. Metaculus is a forecasting technology platform that identifies important questions (such as the chance of Russia invading Ukraine), aggregates forecasts made by hundreds of forecasters, and weighs them by their past accuracy. Metaculus gave a probability of a Russian invasion of Ukraine of 47% by mid January 2022, and 80% shortly before the invasion on the 24th of February²¹ – a time when many pundits, journalists and experts were saying it definitely wouldn’t happen.

The Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford does foundational research at the intersection of philosophy and economics into how key decision-makers can identify the world’s most pressing problems. It has helped to create a new academic field of global priorities research, creating a research agenda, publishing tens of papers, and helping to inspire relevant research at Harvard, NYU, UT Austin, Yale, Princeton and elsewhere.

What principles unite effective altruism?

Effective altruism isn't defined by the projects above, and what it focuses on could easily change. What defines effective altruism are the principles that underpin its search for the best ways of helping others:

1. Prioritization: Our intuitions about doing good don't usually take into account the scale of the outcomes — helping 100 people often makes us feel as satisfied as helping 1000. But since some ways of doing good also achieve dramatically more than others, it’s vital to attempt to use numbers to roughly weigh how much different actions help. The goal is to find the best ways to help, rather than just working to make any difference at all.

2. Impartial altruism: It's normal and reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends or nation. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. This means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.

3. Open truthseeking: Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, community or approach, it’s important to consider many different ways to help and seek to find the best ones. This means putting serious time into deliberation and reflection on one’s beliefs, being constantly open and curious for new evidence and arguments, and being ready to change one’s views quite radically.

4. Collaborative spirit: It’s often possible to achieve more by working together, and doing this effectively requires high standards of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Effective altruism does not mean supporting ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning, but rather is about being a good citizen, while ambitiously working toward a better world.

These principles are not absolutes, and are subject to revision, but we think they’re important and undervalued by society at large. Anyone applying these principles in trying to find better ways to help others is participating in effective altruism. This is true no matter how much time or money they want to give, or which issue they choose to focus on.

Effective altruism can be compared to the scientific method. Science is the use of evidence and reason in search of truth – even if the results are unintuitive or run counter to tradition. Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason in search of the best ways of doing good.

The scientific method is based on simple ideas (e.g. that you should test your beliefs) but it leads to a radically different picture of the world (e.g. quantum mechanics). Likewise, effective altruism is based on simple ideas – that we should treat people equally and it’s better to help more people than fewer – but it leads to an unconventional and ever-evolving picture of doing good.

How can you take action?

People interested in effective altruism most often attempt to apply the ideas in their lives by:

• Choosing careers that help tackle pressing problems, or by finding ways to use their existing skills to contribute to these problems, such as by using advice from 80,000 Hours.

• Donating to carefully chosen charities, such as by using research from GiveWell or Giving What We Can.

• Starting new organizations that help to tackle pressing problems.

• Helping to build communities tackling pressing problems.

See a longer list of ways to take action.

The above are not exhaustive. You can apply effective altruism no matter how much you want to focus on doing good, and in any area of your life – what matters is that, no matter how much you want to contribute, your efforts are driven by the four values above, and you try to make your efforts as effective as possible.

Typically, this involves trying to identify big and neglected global problems, the most effective solutions to those problems, and ways you can contribute to those solutions – with whatever time or money you’re willing to give.

By doing this and thinking carefully, you might find it’s possible to have far more impact with those resources. It really is possible to save hundreds of people’s lives over your career. And by teaming up with others in the community, you can play a role in tackling some of the most important issues civilization faces today.

FAQ

Who created this website and why?

This website was created by the Centre for Effective Altruism, a charity dedicated to building and nurturing the effective altruism community. CEA created this website to help explain and spread the ideas of effective altruism.

What is the definition of effective altruism?

Effective altruism is the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice.

We can roughly break the project of effective altruism down into a research field that aims to identify the most effective ways of helping others, and a practical community of people who aim to use the results of that research to make the world better.

Someone is practising effective altruism if they’re participating in either of these two projects i.e. attempting to find more effective ways of helping, or devoting some of their resources to the most effective ways of helping discovered so far.

Effective altruism, defined in this way, doesn’t say anything about how much someone should give. What matters is that they use the time and money they want to give as effectively as possible.

“As effectively as possible” means trying to uphold the four values of effective altruism covered above: (i) prioritization – trying to weigh the scale of the effects of your actions (ii) impartial altruism – attempting to treat others equally (iii) truthseeking – constantly searching for new evidence and arguments (iv) collaborative spirit – acting with high standards of honesty and friendliness, and taking a community perspective.

What is meant by “helping others” or “doing good” within effective altruism? See the next FAQ entry.

To see a more precise definition of effective altruism, see The Definition of Effective Altruism.

What is meant by ‘doing good’ or ‘helping others’ in effective altruism?

What it means to ‘do good’ is a subject of active debate and research in the community, which includes people who hold many different moral views.

That said, typically in effective altruism, ‘doing good’ is tentatively understood to mean enabling others to have lives that are healthy, happy, fulfilled; in line with their wishes; and free from avoidable suffering – to have lives with greater wellbeing.

Effective altruism has this focus because increasing wellbeing is a goal that is important to many people. That isn’t to say that only increasing wellbeing matters, and in practice people in effective altruism have many other values.

Because what matters morally is so uncertain, people involved in effective altruism aim to respect other widely held values in their pursuit of doing good. Effective altruism is not about “ends justifies the means” thinking. It is about being a good citizen while ambitiously working toward a better world.

Read more about how 80,000 Hours – a non-profit that’s part of the community – defines ‘doing good’ here.

To see a more precise definition of doing good used in effective altruism, see The Definition of Effective Altruism, by the philosopher and co-founder of Effective Altruism, William MacAskill.

How did effective altruism get started?

Effective altruism was formed when several communities around the world came together, including Giving What We Can and the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, the rationality community in the Bay Area, and GiveWell (then in New York).

The term ‘effective altruism’ was coined in Oxford in 2011 as part of the name for the Centre for Effective Altruism (which hosts this website), but it caught on as a term to describe the broader movement.

Some of effective altruism’s intellectual inspirations are evidence-based medicine & policy; applied utilitarianism; and research into heuristics and biases in human reasoning.

Here is a talk about the intellectual history of effective altruism by Toby Ord and a history of the term ‘effective altruism’.

What resources have inspired people to get involved with effective altruism in the past?

Some examples of resources that have inspired people to get involved in effective altruism (but don’t necessarily represent its current form) include:

• Doing Good Better, by Will MacAskill
• The 80,000 Hours career guide, by Benjamin Todd
• The Precipice, by Toby Ord
• Taking Charity Seriously, by Toby Ord
• Our top charities, by GiveWell
• Rationality: A-Z, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Doing Good – A conversation with William MacAskill, by Sam Harris
• The why and how of effective altruism, by Peter Singer at TED.
• The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, by Peter Singer
• On Caring, by Nate Soares
• The most important century, by Holden Karnofsky
• 500 million, but not a single one more, by Jai Dhyani
• An introduction to effective altruism, by Ajeya Cotra
• Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
• Effective altruism: an introduction, the 80,000 Hours podcast

Why does effective altruism matter?

In brief:

1. Lots of people want to do good.
2. Some ways of doing good achieve much more than others (given the same amount of resources).
3. These differences are not widely known or acted upon.

This means that by searching for the most effective ways to do good, making them widely known, and acting on them, people interested in doing good can do far more to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Moreover, this can be achieved even if the amount of resources devoted to doing good doesn’t increase.

Read more.

What do people interested in effective altruism work on in practice?

People interested in effective altruism work on a wide range of issues and projects.

For instance, Benjamin Todd estimated the following distribution of funding across issues in 2019:

In terms of how they contribute, many choose jobs with the aim of tackling pressing problems. These jobs span all sectors, including within non-profit and for-profit organisations aiming to tackle these problems, academic research, or positions in government and policy.

Over 5,000 people pledge to donate over 10% of their income to the charities they believe are most effective through Giving What We Can, and over 100,000 people have made at least one donation based on GiveWell’s recommendations.

A common misconception is that effective altruism is only about donating money to global health charities or ‘earning to give’. But community members support many causes besides global health, only a minority are prioritizing earning to give, and effective altruism is as much about how to use your time effectively as your money. In fact, the organization 80,000 Hours argues that for many people, their career decisions matter more than their decisions about where to donate. Read more in “Misconceptions about effective altruism”.

See examples of people practising effective altruism in the next question.

What are some examples of people involved in effective altruism?

See some examples of:

• People who changed their career due to 80,000 Hours.
• People who’ve taken the Giving What We Can pledge.

Does effective altruism say I should make doing good my only focus in life?

No. How much to focus on doing good is a personal decision.

Effective altruism is about how to use the resources you want to devote to doing good as effectively as possible, not how much to focus on helping others in the first place.

Effective altruism often inspires people to make doing good a greater focus, because they realise it’s possible to do more good than they thought.

But for most in the community, doing good is just one important goal among several moral and personal goals. Likewise, while some in the community donate 50%+ of their income to charity, others only donate 1%.

Your own decision will be based partly on your moral views, and partly on your life circumstances. Many are simply not able to make helping others a major focus in life.

Even if you do want to make doing good a major focus, making it your only focus is often counterproductive. First, this is because what matters morally is deeply uncertain, and focusing on one ill-defined moral goal to the exclusion of all others could easily cause harm. Second, having a single goal isn’t a good match with most people’s psychology, so is likely to cause burnout, reducing your impact in the long term.

Why don’t people in effective altruism focus on more conventional issues?

A key consideration for which issue one should focus on is where resources are already being allocated by society. If an important problem is already widely recognised, then it is likely that a lot of people are already trying to solve it. That means it will usually be harder for a few extra people who decide to work on the issue to have a very large impact. All else equal, it’s possible to do far more good in an area that is not getting the attention it deserves.

One way to think about this is in terms of a "world portfolio" – what would the ideal allocation of resources be across all social causes? And where are we farthest from that ideal allocation?

This is why the issues people in effective altruism prioritize can seem surprising or narrow. They focus on the issues that are furthest from getting the attention they need.

This means the issues the community focuses on will change over time. If more people get interested in effective altruism, then the issues focused on today will no longer be neglected, and the community will change or expand its scope.

Where do organizations inspired by effective altruism get their funding?

Some organizations in the community are backed by a large number of individual effective donors. For example, over 110,000 individual donors have used GiveWell’s research to contribute more than $1 billion to its recommended charities. Others — including the Centre for Effective Altruism, which produced this website — are supported in significant part by grantmaking organizations inspired by effective altruism such as Open Philanthropy. Grants and donations can vary widely in size; the common thread between them is that these donors care deeply about doing as much good as possible with their giving.

See more common questions about effective altruism.

What are some common objections to effective altruism?

• What about if I disagree that the projects in this article are effective?
• Is effective altruism only about making money and donating it to charity?
• Is effective altruism the same as utilitarianism? What if I’m not a utilitarian?
• Does effective altruism neglect systemic change?
• If everyone followed the advice of effective altruism, wouldn’t that lead to a misallocation of resources?
• Is effective altruism calculating and impersonal?
• Is effective altruism too demanding?
• Doesn’t charity start at home?
• Do charity and aid really work?
• How are the people you’re trying to help involved in the decision-making?
• Does effective altruism neglect effective interventions when the impact can’t be measured?
• Isn’t effective altruism obvious?
• Is the effective altruism community too homogeneous?

What’s next?

If you’re interested in learning about how to do more good, we’ve compiled the following lists of some of the best resources about effective altruism:

• Articles
• Podcasts
• Books
• Videos & talks

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.