The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

Eventually they realized that they weren’t getting the information they wanted “because the charities themselves didn’t have it.”6 But still Karnofsky and Hassenfeld thought the data was important, and they thought other donors would want it too. So in 2007, they decided to leave their jobs and start GiveWell, an organization dedicated to doing (and publicizing) quantitative research on different charities in order to determine which are the most effective, that is, have the highest ROD. This is similar in spirit to the approach taken by Consumer Reports or the Motley Fool, but instead of researching cars and cameras or stocks and bonds, GiveWell researches charities. GiveWell now sits at the center of a growing social movement called effective altruism. Inspired by the work of Singer (along with Karnofsky, Hassenfeld, and others), effective altruists hope to change how people donate their time, effort, and money to good causes. And they’re using reason and evidence where others have relied mostly on emotion and gut instinct. This is a hard-nosed, data-driven approach that looks above all for results. In deciding how to give, effective altruists follow their heads, not their hearts.