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November 21 - November 26, 2017
The challenge for us is this: How can we ensure that, when we try to help others, we do so as effectively as possible? How can we ensure that we avoid accidentally causing harm, and succeed in having the greatest positive impact we can?
We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.
Because we don’t get useful feedback when we try to help others, we can’t get a meaningful sense of whether we’re really making a difference.
“deworming is probably the least sexy development program there is.”
Focusing on new technologies to solve development issues undermines their humnity. They dont need smart solutions they need an even playing field
work out which ways of doing good are best, and to do those first. This project is crucial because, as we’ll discuss, the best ways of doing good are very good indeed.
We discovered that the best charities are hundreds of times more effective at improving lives than merely “good” charities.
effective altruism’s five key questions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing you can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?
If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then, speaking globally, you are the 1 percent.
Most households own radios but lack electricity, toilets, or tap water. Less than 10 percent of households possess a chair or a table.
It’s a basic rule of economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it.
Prospect Theory?
It’s not often you have two options, one of which is one hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for five dollars or buy someone else a beer for five cents. If that were the case, we’d probably be pretty generous—next round’s on me! But that’s effectively the situation we’re in all the time. It’s like a 99-percent-off sale, or getting 10,000 percent extra free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in your life.
Source: Angus Maddison
That we can’t solve all the problems in the world doesn’t alter in any way the fact that, if we choose, we can transform the lives of thousands of people.
Similar thoughts apply to deciding what cause to focus on more generally. For example, if an uncle dies of cancer, you might naturally want to raise money for cancer research. Responding to bereavement by trying to make a difference is certainly admirable. But it seems arbitrary to raise money for one specific cause of death rather than any other.
But we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair to those whom we could have helped more.
If we want to do as much good as we can, we need to think about what the consequences of our actions will be. Moreover, we need to think about how our actions will turn into improvements to people’s lives.
The crucial second step is to realize the importance of focusing on the best activities.
Yes ideally but if one is (even incorrectly ) driven to give to a specific unoptimial chairty and would otherwise do nothing...
Dambisa Moyo, published a book called Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, in which she argued that “aid is malignant” and should stop.
I’ve since realized that I was thinking about development in entirely the wrong way. The picture that aid skeptics paint is highly misleading and, even more important, isn’t particularly relevant for people who want to do good.
In 1950, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa was just 36.7 years. Now it’s 56 years, a gain of almost 50 percent. The picture that Dambisa Moyo paints is inaccurate. In reality, a tiny amount of aid has been spent, and there have been dramatic increases in the welfare of the world’s poorest people.
If you add up all the wars, genocides, and terrorist acts that occurred since 1973, the death toll is a staggering twelve million. Prior to its eradication, smallpox killed 1.5 to 3 million people every year, so by preventing these deaths for over forty years, its eradication has effectively saved somewhere between 60 and 120 million lives.
The eradication of smallpox is one success story from aid, saving five times as many lives as world peace would have done.
But we don’t need to fund programs of merely average effectiveness. We can deliberately choose to fund only the very best programs, which allows us to do a tremendous amount of good. To see how this plays out, let’s consider two types of aid programs. First, developing-world education:
Imagine saving a single person’s life: you pass a burning building, kick the door down, rush through the smoke and flames, and drag a young child to safety. If you did that, it would stay with you for the rest of your life. If you saved several people’s lives—running into a burning building one week, rescuing someone from drowning the next week, and diving in front of a bullet the week after—you’d think your life was really special. You’d be in the news. You’d be a hero. But we can do far more than that.
This makes the average value of drinkable water high. But we’ve already got a lot of water, so the value of an additional gallon of water (in developed countries) is very low. If I, a citizen of a developed Western nation, have one additional gallon of water, that means I may simply have a slightly deeper bath one evening. This is why the cost of a gallon of water from the tap in New York City, where I’m writing these lines, is just $0.015—less than two cents.
Per person, Japan was thirty times richer than Haiti. As a whole, the country was a thousand times richer.
For that reason, on the fifteenth of March, just four days after the earthquake hit, the Japanese Red Cross made the following statement: The Japanese Red Cross Society, with the support of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, has determined that external assistance is not required, and is therefore not seeking funding or other assistance from donors at this time.
Every day, people die from easily preventable diseases like AIDS, malaria, or tuberculosis. This is a disaster far beyond that of Haiti, or Tohoku, or Sichuan. Every day, eighteen thousand children—more than the number of people who perished in Tohoku—die from preventable causes.
World Health Organization and World Bank concluded that “emergency health interventions are more costly and less effective than time-tested health activities.”
Cancer treatment receives so much more funding than malaria treatment because malaria is such a cheap problem to solve that rich countries no longer suffer from it.
Looking at what would have happened otherwise is a fundamental piece of scientific reasoning, referred to as assessing the counterfactual. But the mistake of neglecting the counterfactual is rife within the world of altruism, and this mistake can have terrible consequences.
Earning to give means exactly what it sounds like: rather than trying to maximize the direct impact you have with your job, you instead try to increase your earnings so you can donate more, improving people’s lives through your giving rather than your day-to-day work.
In the culmination of the show, he accused the cosmetic surgeon he’d been interviewing of wasting his talent and skills to make wannabe movie stars more attractive, rather than saving lives. What we’ve seen so far shows that Louis Theroux’s sentiment, while understandable, is misplaced. It’s the cosmetic surgeon’s decision about how to spend his money that really matters.
Psychologists have found that people either give too much weight to low-probability events (as, perhaps, when people choose to play the lottery), or they simply ignore them all together.
Economists have studied this issue and worked out how, on average, a consumer affects the number of animal products supplied by declining to buy that product. They estimate that, on average, if you give up one egg, total production ultimately falls by 0.91 eggs; if you give up one gallon of milk, total production falls by 0.56 gallons. Other products are somewhere in between: economists estimate that if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68 pounds; if you give up one pound of pork, production ultimately falls by 0.74 pounds; if you give up one pound of chicken,
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lower-bound reasoning: given that it’s impossible to get a precise estimate of her potential impact in politics, we’ll try to create an estimate that we feel confident is an underestimate (or a “lower bound”). Then we can say that, even though we don’t know how much influence she’ll have, it is at least as much as the lower-bound estimate.
mass media health education isn’t something individuals can buy, and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t know just how valuable it is. Markets alone cannot provide mass media health education, so it needs to be funded and implemented by governments or nonprofits.
Given this, there is little reason to buy Fairtrade products. In buying Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to people in comparatively well-off countries. You’d do considerably more good by buying cheaper goods and donating the money you save to one of the cost-effective charities mentioned in the previous chapter.
But would you?
leaving on your TV (one of the worst offenders in terms of standby energy use) for a whole year contributes less to your carbon footprint than driving a car for just two hours.
Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally based food.
Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend $105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions. This is significant, but to most people it’s considerably less than it would cost to make large changes in lifestyle, such as not flying.
moral licensing, which describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future.
Moral licensing shows that people are often more concerned about looking good or feeling good rather than actually doing good. If you “do your bit” by buying an energy-efficient lightbulb, your status as a good human being is less likely to be called into question if you subsequently steal a small amount of money.
Where it becomes crucial, however, is when people are encouraged to do fairly ineffective acts of altruism and, as a result, are less likely to perform effective ones later. If, for example, encouraging someone to buy fair-trade causes that person to devote less time or money to other, more effective activities, then promoting fair-trade might on balance be harmful.
In both career choice and entrepreneurship, you start out with a tiny amount of relevant information, but you have to use that information to cope with a huge number of variables. Moreover, as things progress, these variables shift: you’re constantly gaining new information; and new, often entirely unexpected, opportunities and problems arise. Because of this, armchair reasoning about what will and won’t happen isn’t very useful.
Ries argues that entrepreneurs should think of their ideas or products like hypotheses, and continually test, ultimately letting the potential customers determine what the product should be.
Lean startup
This is an important concern, and if you think that a particular career will destroy your altruistic motivation, then you certainly shouldn’t pursue it.
But were bad at knowing!!!!
we should expect the interests of future people to be systematically underrepresented because they don’t participate in present-day markets or elections.
The meat industry is also one of the largest contributors to climate change, amounting to 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
