Social Media and Effective Altruism
I don’t often give to charity. In one sense I feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of active charities and NGOs, operating nationally or internationally, often working tirelessly on the same issues. It’s hard to distinguish between them sometimes, and when I do, on what basis do I decide which one needs the money more? Which is doing the more important work? Which is going to put the money to the best use? Like a lot of people, I want to know that my contribution is going to have a tangible effect on the problem, and that it is going to be used on the front line rather than vanishing into bureaucracy or the marketing budget (that’s not to say that these things aren’t important for charities). The result has been a kind of paralysis on my part.
A few weeks ago I listened to an episode of Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast in which he has a conversation with Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, who is also the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism. In the podcast they discuss the concept of and rationale behind the movement of effective altruism. This is a good summary of the term:
Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?
Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on.
MacAskill demonstrates the need for effective altruism with a case study: the PlayPump is a water pump system which has been integrated into a children’s merry-go-round. It works by leveraging the rotation of the merry-go-round to pump underground water into an elevated water tank with a tap on it, thus providing clean water for villages across Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a great concept, and was embraced and financed by philanthropists and well-meaning celebrities (e.g. Jay-Z, Beyonce). Unfortunately the invention was deeply flawed:
In order to pump the clean water, you need constant torque, so actually pushing this thing would be very tiring for the kids. Sometimes they’d fall off and break limbs, sometimes the children would vomit from the spinning, and they wouldn’t want to play on this thing all day. But the community still needed this water, and so it was normally left to the elderly women of the village to push this brightly coloured PlayPump ‘round and ‘round, all hours of the day, a task they found very undignified and demeaning. And secondly it just wasn’t very good as a pump, and often it was replacing very boring, but very functional, hand pumps.
It demonstrates the point pretty well — that good intentions are not enough to fix a problem, and that charitable giving and innovation should be driven by evidence, with the objective of having the greatest impact on the problem.
This hasn’t caused me to ramp up my charitable givings dramatically, but it has changed my thinking to some degree.
One thing that has not been far from my mind any day over the past few months has been the conflict in Syria. There has been no shortage of dramatic and disturbing photo and video content emerging from this war over the past year or so, with the occasional striking photo bubbling to the top and influencing the media narrative for a few days. Since I’ve started working in Storyful, and paying close attention to the work that my colleagues do every time there is an atrocity in Aleppo, I see a lot of this content.
To protect the sensibilities of some of my followers who don’t necessarily want their day ruined, I had until recently resisted sharing it, but I decided a few weeks ago to instead share it as much as possible, ‘to raise awareness’. However I have still felt pretty hopeless and impotent in wanting to help in some way. Political efforts to stop the conflict have deteriorated over the past year, and the international community has been entirely useless in pressuring Assad and Putin into pulling back. The election of Donald Trump will if anything further embolden the Syrian government. In short, the war is not going to end any time soon. So the only thing that I can see to do is to try and get some aid to those who are living under siege, and to get some resources to those who are on the ground trying to help them.
I asked a few people — journalists, activists, and campaigners—which charities are active on the ground in Aleppo, and where would a contribution do the most good. I did receive suggestions, but not ones that I felt were very informed.
In September, BBC Newsnight broadcast a short feature on a hospital in Aleppo, which I found quite moving and upsetting. Again I felt powerless to help, but in this case I reached out on Twitter to BBC journalist John Sweeney, whose report it was that was broadcast, and I asked where would be good to donate in order to help in some tangible way. He suggested the David Nott Foundation or Médecins Sans Frontières. David Nott is a surgeon in London, and he and his foundation teaches advanced surgical skills to local medics and surgeons in conflict zones such as in Syria. He features in the Newsnight clip remotely guiding a local surgeon through an operation, with the procedure being broadcast to Nott over Skype using a camera phone. It’s quite extraordinary. I donated to the foundation and shared the Newsnight video along with the links to the suggested charities on my social media.
To bring this back to effective altruism: my thinking now is that it’s not enough to simply be upset, or angry, or frustrated, or disturbed by footage of some atrocity. Good intentions are not enough. It’s worth putting in the effort to speak to those who may know more about the issue, or who may themselves be active on the ground, and to find out what can be done to help. In the context of social media, sharing dramatic footage and ‘raising awareness’ is one thing, but does it do anything besides create more angry and frustrated people? Is it worth putting in the extra work, finding out if there is a way to help (a charity to donate to, a demonstration to promote), and spreading that information along with the footage?
This is a simple example from my own experience, and it’s a modest donation that will make a very small difference. There are people putting their own lives in jeopardy to be on the front line in war zones such as Aleppo. And less dramatically than that, there are other NGOs and activist groups in Ireland and elsewhere working tirelessly to help in Syria by lobbying and other activities. However I’m hoping that by changing my own mindset that at least for any issues that agitate me in the future I’ll be conscious to, rather than just fume over it or vent about it, try to find out how I can help. In this case I made a small contribution, and some of my friends also made a contribution that they would not otherwise have, so that’s something.
Donate to the David Nott Foundation
Please feel free to suggest any other tangible ways to help those under siege in Syria
Another video of David Nott:
