Effective Altruism

Last week I wrote about about influences on my ethical identity, saving a discussion of effective altruism (EA) for today. EA is both a set of ideas and a community focused on finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice. I do not attempt in this post to thoroughly summarize they key ideas of EA. For a primer or a follow-up after reading this article, I suggest a skim of the resources compiled in the EA Handbook.

College EA group leaders retreat, October 2022

In fall of 2017 I was a few months into an AmeriCorps teaching position and missing the intellectual stimulation of college courses. I decided to peruse some online options and spent a few months trying out various lectures in history, philosophy, and psychology to balance out all the math and science I had previously prioritized. Eventually in the spring of 2018 I found a course with a subtitle along the lines of “applying philosophy to do good in the world” to take in full. It was Peter Singer’s Coursera course on a young movement called effective altruism.

I recall three takeaways at the time:

1. The extreme poverty and inequality in the world means that those with the most resources can do tremendous amounts of good by helping those with the least.
2. In fact, simple thought experiments (ie. Singer’s classic Shallow Pond) make a strong case that not only can we do a tremendous amount of good, but also that we should based on common-sense conceptions of what it is to be moral. (Though Singer is perhaps the most famous living utilitarian, this conclusion can follow under many plausible ethical frameworks.)
3. So much of our culture (which for me at the time was largely defined by elite institutions of higher ed.) is set up to obscure the tradeoffs we constantly make against this potential and responsibility.

I circled around the EA world with books and podcasts, getting more and more interested in these dual projects of thinking hard about the moral responsibilities we have and how to reliably act on them. This was all rather heady, though, and hard to import into the software that actually guided my choices and actions. Despite this private intellectual engagement I felt through these years quite teleologically adrift and experienced low points in my relationship to purpose, meaning, and life.

Praxis

After almost a year of facing the difficulties of teaching through the pandemic, I felt ready to try to act on all the potential energy that EA-adjacent media was stirring up within me. In February of 2021 I applied for a career consulting session with 80,000 Hours, an organization that helps to identify and weigh options for doing good. To the uninitiated, their advice can sound quite counterintuitive and challenging (see: “why you shouldn’t ‘follow your passion’ and why medicine and charity work aren’t always the best way to help others.”).

At first I felt somewhat on the defensive while justifying my interest in being an educator, but ultimately I found my advising extremely helpful and fascinating, and I left the process feeling both supported and respected. I had to deeply question what I thought mattered in the world, what case I could make about how my work made a difference on these things, and how I might further leverage my skills and interests (yes, it was in fact allowable consider my interests!).

This advising launched me on a whirlwind immersion more thoroughly into the EA world. Within the next two years I:

• Participated in eight-week-long intro. and then in-depth online EA fellowships, followed by sixteen more weeks as a facilitator
• Began consulting with university EA groups on their community-building and programming
• Took the Giving What We Can pledge to allocate a share of my personal income to highly effective charities
• Applied for and received a grant to support my graduate studies
• Applied for and received a grant to plan and run a weekend retreat for college EA group leaders
• Received rejections from ~5 other EA-related grant projects and ~10 EA-related full-time positions
• Joined the Board for the virtual EA fellowship program

During this period EA publicity expanded dramatically (both good and bad) so there were constantly new and interesting conversations to be had with the many friends and colleagues I was finding along the way.

Reflection

I am not as explicitly involved with EA organizations today as I was in 2021–2022 (which I think for most folks is a healthy trajectory), but I credit those experiences for a tremendous amount of personal, intellectual, and moral development. I now turn to five reflections that have emerged:

(Note: Using “EA” as a subject is a bit hand-wavey; I use it to refer generally to both the community at-large and the set of canonical ideas associated with the movement, to the extent that they exist.)

1. I wish more people talked about these ideas. I don’t think that the solutions that are often associated with EA (quantitative charity evaluation, expected value reasoning, longtermism, certain specific cause prioritizations, etc.) are going to resonate with everyone or look perfect in retrospect, but the questions that involvement in EA requires one to ask are to me shamefully underrepresented in modern Western culture, specifically in the coming-of-age process. Values inquiry, moral philosophy, moral circle introspection, considering tradeoffs and complexity, and so much more are core topics that are unavoidable when asking how one might do good in the world, and topics that I wish my peers and my students were nudged to engage with more. I know the world would benefit and I think we would learn to live and love more deeply too. I continue to learn to recognize that there are many people and communities that do engage with these questions regularly, and I find myself gravitating more and more towards these people in my life. I still often wonder how best to call in my friends and my students, as so many have graciously done for me.
2. Engaging with EA ultimately changed not just what I thought, but what I did. I have had many learning experiences that I am sure have changed me in ways that subtly manifest in my actions, but I have never been able to draw such direct lines between my thoughts and my actions as I have via EA. I give away money that I didn’t before, to places I wouldn’t have before. I made professional decisions to better optimize my positive impact. I finally committed to being vegetarian and moved closer to being vegan. I created and facilitated programs and curricula that launched similar trajectories for others. Most of what I learned from EA programs were ideas I’d heard and agreed with before, but when delivered with such clarity, rigor, and passion I could not help but to change my life to be more thoroughly in line with them.
3. EA has gotten some big things really right. Pandemic preparedness prevention and safe deployment of AI in particular stand out as cause areas that were wildly popular in EA discourse before coming into the mainstream, and are now clearly ways in which one might consider having a positive impact on the world. Even something like Peter Singer’s animal ethics is far more palatable today than when he first began penning his arguments for animal welfare as a key moral priority of our time. EA has of course not been the first to promote messages like these and has gotten plenty wrong, and EA orgs. and community members will notoriously be the first to call out mistakes, debate themselves, or publicize counter-arguments.
4. Living ethically is demanding and EA principles can’t be totalizing. The EA Forum (a fascinating Wild West of EA discussions du jour) is full of conversations about how to realistically optimize for impact (see the great post You have more than one goal, and that’s fine) and many more topics related to self-care. I felt intense guilt, frustration, and confusion at many points throughout the past several years while engaging with challenging questions about living a good life, but ultimately I feel more at peace about the habits I have established to keep me engaged with this work while also giving myself permission to not lose sight of other meaningful pursuits and intriguing worldviews. (My dad happened to write a great blog post about this earlier this week!)
5. EA can’t provide everything I need. I found something I had not found elsewhere in EA’s amazing combination of rigor and passion for making the world better, but all this hard thinking and careful doing has not for me been much of a spiritual practice. Physical community, teaching, being in nature, and mediating help me develop intense empathy and longing for the good that EA frameworks can then help me act towards. I need other ideas and experiences to ignite the flame, and then EA can help me think about how to best to shine it.

Looking ahead

Many of the changes I have made in my life because of EA ideas feel like durable and core aspects of my identity now. I will continue to give, discuss, and learn. I will think about what I think and how I think. I will remain involved in the EA community through my work as an educator, collaborating with other community-builders to engage young people in the projects of values reflection, moral reasoning, life and career planning for positive impact, and more, even though this will often be without any explicit association with the EA movement.

I love sharing my experiences with EA with others and love hearing about the frameworks and cosmologies that help others find meaning and purpose in the world. I hope to continue this journey of learning and reflection with you!