MORE Effective Altruism

The “Effective Altruism” movement recommends charitable giving that focuses on what the New Testament calls, “the least among us,” for example, to improve health in developing nations.

I believe there is a more effective focus: increasing Gross World Flourishing: that is, giving to the people with particularly good potential for, for example, becoming wise leaders, developing clean, abundant energy, and generating better preventions and cures for diseases.

Here’s an example of such More Effective Altruism. I call it MentorMatch. In it, match.com-like software would, especially in developed nations, match mentors with low-income kids of high intellectual ability, drive, and ethics. The mentors (paid or volunteer) would be screened via software as in background-checking software and trained via an online interactive short course, like in online traffic school. Or the “mentor” could be a mentoring/counseling app, adapted from existing ones or developed custom. The proteges (the kids) could be identified by sending an email soliciting referrals to the school counselor associations’ mailing list.

Why is MentorMatch more likely to increase Gross World Flourishing than, for example, a cause touted by “Effective Altruism:” mosquito nets in tropical nations?

— Focusing on high-ability kids is more likely to significantly improve Gross World Flourishing.

— Compared with children from rich families, low-income kids are more likely to have significant unmet need in achieving their potential.

— Compared with people in developing nations, those in developed nations face fewer external barriers to achieving their potential.

— The benefits of investing in young people last longer. The kids should, however, be old enough to have shown that they’re already doing more than their age-peers to increase Gross World Flourishing, for example, a child who, in a low-income middle school, started a thoughtful student newspaper.

— Unlike group activities, mentoring is individualized in topic, pace, and approach. Mentoring — human or digital — promises to help kids with practical and emotional roadblocks, increase motivation and, in turn, make them more likely to increase Gross World Flourishing.

Other examples of More Effective Altruism initiatives:

Funding the development of SuperCourses. These would be taught online by world-class transformational instructors. Each lesson would be enhanced by demonstrations, simulations, and gamification. Machine learning would keep improving instruction’s individualization based on the student’s performance on the previous mini-quiz and on the child’s facial expressions: happy, sad, engaged, disengaged. Lessons could be translated into any language and accessible on a phone, which are ubiquitous even in developing nations.

Funding top, iconoclastic STEM students to pursue research that is basic, not applied. Basic research provides the foundational knowledge that is prerequisite to application. Because basic research’s impact is less certain and more long-term, government and corporate funding are limited. Also, the brilliant iconoclast may have a hard time coping with an educational system that prizes conformity and incrementalism. Candidates could be found by querying STEM department chairs at top universities.

Areas of research with significant potential to increase Gross World Flourishing include:

— Sufficiently safe and unlimited sources of clean energy: nuclear fusion, hydrogen power, etc.

— Understanding the foundations of the human genome at the molecular level on up, for example, protein folding. Such research is the precursor to preventing and curing such diseases as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. With sufficient guardrails, such research could also lead to ethically enhancing impulse control, problem-solving ability, perhaps even altruism. Those attributes, in turn, are key to improving Gross World Flourishing.

— Improved data mining. Whether searching a database or the internet, data mining is central to our ability to find what we want from the world’s inconceivably large and ever-growing mountain of data, and in turn, for us to increase Gross World Flourishing.

Funding independent researchers working on initiatives that promise to increase Gross World Flourishing yet aren’t well funded. University- or corporate-based researchers are often restricted to what government, other corporations, and individual investors will fund, and such research is usually incremental, low-risk, and promises a quick financial return. Some researchers who refuse such shackling are held back not by their or their ideas’ mediocrity but by lack of funding. Funding needn’t be limited to money. For example, I fund and facilitate, on Zoom, a worldwide group of nine such researchers and believe it is a cost-effective way to increase Gross World Flourishing.

Funding research instrumentation. It’s sexy to fund research that focuses directly on a societal problem. But much such research requires something less sexy: instrumentation, for example, better imaging equipment, electron microscopy, DNA sequencers, processing chips, etc. Funding instrumentation can be a potent, under-the-radar way to increase Gross World Flourishing.

It seems like only yesterday when the “Effective Altruism” movement began. Yet it already feels like an entrenched status quo, with considerable insistence that the most effective altruism focuses on helping “the least among us.” I believe that focusing on improving Gross World Flourishing would make “Effective Altruism,” well, more effective.

I read this aloud on YouTube.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the evaluation of innovation. He is the author of many books, including, What’s the Big Idea? 39 reinventions for a better America. You can reach him at mnemko@comcast.net.