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Sam Deere

If you think that altruism, equality, and helping more people rather than fewer are all important values, then you're probably on board with effective altruism.

Four Ideas You Already Agree With (That Mean You're Probably on Board with Effective Altruism)

Here are four ideas that you probably already agree with. Three are about your values, and one is an observation about the world. Individually, they each might seem a bit trite or self-evident. But taken together, they have significant implications for how we think about doing good in the world.

 — when people are in need and we can help them, we think that we should. Sometimes we think it might even be morally required: most people think that millionaires should give something back. But it may surprise you to learn that those of us on or above the median wage in a rich country are 

 — maybe we can also afford to give back too.

 — everyone has an equal claim to being happy, healthy, fulfilled and 

, whatever their circumstances. All people matter, wherever they live, however rich they are, and whatever their ethnicity, age, gender, ability, religious views, etc.

 — all else being equal, we should save more lives, help people live longer, and make more people happier. Imagine twenty sick people lining a hospital ward, who’ll die if you don’t give them medicine. You have enough medicine for everyone, and no reason to hold onto it for later: would anyone really choose to arbitrarily save only 

 of the people if it was just as easy to save 

 — even millionaires have a finite amount of money they can spend. This is also true of our time — there are never enough hours in the day. Choosing to spend money or time on one option is an implicit choice 

 (whether we think about these options or not).

I think that these four ideas are all pretty uncontroversial. I think it seems pretty intuitive that we should help people in need if we can; that we shouldn’t arbitrarily preference some groups of people over others; that we would prefer to help more people if given the option; and that we don’t have infinite time and money.

In fact I’d go further — I’d say that we’d feel pretty uncomfortable trying to 

Helping others in need isn’t morally required, important, or even that good

It’s OK to value people differently based on arbitrary differences like race, gender, ability etc.

It doesn’t matter if some people die even if it doesn’t really cost us anything extra to save their lives

We don't have infinite money, so we always need to choose which worthy cause to support.

So if we agree that these four ideas embody important values — and I think that they do — then there are big implications for how we should think about doing good. In fact, it means that the way we typically think about doing good is wrong.

In order to be true to these values, we need to think about how we can help the most people with our limited resources.

 where we can make a big impact for a small amount of money. In fact the best options are 

 — sometimes hundreds of times better. That might mean the difference between helping one person, and helping hundreds of people 

for exactly the same amount of time or money

is almost certainly not making as big an impact as the 

 (and let’s face it, many causes we choose to support tend to be the result of either random chance, or systemic factors that mean we’re only exposed to certain causes).

And this matters, because if we don’t choose well, then we’re either not giving people equal consideration (that is, implicitly discriminating against some groups of people), or we’re not helping as many people as we can (that is, allowing extra people to suffer or die, even though we could potentially help them).

So, at first, every worthy cause — from cancer research, to climate justice, to animal sanctuaries, to preventing 

 diseases in places that we'll probably never visit — should be on the table... 

 that we also think it's better to help more people and we understand that we don’t have the resources to help everyone. So we should first focus on the causes where we can help the most people for our limited time and money, 

not just on those that we happen to have already heard about

Women in Uganda holding bales of insecticide-treated bednets provided by the 

Trying to be cause-neutral can be a really hard thing to do. Most people have first-hand experience of loss: I’ve lost two relatives to leukaemia; watched as the disease consumed their bodies and the pain meds fogged their minds; lived through the shared grief of their passing. It’s entirely reasonable that this makes us want to donate to organisations trying to solve the specific problem or cure the particular disease that has robbed us of our loved ones. We’re empathetic creatures, and we don’t want other people to experience the same suffering, or for their loved ones to experience the same grief.

 equally, we should also care about treating their experiences equally. There’s not a really good reason that I should prefer averting the death, disability, and suffering caused by a particular disease (like leukaemia) any more than I should care about suffering caused by malaria, tuberculosis, traffic accidents, or anything else. What matters is that lives are cut short, parents are deprived of their children, people are living in pain. Caring about equality means treating 

 death and suffering as a tragedy, not just that caused by specific diseases that we — by cruel twists of fate that thrust them into our field of view — happen to notice.

Making these decisions is really, really hard. But there is a set of thinking tools we can use to help us. This way of thinking is called 

. It's basically the same as regular altruism (in that it emphasises the importance of helping other people) — the word 'effective' just means trying to think clearly about how your actions can help the 

I see effective altruism as a way of being able to better live up to 

This way of thinking is applicable to any way that we might want to do good — whether that be agitating for political change, choosing where we donate our money, or how to have a big impact with our careers.

In a world where there are so many worthy causes we could work on, it gives us a way out of decision paralysis, by systematically looking for ways to do the most good with our limited time and money.

It asks us to face up to some hard choices. But remember, we’re making these choices anyway, whether we think about them or not. So even though it might be hard to not donate to something that seems really important — whether for personal reasons, or because you’re convinced by a charity’s marketing pitch — remember that you’re always trading off against other worthy causes.

Here’s an example of this in action. The typical person in the UK donates around £6,700 ($9,600USD)

 over the course of their working lifetimes. For this money we could fund the distribution of 

 (likely preventing around 200children from becoming really, really sick from malaria

). However, most voluntary donations go to domestic medical charities

. The UK’s National Health Service considers it good value to save one 

. It’s highly unlikely that a domestic charity will beat this figure, so the typical donor’s impact is going to be many, many times less than it could otherwise be. Remember, 

just because we don’t think about these choices, doesn’t mean that they’re not there.

So please, think carefully about these ideas — the importance of altruism, equality, and doing as much as we can with our scarce resources — and see if they make sense to you.

If they do, then the next time you think about how to make the world a better place, give voice to these values by thinking 

Some resources for learning more about effective altruism:

Some actions you can take that we think are really effective

 to a charity recommended on the basis of its impact and cost-effectiveness — check out our 

. If you’d like to support charities that increase the welfare of non-human animals effectively, check out 

 to keep donating over the course of your lifetime — 

 people (and counting) have pledged to donate 10% of their lifetime income to the most effective charities, and 

 have made pledges of 1% or more of their income for a custom period.

Choose a career that’s really high-impact by reading career advice from 

 in your local area or at your university, and get other people interested in making a bigger difference

Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

Linchuan Zhang

 [Interview] Why Derek Thompson of The Atlantic took the Giving What We Can pledge

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, writing on a wide range of topics such as technology, economic policy and behavioural psychology. One of his best known pieces is The Atlantic magazine cover story 

, which delves into the impact technology may have on the future of employment as we know it. We interviewed him on why he took the 

A couple of years ago Derek met Will and Amanda MacAskill while staying in New York. Huddled in a kitchen drinking beer with Will, he started to wonder if you could really do more good for the world working on Wall Street than for Wateraid.

Since then Derek has done a lot of research into effective giving, promoting the idea that those in the global north can do a tremendous amount of good with their wealth, especially if they think “scientifically rather than sentimentally”.

Workers distributing mosquito nets on behalf of the Against Malaria Foundation in Malawi

When his mother passed away from cancer Derek did something incredible to honour her memory. He 

donated a thousand dollars for every year of her life

 to help hundreds of others whose mothers were at risk.

We were very excited to have Derek take the 

 committing 10% of his incoming to effective charities. Derek very kindly spoke with us via email about his experiences.

 Derek, why have you decided to take the Giving What We Can pledge?

 I wanted to pre-commit myself to doing something that I know is right and good: To make a point, every year, to donate a significant amount of my income to a profoundly good cause.

, which are recognized by GiveWell to be two of the most effective charities in the world.

 Will this affect the way you do journalism? Do you want to write about pressing causes or high-impact social movements? How does your work writing on economics and labour markets relate to your views about effective altruism?

 I think journalists have an obligation to write about issues of great importance that escape the everyday attention of most people, and effective altruism offers a great frame through which to find those 

 What would you say to someone hesitating about whether to take the pledge?

 The typical family spends about ten percent of its income on food. That’s about 5,000 dollars for a typical household each year. For that amount, the Against Malaria Foundation estimates that you could buy enough malaria nets to save a life. By donating an extra breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day for one year, you can save a life. That seems like a pretty compelling deal.

Thank you to Derek for sharing his story. If you would like to follow Derek’s work 

We would love to hear why you started giving, so please get in touch on 

If you’re wondering what you could achieve with your donations have a look at our 

Ben Rhodes

Why you should apply for the September Internship

Forget what you think you know about summer internships: two weeks at the Centre for Effective Altruism is quite unlike any other work experience. From the get-go you are immersed into a dynamic, startup environment brimming with intellectual excitement and a sense of community. If you are looking for the 

guidance to make it as impactful as possible

opportunity to make lasting friendships along the way

Before I began my internship with Giving What We Can I was asked to reflect on my skillset and select a project from a wide range of possibilities. I was encouraged to discuss projects with relevant staff members, reshape them to suit my background, and even design a new one from scratch if I so desired. I was given the freedom to innovate and organise my own schedule, running contrary to my standard model of internships as micro-managed drudgery. In the end, I decided to capitalise on my experience founding and running an Effective Altruist society by working on a project to create and grow university chapters.

Depending on the nature of your personal project, you are allocated a supervising member of staff and a team of fellow interns working on related tasks. This really is the premier design feature of the internship; 

by having a close-knit team to share ideas with and generate instant feedback, your learning cycle is much faster

. You don’t have to wait for someone more senior to validate your work constantly. Plus, by working in teams, you quickly build up friendships with smart, insightful people. If I had to single out the most significant belief I updated on because of the internship, it would be this: 

the importance of growing your network of effective altruist contacts, and sharing knowledge within that network, is hard to overestimate

I have only scratched the surface of what the internship has to offer: outside of working hours is where the real fun begins. Lunchtimes start with the renowned wrap buffet, courtesy of CEA, designed to overwhelm you with a smorgasbord of wrap fillings. Any altruist worth their iodised salt will demonstrate their wrapmanship at the lunchtime table. Can you navigate the 

? Be warned: your strategic sauce selection skills are being scrutinised.

The Giving What We Can team go to impressive lengths to ensure your time outside the office is just as engaging as that spent in it. We had the ominous ‘Bill Spectre’ conduct us on a horrifying yet hilariously tongue-in-cheek ghost tour of Oxford’s charming cobbled lanes. We paid a visit to the board game café ‘Thirsty Meeples’ and were - yet again - overwhelmed with choice. One standout game was ‘Pandemic’: a cooperative strategy game where each player is a specialist member of the Centre for Disease Control. You have to leverage your unique skills and coordinate with your team to save the world from viral annihilation. If CEA ever pivot into board game design, the outcome would look a lot like Pandemic. Other activities include picturesque picnics in Christ Church meadow and super-stimulating, pint-fuelled conversations at pubs all over Oxford. I can recall one occasion when a hedonist philosopher - who wrote a paper on how to have a 

 - generously bought rounds for all present.

I really could go on for long, long time about how exhilarating the internship experience was. If what I’ve said so far has sparked an interest, then feel free to get in contact with me to ask more questions. Or, if you are already sold, go ahead and apply - the application process is quick and straightforward.

Thomas Sittler

What it's like to intern at Giving What We Can

This summer I spent two months working at Giving What We Can’s Oxford offices as an intern. It was an 

incredibly valuable experience and I encourage anyone with an interest in extreme poverty alleviation to 

. You can find more information about doing a summer internship at Giving What We Can 

 (CEA), the organisations Giving What We Can is part of, shares the office the 

. This means that even though the Giving What We Can team is small, there are constantly 

opportunities to talk to, learn from, and socialise with a much larger group of people who are all trying to improve the world as much as possible

. I doubt I’ve ever met so many great people in a two-month period before.

the best way to learn about effective altruism

. I had read about effective altruism a little bit, mostly from the perspective of global poverty, but being there just doesn’t compare to reading things online (although there is a lot of very high-quality material 

). There was always an interesting conversation going on, and someone I could test my ideas on or ask to explain something. New concerns and old critiques of effective altruism are discussed frequently and openly. Among the interns, there were very varying degrees of commitment to the ideas of effective altruism, but everyone was very serious about genuinely helping their organisation and creating top-quality output.

Giving What We Can takes good care of its interns.

 I first noticed this when I explained that I didn’t have accommodation in Oxford for the summer, and they replied that I could stay in a house which was shared between interns and employees of CEA. But this was certainly not the last example.

. For instance, after one or two weeks working on outreach (encouraging people to start local Giving What We Can chapters), I noticed that this work was probably not a great personal fit for me. I came up with a couple of things that I thought would be a better fit for my skills, one of which was to work on tax deductibility in France for our recommended charities (I’ve lived in Paris for 14 years). The team welcomed these ideas – they operate under the principle that each intern is in the best position to figure out what would be the highest-impact thing for them to do.

Some of the other projects I worked on included translating the effective altruism landing page into French, improving our chapter ‘starter packet’ and writing two research reports on promising interventions. Doing so many different projects really drove home the 80/20 rule: the 80% of the value comes form 20% of what you do. For instance, I spent perhaps 5-8 times more time and energy on my first research project than on my second, but I am not sure the first one was much more valuable. My internship taught me to ruthlessly prioritise, something I became better at but still have room for a lot more progress on.

“Work smarter, not harder” is a cliché of self-help, but CEA is an organisation that has really internalised it. CEA recognises that making its people more productive is a very high-leverage action, and worth investing a lot of resources into. I could always turn to some of my very knowledgeable colleagues for advice on how to work more efficiently, and this idea is baked into the office culture, with things like morning check-ins, monthly feedback sessions, lunchtime talks, and a personal mentor for each employee or intern.

I grew a lot as a person during this internship. It was a 

fun and supportive environment where I felt free to try things and fail

. I was shocked by how often my colleagues offered to take time out of their workday to upskill me – whether about multiple regression, GitHub, how to write a good cold email, or how to plan my day.

For any of these aspects alone, the internship would have been worth my time. 

It’s a great way to help the world while helping yourself develop. If you’re considering applying to be an intern at Giving What We Can or the Centre for Effective Altruism, hesitate no more and go for it!

Sebastian Roing

Out of the box and into this world: behavioural economics and international development

Studies show that people often make bad decisions. Annoyingly bad decisions, for annoyingly petty reasons. Like that time you procrastinated getting back to a friend, for no obvious reason, and it turned out you missed out on a nice dinner, an evening at the pub or some such. In fact, you probably didn’t need studies to inform you that you sometimes make bad decisions. You knew that perfectly well already.

But there is an incredible value to knowing people, in general, are not rational decision-makers. And there is an even higher value to knowing what specific biases influence their decisions and what lapses in judgement people are prone to commit. This value consists in being able to design policy interventions that 

, flagship publication of the World Bank. In this blog article I will outline the thinking behind the WDR and highlight a few promising opportunities for low-cost interventions.

 looks at how small changes in the costs of applying to college affected application rates for students from low-income households. The small changes in costs originated from score reports of standardized tests, such as the ACT, that have to be sent by the test administrator directly to American colleges. In this case, the number of score reports that were sent free of charge increased from 3 to 4. Sending additional reports incurred a small cost of $6. What happened was that the mean number of score reports sent increased from almost exactly 3 to almost exactly 4. The effect was the same across low-income and high-income households.

Why is this strange? Well, it suggests that the students didn’t weigh the costs of sending an additional score report against the potential benefits, they simply went with the default option. Unthinking acceptance of default options seems to be pervasive in human societies, and in some cases it may have huge consequences. The students from low-income households in the example above were foregoing, on average, an additional $10,200 of lifetime earnings by not sending an additional $6 score report.

Automatic acceptance of default options is only one of many cognitive biases that people are subject to. Others include anchoring (an excessive focus on a single piece of evidence, usually the first one presented, when making a decision) and confirmation bias (the tendency to search for, interpret and focus on information in a way as to confirm your preconceived ideas).

These biases, recurring systematically and pervasively, are not in accordance with the underlying assumption of rational, utility-maximizing agents of economic models. 

 do what they would really want to do. They fall in the traps of automatic thinking and pre-defined mental models.

This implies that a heavy usage of economic models with rational agents can lead to a situation in which we ignore 

incredible opportunities to improve people’s lives through interventions that recognize their cognitive biases.

 What’s more, this is particularly relevant for development policy, as 

poor countries lack many of the institutions that make good decisions default options in the West

Figure 1: Good luck maximizing utility, baby.

The World Development Report 2015 draws heavily on the work of behavioural economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and for an overview of their research I would really recommend 

Three principles of human decision-making

In the World Development Report 2015, the World Bank sets up a framework where human decision-making is characterized by three principles.

 Lots of decisions we just make automatically, without much effort or consideration. Accepting the default option is one example of automatic thinking. Hence, 

minor changes to the decision-making environment can have disproportionate effects on outcomes and aggregate well-being.

 Such changes may relate to the timing of the decision or the design of the documents relevant for the decision.

One example comes from Mexico City, where people from low-income households were invited to pick the best $800, one-year loan from a randomized list of loan products representative of the local market. A mere 39% could identify the lowest-cost product from the brochures distributed by the banks themselves. However, 68% could do so with the help of a consumer-friendly leaflet designed by the Consumer Financial Credit Bureau. Making it easier for people to select what they want improves aggregate well-being.

Another example comes from India, where a study by Mani et. Al. (2013)

 showed how financial distress can deplete mental resources needed for important decisions. In the part of India studied, 99% of sugar cane farmers were indebted just before harvest, as opposed to 13% just after the harvest when farmers had received most of their income for the season. The financial distress had a considerable impact on farmers’ mental resources. In a series of cognitive tests, farmers performed consistently worse before harvest relative to after harvest, controlling for other factors such as sleep, work hours, nutrition etc. The mental depletion corresponded, on average, to the lack of a full night’s sleep.

With this in mind, it is perhaps less surprising that another study (Duflo, Kremer & Robinson, 2011)

Blog

Four Ideas You Already Agree With (That Mean You're Probably on Board with Effective Altruism)

[Interview] Why Derek Thompson of The Atlantic took the Giving What We Can pledge

Why you should apply for the September Internship

What it's like to intern at Giving What We Can

Out of the box and into this world: behavioural economics and international development

The Economic Benefits of Malaria Eradication

Why I not only give what I can but also campaign for Giving What We Can

Could parasites be making vaccinations less effective in developing countries?

Did iodized salt raise the IQ of 50 million Americans by 15 points?

Why I am taking the pledge this New Year's