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Julian Hazell

For basically my entire life, I didn’t think I could make much of an impact on the world’s most pressing problems. That changed when I read Peter Singer’s 

In short, Singer argues that we are morally obligated to help others if we can do so without significant sacrifice on our own part. He illustrates this through his “drowning child” thought experiment, which asks: would you wade into a shallow pond of water to save a drowning child if doing so would ruin your clothes? The vast majority of us say yes, which leads to another question: why aren’t we as willing to sacrifice our resources to save lives that aren’t in front of us?

Singer stresses that it doesn’t matter if the child is in front of us — if we can save lives for comparatively little cost (the value of the clothes we are wearing, for example), why don’t we? Why are we motivated to be altruistic for the drowning child in front of us, but not the ones we don’t see?

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” — Peter Singer

The simplicity, effectiveness, and elegance of the core argument made complete sense to me. Contrary to my previous belief that I was only a small fish in a big ocean, it turns out I can positively impact others’ lives, oftentimes quite substantially. There are drowning children out there (metaphorically, in this case), and I have an obligation to help them. Better yet, I’m in a good position to help a lot of drowning children over the course of my life if I follow the evidence and use careful reasoning. That’s both exciting and nerve-wracking.

The drowning child thought experiment was powerful enough to make me buy into the 

 project. Actually, I didn’t just buy in — I felt infused with a resounding sense of motivation that I can make a difference.

But that motivation soon turned into anxiety as I began grappling with the sorts of tricky philosophical and empirical questions that come with putting these feelings of obligation and fuzzy ideas into practice.

“Now, what can I do to help as many people as possible?”

, I would think to myself. Anything less would mean that someone might not ‌live a happy life. This sort of practical introspection quickly morphed into something like, 

“Holy s**t, what should I be doing to help?”

Any action I thought about taking was quickly picked apart by a feeling of uncertainty that bordered on neuroticism. “What if this action isn’t going to maximise the amount of good I do?”, I would ask.

These kinds of questions wouldn’t be followed by answers; they’d instead be followed by even more questions. Yikes.

What is the most good? How much should I donate? What if donating elsewhere would increase my impact? Can I really justify buying this sandwich if I could spend it on a mosquito net instead? Have I really earned any of the things I own?

What began as a force for motivation started turning into a pipeline of negativity — one that would take a healthy degree of uncertainty as an input, and spit out an ever-encroaching feeling that I was failing the project of effective altruism as an output.

That was the wrong mindset, and I’ve since come to terms with the fact that I’m a human who is trying to do the best I can, not some sort of omniscient maximiser from an economics model. This realisation has made me much happier and significantly more motivated to continue doing good in the world.

I’m writing this piece because I don’t want you to feel the anxiety I felt. I want to help you to feel comfortable with uncertainty, especially if you’re new to effective altruism.

Here’s why it’s perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist.

Effective altruism is, almost by definition, complicated. If it wasn’t, we’d skip the complex analysis because we’d already know exactly what to do. But in practice, ‌it can be really hard to find the best ways to use our resources to help others the most.

We really don’t have this effective altruism thing entirely figured out, contrary to the impression that newcomers might have. There are a lot of unanswered questions, incomplete analyses, tough considerations, and noisiness involved with many of the things effective altruists care about. It’s important to remember that effective altruism is carried out by humans, not robots — and we are flawed reasoners who must navigate incomplete information, social norms, personal desires, cognitive biases, and finite resources.

But that’s okay. If you feel uncomfortable with this uncertainty, I encourage you to introduce simplicity wherever you can. I’ll describe a few practical rules of thumb below to help you get started. These can help with the complex considerations that effective altruism often demands, and can make you feel better about the actions you’re taking to satisfy them. This can often be especially true if you’ve only recently discovered effective altruism.

Simplifying rules of thumb can be wrong, but are often still useful

importance, tractability, and neglectedness (ITN) framework

, which helps us figure out the kinds of problems we should work on. Effective altruism has changed in the last few years, but a few things have stayed relatively constant. The ITN framework is a key example. Like most other models, the ITN framework is 

 and oversimplified. Yet despite this, it has stayed relevant over the past decade as ideas within the effective altruism community have ebbed and flowed. Why? My best guess is that even though the ITN framework is imperfect, it still broadly points us in the right direction in many circumstances. The framework’s ability to direct the user at a quick-yet-still-useful answer allows us to forgive its shortcomings, hence why it is still one of the primary tools in the effective altruism toolkit.

So yes, maybe there is another tool out there that would enable you to do a little bit more good. But maybe it would require days of thinking, 10 spreadsheets, and 20 cups of coffee to work through, and even then you might still have a lingering sense of uncertainty. Crucially, if these kinds of barriers would stand in the way of you actually taking action, the ITN framework would be the clear winner.

You can adopt other rules of thumb that, much like the ITN framework, can increase your impact, make your life easier, and help you deal with the anxiety that you aren’t making the absolute perfect choice.

If you’re new to effective giving — or even if you’re not, but you value keeping your life as simple as can be — a good simplifying rule would be to stick closely to the recommendations of charity evaluators like 

. These organisations hire smart people to spend thousands of hours working through the inner complexities of evaluating charity effectiveness, something that an individual would have difficulty doing alone. You can take advantage of that work (at no cost to yourself) by following their recommendations.

 that hire expert grantmakers to disperse donations. Think of this like hiring your own personal impact advisor, except for free.

And also note that you can always change where you donate later, especially as your knowledge, key considerations, and beliefs change. These options are good places to start in the meantime.

If you’re not sure about how much you should donate, start by picking a simple rule and sticking with it.

If the “simple” approach helps you get started with some positive action in the first place, then you should strongly consider acting on it. You can build from there and progressively refine your decision making in the long run‌.

Here are some other rules of thumb you might find helpful (but by all means, feel free to create your own):

 of your choice for whenever a paycheque hits your bank account.

Carve out a specific time period each year (e.g., three days) to research charities to support, and then stick with the charities you choose for the rest of the year.

Find an ‘effective giving buddy’ you can chat with once a month about your giving progress and any uncertainties you might be having.

Write down your best guess of your donation’s impact (e.g., protect 100 people from malaria for two years), and review this periodically to be reminded of your impact.

If you feel overwhelmed about the sheer number of things to read about effective altruism, avoid information overload by creating a habit of only reading one or two blog posts, articles, or reports per week. This adds up to a lot in the long term!

Remember, you are guaranteed to have zero impact if you donate nothing out of fear of failing to choose the absolute best option. But choosing a possibly-imperfect-yet-entirely-reasonable starting point (e.g., donating 5% of your income to GiveWell’s recommended charities) is an excellent way to do good in the world. We can’t ever be entirely sure whatever we’re doing is maximising some abstract goal, so we should at least start somewhere.

Speaking of which, we often can’t maximise our goals — but that’s okay!

We can’t actually maximise, but we can try our best

Effective altruists often use maximising language like “the most good you can do” or “maximising the amount of good you can do.” But this can be difficult to practically implement when we’re uncertain about different options. If effective altruism is about trying to do as much good as possible, are we ‘failing’ if we fall short of this goal?

I don’t think so. We will pretty much never be able to calculate which actions will maximise the amount of good we do, but aiming in a promising direction seems like a good rule of thumb. As someone who cares about effectiveness, it can be hard to feel ‌as if you’re leaving impact on the table. But think of effective altruism as a long game — one that you should do sustainably and in a way that can inspire others.

The world is messy and confusing, so embrace uncertainty and do your best. You’ll have zero impact if you do nothing, so start by doing something that will get you on the path to maximising your impact (e.g., donate 1% of your income to our 

) and then adjust as time goes on. I wager that you’ll feel pretty good about how much you’re helping others if you start at as little as 1%. Then, as you increase that number to 5%, and then 10%, you’ll see why effective giving can feel so rewarding and meaningful.

Giving is a long-term endeavour, not one that you have to maximise and optimise for over the course of a year. It shouldn’t be stressful or anxiety-inducing, and it should be something you can see yourself doing over the course of your life. Most importantly, you should aim to set an example for people who are on the fence by demonstrating that giving significantly and effectively is not just compatible with living a happy and fulfilling life, but is integral to it. If giving is making you stressed out or anxious, others might not want to follow your lead, so remember to take care of yourself.

At the end of the day, we’re imperfect beings who would like to live in a perfect world. That's fine — we can still make a substantial amount of progress by noticing the uncertainty and complexity around us, and acting anyway.

Effective giving is a long-term endeavour, not one that you have to maximise and optimise for over the course of a year. It shouldn’t be stressful or anxiety-inducing, and it should be something you can see yourself doing over the course of your life.

It's perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist

Shakeel Hashim

Warren Buffett and John Doerr are two of the most successful investors in the world. But they made their money very differently. Buffett, for the most part, made his money through "value" investing: he found solid, reliable companies that he thought were undervalued, put money into them, and watched that money go up.

Doerr, a venture capitalist, took a very different approach. He put his cash into incredibly risky startups like Google, Amazon, and Twitter. All those ventures had a very high likelihood of failure (the vast majority of startups fail, after all), and a tiny chance of becoming massive successes — which is, of course, what happened.

There are multiple ways to give effectively

Just as there are multiple ways to invest effectively, there are also multiple ways to give effectively. Some donors take a Buffett-style approach, donating to charities with a track-record of success and a high probability of helping people. Those people might donate to 

 top charities, funding evidence-backed interventions like 

Other donors choose to donate to opportunities where, although success isn't guaranteed, the potential impact they might have if they do succeed is so great that they think it's worth trying. To understand this, we can use the statistical concept of “expected value”, which looks at something’s potential outcomes and the likelihood of each of those outcomes happening to calculate an overall predicted value.

An example will help make this clear. Imagine someone tells you that if a coin lands on heads, you’ll get $100, but if it lands on tails you’ll get nothing. There’s a 50% chance of each outcome occurring, so the expected value of the coin flip is $100 * 50% = $50. This is a really helpful way of evaluating charities, each of which has different potential outcomes and different likelihoods of achieving those outcomes.

Let's say there are two charities, Alpha and Beta. Alpha has a 100% chance of helping 1,000 people, so its "expected value" is 1,000 * 100% = 1,000. Beta, meanwhile, has a 1% chance of helping 1,000,000 people, so its expected value is 10,000. Donors that prefer certainty might donate to Alpha. But to others, Beta’s much higher expected value makes it a better donation opportunity.

This startup-like approach to donating has been dubbed "

", a term coined by Open Philanthropy, a foundation aiming to give away its money as effectively as possible. (Full disclosure: Open Philanthropy provides funding for Giving What We Can.) But hits-based giving isn’t a new idea: there are historical examples of it working really well.

One example comes from the Rockefeller Foundation, a charitable foundation established by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, which invested in research on how to improve agricultural productivity. One of its employees, plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, ended up developing the high-yielding wheat strains that fuelled the "Green Revolution". By increasing agricultural productivity, Borlaug’s work helped to massively increase the amount of food produced in the world, bringing millions out of hunger. He is now credited with 

 for his work — which other donors might have deemed too risky to fund. But because Rockefeller was willing to take the risk, a huge number of people were helped.

Rockefeller isn’t the only example of successful hits-based giving. Katharine McCormick, another wealthy philanthropist, was the sole funder of research that led to the development of the birth control pill, which has improved women’s lives all over the world. Without McCormick willing to gamble on the research, we might never have had the pill. It's possible that something similar could happen again. Research into 

 might not pay off, but if it does, it could help stop the next pandemic. 

 could turn out to be infeasible, but it could also eradicate malaria.

Hits-based giving doesn't just involve throwing money at every promising-looking opportunity, though. Instead, calculated risks need to be taken. Because most of the projects you fund will likely fail, you have to make sure that the ones that do succeed will succeed on a gigantic scale, to make up for all the losses you've incurred elsewhere. Looking at an intervention's 

importance, neglectedness and tractability

 is a really helpful way of assessing its potential for impact, and it's why Giving What We Can and many others think about these factors when evaluating different charities.

It can also help to diversify your portfolio of grants. Startup investors rarely invest in just one or two companies. Instead, they spread their money across dozens or even hundreds of opportunities. When you're dealing with a low likelihood of success for each opportunity, increasing the number of opportunities increases your overall chance of success. The same is true for hits-based giving: Open Philanthropy says it "might expect just one or two 'hits' from our portfolio to carry the whole". Accordingly, it's 

Hits-based giving involves retraining your brain a bit, too. As 

 about startups, "if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realise are good." The same can be true for charities. Trying not to "defer to expert opinion or conventional wisdom" is one way to ensure you're not accidentally missing promising opportunities, Open Philanthropy advises. They do caution, though, that research is important — you should be informed of the conventional wisdom, even if you don't agree.

Lastly, you have to be willing to let go of the need for strong evidence. Some approaches to charity make use of 

, which assess whether interventions are really having the desired impact, and to what degree. That approach can be important in making sure that money goes to the places where it can do the most good. But many promising-looking interventions don't have much evidence backing them up, because they're too experimental or new to have established an evidence base yet. And for certain interventions, it’s almost impossible to conduct research to see if they’ll work. In fact, Open Philanthropy points out that "most past cases of philanthropic “hits” were not evidence-backed in the sense of having strong evidence directly predicting success." To be a hits-based donor, you have to be willing to take a gamble on something — an informed gamble, but a gamble all the same.

Ways to adopt the hits-based giving approach

If all this sounds appealing, you're in luck: there are ways you can adopt a hits-based giving approach. Charity Entrepreneurship, for instance, incubates new charities to solve big problems, and 

 is another way to help — much of this money ends up funding experimental projects trying to safeguard the future of humanity. Who knows: you might even help save billions of lives by funding the next Norman Bourlag.

Just as there are multiple ways to invest effectively, there are also multiple ways to give effectively. This article covers one way, called "hits-based giving", that approaches charity like a venture capitalist approaches investing in startups.

Donating like a startup investor: Hits-based giving, explained

Michael Townsend

Despite there being a significant amount of funders already in the space, Researcher Michael Townsend argues small donors can have a significant impact by donating to charities that safeguard the long-term future.

 --- I'm quite confident about my central claim that small donors motivated by longtermism can have a significant impact through their donations. I aimed to highlight the peripheral claims I am less confident about.

 --- I wrote this in my capacity as a researcher at Giving What We Can; though I primarily aimed to articulate my own view, this post also conveys the organisation's current best guesses regarding the value of longtermist donations.

there is approximately $46 billion USD committed to effective altruism

small donors still have significant impact

: if small donors are only contributing a fraction of a fraction of the yet-to-be-dispersed funds given by large donors, doesn't the relative value of earning to give significantly drop compared to other career paths?

I don't think these views are mutually exclusive.

The value of charitable giving relative to certain career options may have changed, but this isn't because we have all the funding we need. So while there may be 

 good opportunities for ambitious projects or careers that leverage the resources already available, I think there is still room for more funding to make a significant difference --- even from (if not 

 from) a longtermist perspective. More precisely:

From a neartermist perspective, donating to top GiveWell charities can save a life for $5,000 USD. It's quite sad that it's so cheap to save a life, but it warrants being called a significant opportunity for impact.

If longtermists can outperform this, that also warrants their impact being called significant.

There are many available donation opportunities that, from a longtermist perspective, seem like they should outperform the $5,000 per life benchmark (and perhaps by a significant margin).

The above is consistent with the idea that most people who could do highly impactful direct work should do that instead of earning to give, even if they could have extremely lucrative careers. There's no cap on how good something can be: despite how much good you can do through effective giving, it's possible direct work remains even better. But in any case, I think that in general, effective giving is not in tension with pursuing direct work. And for many people, effective giving is the best opportunity to have an impact.

The aim of this post is to make the case that the amount of good longtermists can do through effective giving is significant (even if it is relatively less impactful).

I then discuss some implications of this, including:

How it affects Giving What We Can's approach to promoting effective giving

How it helps frame just how high the stakes are on a longtermist worldview

The impact of effective giving from a neartermist point of view

An assumption I'm making here (which I anticipate many people involved with effective altruism to already be generally on board with) is that giving to effective neartermist charities can be cost effective on the order of 'saving a life'

 for something like $5,000 USD. That is, 

GiveWell's cost effectiveness estimates are roughly right

 I respond to some concerns people may have about fungibility in the appendix. The analysis there is quite preliminary (I'm aiming to write something more fleshed out soon), but my current guess is that you can expect this level of cost effectiveness even when you take fungibility into account. I'll use the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) as the archetypal example in this post.

Going back to the number: $5,000. I think this is a figure that many people have become too used to. 

Compared to the value of a life, it's a trivial cost

. I firmly stand by all the introductory pitches to effective altruism I have given on this basis: it is an extremely sorry state of the world that renovating a family's kitchen in one country often costs more than it would to save a family from losing a child in another.

I think $5,000 to save a life qualifies as being called a very high level of cost effectiveness, giving donors an opportunity for 'significant' impact. Of course, for something to be very high, it has to be high relative to something. In this case, I think the fair comparison is the value of (marginal) consumption from individuals in wealthy countries: things like renovating kitchens, getting takeout more regularly, paying rent in a nice neighbourhood. In 

, this is where the money would otherwise go.

What I'm aiming to avoid here is comparing the value of donations to the value of a directly impactful career. This comparison is indeed extremely important when the two are trading off against each other --- for example, if someone is deciding whether to earn to give or do direct work, or if someone doing direct work is considering spending on themselves to improve their marginal productivity. 

But most of the time this is not the comparison

 --- in these cases, I think it's important to look at the value of donations compared to the actual alternative.

Going back to $5,000: It's not a good thing that neartermist charities are so cost effective --- it reflects a world with major problems that could be fixed at low cost, but aren't. I don't think the situation is better for longtermists.

Why longtermist donations should be at least as cost effective (from a longtermist point of view)

I think longtermists should expect to find donation opportunities with a cost effectiveness at least as high as $5,000 to save a life, and likely much higher. Roughly, this is because:

Longtermists can donate to the best neartermist charities and have the same near-term effects. If they believe the long-term benefits are positive (in expectation) they're already there.

There are other giving opportunities that seem robustly good from both neartermist and longtermist perspectives, such as climate change.

There are likely even more cost effective donation opportunities from a longtermist perspective, though just how cost effective they are is hard to say.

In the appendix, I discuss that what I am saying is not particularly controversial among longtermists; it's certainly not novel. If you are already on board, please feel free to skip to the implications.

Longtermists can donate to neartermist charities

To state the obvious, longtermism does not imply the near term doesn't happen, so longtermists can have the same cost effectiveness in the near term as neartermists can. The difference is that, from a longtermist perspective, the most important moral consideration is what the long-term effects will be.

," using AMF as the example. Greaves argues that whether donating to AMF is positive in expectation will ultimately be decided by the donor's views on its long-term effects. This means a that a donor who thinks AMF's work has positive long-term effects can donate $4,500

 and expect to save a life in the near term, in addition to (in expectation) even more significant long-term benefits. The cost effectiveness would then be significantly greater than $4,500 to save a life.

But Greaves is concerned that this new cost effectiveness estimate is importantly different from the estimates from GiveWell:

The neartermist assumes most of the value of their donation comes from the life saved --- something they can be very confident about, being supported by a wide and robust evidence base.

The longtermist sees most of the value lying in subjective, highly uncertain guesses about the value of extremely complex phenomena (such as about the long-run consequences of increasing the population).

Small donors can have a significant impact by donating to charities that safeguard the long-term future. 

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