3 Steps to Learning about Effective Altruism + Guiding Questions: Transforming Your View of Charity

These are the main things I learned during my Duke University fellowship on Effective Altruism.

7 min readMay 26, 2021

🧠 IN TOMORROW’S POST: I will be providing some very useful links for people who want to build their understanding of Effective Altruism. 🧠

Being part of a fellowship focused on EA (Effective Altruism) and charitable leadership at Duke University was a truly eye-opening experience for me. I am now done with the program, but my exploration of the topic is only just beginning.

As an initial note, I would like to say that there are some parts of EA that I do not agree with, but I will be going into those in another post. Right now, I want to concentrate on the aspects of this movement that truly resonate with me due to their rationale and impact, regardless of the movement that they belong to.

The program, the readings, and the exercises that we were assigned during the semester have shown me that there is a much more critical and measurable way to approach the idea of doing good.

Here are some of my first impressions of EA, and the concepts that really stood out to me as having the potential to change my thought process about my career, lifestyle, and spending habits.

Keep in mind that I am still learning, and examining my own beliefs constantly.

1. Effective Altruism is not Perfect Altruism, and for good reason. 💚

The goal is not to steer people towards the 100% most efficient use of their time, energy, and money, but rather to make them aware of the truly large impact that they can have without needing to sacrifice much (or sometimes anything at all).

Of course, if you want to sacrifice much (while still keeping your mental sanity and health, which I believe that everyone should be prioritizing), then more power to you.

However, it is important to note that this whole movement is not about doing Doing Good Perfectly, but rather Doing Good Better — which, incidentally, is the name of a book that has been instrumental in shaping my view of what EA stands for. Doing Good Better by William MacAskill is one of the must-reads for getting an overview of the current issues with the general population’s understanding of “altruism”.

2. While economists tend to say that money funnelled into purchasing a type of product brings diminishing returns — that the marginal value of each additional purchase decreases — this is not the case in altruism. 💵

At least not in the current state of the world, where the millions of dollars spent on buying mosquito nets for individuals will still have the same potential to save a life with each additional net bought, because the problem of malaria is so global and expensive to solve.

The absence of diminishing returns certainly makes my impact and progress up the ladder of altruism, seem more constant, stable, and motivating!

3. Just as we would rather know what becomes of our money when we invest in a business, it is appropriate (and rewarding, and essentially vital) to investigate how it is used in a charity. 💰

Many charities are unfortunately black boxes when it comes to the details of where money gets spent, and many people are willing to sink a lot of money into organizations that were once recommended to them by an influencer, feeling that the fact that they are doing something good is good enough. The first step is crucial in any altruism journey, of course, but there is so much more potential!

With just a bit of research, you will have the tools to make a more educated decision about the use of your money — even to the point of being able to save many more lives AND save some of your money.

Although I am not saying by any means that charities are generally shady, I am suggesting that you look for those charities that provide more concrete information, such as the amount of money that goes to saving one child from a certain disease, or the money needed to keep a girl in school for one week.

Not only will this allow you to gain a better understanding of how money can go a lot farther in certain developing countries than it can in your own day-to-day life, but it will also provide you with the necessary information to make an educated decision about how much money to give to a certain charity,

Who knows? While originally planning on donating $40, learning that a certain medication costs $50 might make you want to give that extra $10 push and save a life.

Guiding Questions 🤔

There are a few central questions in EA, which guide the decisions of those who follow this path of consequential, measurable altruism.

a) How many people will benefit, and by how much?

Relating to my previous point, while searching for the answer to this question in the good that you plan to do, you become conscious of where your money would go, and can adjust accordingly and make discerning value judgements.

b) Is this the most effective thing that I can do?

This is mostly to make sure that you do not spend your precious money or time on initiatives that are more effectively done by other organizations or people with different resources.

It does NOT mean that you have to toil to find the elusive “perfect effectiveness” within your options — in aiming for the moon, you will land among the stars!

c) Is this area neglected?

This is one that we might need to think carefully about when pursuing altruistic high school and college projects… There can be less friction or inconvenience in hopping onto the bandwagon and feeling that you are doing good as well, but it is often easier to make a substantial difference in an area that has not been explored as much.

Think about it this way: If a cause gets you all riled up and emotionally excited, then chances are that many other people also feel the same way, and therefore many people have reached out to help.

It is the unsexy, quiet, lesser-known initiatives that might need our attention the most.

d) What would have happened if I had not helped?

I find this question to be the most fascinating to think about, because there are some surprising revelations about the measurable usefulness of certain altruistic roles. The process of figuring out the “What if’s” is called counterfactual reasoning.

e) What are the chances of success, and how good would success be?

This one focuses on the “low-probability, high-reward” initiatives that many people want to take on despite the risks, when they dream of making a difference. It also covers the more steady, tried-and-true approaches to altruism that might be valuable because of their high chances of success.

A lot of people might say, “Why would I even bother? Whatever I do will just be a drop in the bucket.”

Yet it is not really the size of the bucket but the size of the drop itself that truly matters. In a world so vast, there are massive buckets, but we each also have the potential to produce a drop that is massive in its own right.

Yes, it is true that it is extremely difficult for any one person in the world to provide a whole bucket. The good news is: You don’t need to provide a whole bucket of water when one massive drop can quench someone’s thirst.

You just need to do the best that you can to provide that drop, and therefore feel that your efforts have resulted in a tangible difference.

I highly recommend that you invest some free time into investigating this potentially life-changing field, which will make you think deeper about your good intentions. EA is not satisfied with good intentions, so it might make you quite uncomfortable if that is the metric by which you measure your life and your impact.

However, good intentions are not bad, and discomfort does not have to be bad either. By being more conscious of the impact that your intentions will have on others, you can satisfy yourself much further by believing that you have thought things through rationally. This will not make your acts of altruism feel less authentic in any way, BUT it will make them more powerful.

This will all sit even better with the side of you that just wants to do some good for the world.

EA does NOT have any intention of letting that primal impulse go weak in your head with disuse, but rather strengthens it with a diet of logic and analysis.

There you have it! You have read a bunch of my initial thoughts on Effective Altruism! Maybe you feel intrigued and want to do some more research now. Congrats! 🥳 I recommend https://80000hours.org/ and https://www.givewell.org/ to jumpstart your own EA journey!