I'd be doing less good with my life if I hadn't heard of effective altruism
It's hard to know what I would have discovered if there wasn't an 'effective altruism' movement, but before being involved in EA, I was:
- Kind of grossed out by the idea of comparing charities.
- Very innumerate in my reasoning.
- Very influenced by my surroundings on the question of how to do good.
I like to think that doing good would still have been important to me, but I think I'd be much worse, and much less strategic at it. My donations alone almost guarantee that I'm doing more good than I would have been otherwise.
I think I was pretty close to getting stuck in a semi-random corporate career path. I was always sympathetic to EA like ideas. But I think seeing EA's actually 'do the thing' made me think I could and should do the thing too. I remember some feeling of "Well, I think that's 100% the correct approach, and I guess if these people are doing it I have no excuse but to do it too"