This statement has really stuck with me and shall be a guiding factor in many of the conversations I hold with people henceforth: "When thoughtful people with access to the same information reach very different conclusions from each other, we should be curious about why and we should actively encourage people to voice and investigate where those disagreements are coming from"
I already sense that this is going to be a great experience after my Introductory EA Fellowship program with EA-Nigeria
"We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact, and this opportunity for impact is the consequence of a profoundly unequal world." How big? Based on what?
Thanks for a very structured and specific approach with materials to help others start later like me to start to do good better. Thanks the EA team!
I appreciate these writing!
"What evidence would it take to convince me that I was wrong about an idea?”
Reframe the above to ask it to another person in a real debate. Thankyou in advance
Very well structured, and a big thank you from our auditory leaners! :)
Thank you for putting this together! I was struck by this sentence: "We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact, and this opportunity for impact is the consequence of a profoundly unequal world." I have been thinking about this a lot, and whether, by eliminating inequalities we could reach a time where effective altruism might be substantially less relevant (or, in other words, in an ideal world, effective altruism wouldn't exist). Lots of food for thought.
The section on Taking Ideas Seriously reminded me of a recent piece of writing that landed in my inbox. It's by Henrik Karlsson, and it is about a way of processing information actively which we rarely do - actively pushing back against the ideas we form. You can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/escapingflatland/p/how-i-read?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
This is really cool, love how structured and well laid out this is with a journey for people like me who don't quite have time to commit to a course but are happy to tune in and out as available.
I like the wording of "Be aware of our privilege and the seriousness of these issues". I think that sections encapsulated what this is about and what attracted me to the movement.
I'm new to effective altruism and coming into this program with an open mind. Until now, I've only known one approach to helping others, so I'm genuinely curious to explore different perspectives on how to make a positive impact on a global scale.
What particularly resonates with me from this introduction is the emphasis on thinking critically rather than just accepting ideas at face value. I appreciate that the EA community doesn't claim to have all the answers, there's active debate about which causes to prioritize, and that honesty is refreshing.
I'm especially drawn to the idea of "taking ideas seriously" and asking myself questions like "If this is true, what does that imply I should be doing differently?" This feels like a powerful framework for moving beyond good intentions to actual impact.
I'm looking forward to learning from others in this program, understanding different approaches to doing good, and hopefully discovering how my own perspective on helping the world might evolve through these discussions. I'm ready to question my assumptions and see where this journey leads.
I like this thought, "If, for example, a medical community is divided on whether Treatment A or B does a better job of curing some disease, they should want to get to the bottom of that disagreement, because the right answer matters — lives are at stake. "
And I am going to think about other areas where such disagreements and getting to the roots to find the right answers become necessary.
Question to self and others: What are some other areas where thoughtful people diverge?
I am excited by the prospects of this vision and I am curious as I learn more how different cultures internalize these values in reference to their ancestral wisdom and indigenous beliefs. There are countless human philosophies around the earth that live in harmony with their land and sustainably and abundantly provide for their communities. It appears that cultures and nations who recently dominated and decimated similar sustainable ways of living, in search for profit, expansion of power, etc. are the cultures trying to provide support and charity toward the people and lands whom they actively extract value from. I am uncertain if this power dynamic is effectively captured in the concepts of "privilege and seriousness of these issues". I am seeking to find the truth and looking forward to conversations with those who disagree and those who recognize the seriousness of unconditional reparations as a form of decolonization.
Thank you, Anthony, for your very thoughtful comment. I live in a white community in the western US where there was a forced march of Indigenous people from their ancestral homeland to the reservation. Recently the local government has been renaming landmarks, including a bridge over which they were forced, with names in that language. This strikes me as something to assuage white guilt and excuse us from taking real action, like the unconditional reparations you mention. I wonder if this is in the same vein as the question you raise here.
Awesome. One thing is always very key to life, which is; we shouldn't trivialize every little opportunity (s) we found ourselves in making positive impacts. Thank you all @ EA team
"We shouldn’t lose sight of our privilege in being able to read and discuss these ideas, or that we are talking about real lives. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact..." Sometimes I feel as though I am one to lose sight of the privilege I have to ponder and discuss these ideas. The EA team makes me genuinely excited about the change and impact I can potentially make, and for that, I give them a big thanks!
Thank you, EA, this introduction has really grabbed my attention and set the stage for what is to come! I am looking forward to finding best ways to do good and put them into practice.
Sometimes we think there are no other ways to do something, but we must ask ourselves and try to change in order to help people.
We shouldn’t lose sight of our privilege in being able to read and discuss these ideas, or that we are talking about real lives. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact, and this opportunity for impact is the consequence of a profoundly unequal world.
Indeed very grateful to embark on this journey and extremely excited to go through EA in a structured manner :)
If you start off disagreeing with someone then change your mind, that can be hard to admit, but we think that should be celebrated. Helping conversations become clearer by changing your mind in response to arguments you find compelling will help the community act to save lives more effectively
To add to this (for those who think Charity Entrepreneurship could be a career option), this is from How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit book page 35:
Feedback loops and openness to criticism allow you to change your mind and grow your organization. This requires a rare willingness to admit mistakes. Cultivate a "scout mindset," trying to understand situations and concepts as honestly and accurately as possible, even when inconvenient. Remember, changing your mind is the ultimate victory, because in those moments you are improving your model of the world and making your charity better.
This is my first time of every engaging with the concept of EA. I am keeping an open mind and have come to this programme to learn. I will be open to question truths and knowledge i have known and held close to my heart over time. I would be open to new ideas, fresh thinking, and even hard truths. I seem to like the way the programme is structured to allow freshers like us build our confidence with this new thinking and philosopy.
"If you start off disagreeing with someone then change your mind, that can be hard to admit, but we think that should be celebrated."
This is hard and scary to do depending on the situation. I am starting to notice more when I change my mind and how it feels.
This handbook alone reveals how exciting the program is going to be: a chance to explore and reflect on the world's biggest causes with others will develop critical thinking skills and introduce new insights and ideas.
I personally enjoy the part of this reading that calls us to take all presented ideas seriously and not take anything to heart without intentional forethought.
Thank you for taking your precious time to organize this handbook and make other effective altruists' lives easier! May all sentient beings be directly or indirectly benefited!
Specifically under "Be aware of our privilege and the seriousness of these issues". I'm inclined to believe that this section entails what this is about and that's one of the core reasons why I got interested.
The handbook demonstrates the immense thrill that the program if about to offer. It is a very great opportunity to take a journey to learn about effective altruism and start the practical work of applying what we discuss into our lives. It presents an opportunity to collectively delve into and contemplate the most significant global issues. This experience will foster the growth of essential analytical abilities while also presenting novel perspectives and concepts.
I would like to extend my warmest thanks to the EA team for all of their work, and for providing such a perfect content.
Effective altruism (EA) is an ongoing project to find the best ways to do good, and put them into practice.
Our core goal with this program is to introduce you to some of the principles and thinking tools behind effective altruism. We hope that these tools can help you as you think through how you can best help the world.
We also want to share some of the arguments for working on specific problems, like global health or biosecurity. People involved in effective altruism tend to agree that, partly due to uncertainty about which cause is best, we should split our resources between problems. But they don’t agree on what that split should be. People in the effective altruism community actively discuss and disagree about which causes to prioritize and how, even though we’ve learned a lot over the last decade. We hope that you will take these ideas seriously and think for yourself about which ways to help are most effective.
Finally, we give you some time at the end of the program to begin to reflect on how you personally can help to solve these problems. We don’t expect you’ll have an answer by the end of the eight weeks, but we hope you’re better prepared to explore this further.
Each part of the program has a set of core posts and sometimes an exercise.
We think that the core posts take most people about 1-2 hours to get through, and the exercise another 30-60 minutes. We have matched the readings and exercises so that, in total, we think it will take around 2-2.5 hours per week to prepare for the weekly session.
The exercises help you put the concepts from the reading into practice.
Beyond the core posts, there are more materials each week in ‘More to Explore’ — these are all optional and explore the themes of the week in more depth and breadth.
Approximate reading times are given for each of the posts. Generally, we’d prefer you to take your time and think through the readings instead of rushing.
This curriculum was drawn up by staff from the Centre for Effective Altruism, incorporating feedback from others. Ultimately we had to make many judgement calls, and other people would have drawn up a different curriculum.[2]
Often, conversations about ideas are recreational: we enjoy batting around interesting thoughts and saying smart things, and then go back to doing whatever we were already doing in our lives. This is a fine thing to do — but at least sometimes, we think we should be asking ourselves questions like:
And, zooming out:
Answering these questions can help make our worldviews as accurate and full as possible and, by extension, help us make better decisions about things that we care about.
When thoughtful people with access to the same information reach very different conclusions from each other, we should be curious about why and we should actively encourage people to voice and investigate where those disagreements are coming from. If, for example, a medical community is divided on whether Treatment A or B does a better job of curing some disease, they should want to get to the bottom of that disagreement, because the right answer matters — lives are at stake. If you start off disagreeing with someone then change your mind, that can be hard to admit, but we think that should be celebrated. Helping conversations become clearer by changing your mind in response to arguments you find compelling will help the community act to save lives more effectively Even if you don’t expect to end up agreeing with the other person, you’ll learn more if you acknowledge that you disagree and try to understand exactly how and why their views disagree with yours.
We shouldn’t lose sight of our privilege in being able to read and discuss these ideas, or that we are talking about real lives. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can have such a large impact, and this opportunity for impact is the consequence of a profoundly unequal world. Also, be conscious of the fact that people in this program come to these discussions with different ideas, backgrounds, and knowledge. Some of these topics can be uncomfortable to talk about — which is one of the reasons they’re so neglected, and so important to talk about — especially when we may have personal ties to some of these areas.
This handbook aims to introduce people to effective altruism in a structured manner. There are far too many relevant topics, ideas, and research for all but a small fraction of them to fit into this very short program. If you are interested in these topics, you may find it very useful to dive into the linked websites, and the websites those sites link to, and so on.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This handbook is also accessible as a Google Doc version here
Our goal is to introduce people to some of the core principles of effective altruism, to share the arguments for different problems that people in effective altruism work on, and to encourage you to think about what you want to do on the basis of those ideas. We also tried to give a balance of materials that is in line with the (significant) diversity of views on these topics within effective altruism.
In drawing up the curriculum, we consulted community members, subject matter experts, and program facilitators.
We think that these readings are interesting and give a good introduction, but we hope that you engage with them critically, rather than taking them all at face value. Once you’ve read this curriculum, we encourage you to explore other EA writings (e.g. on this wiki).
Not to be a party pooper, but I don't even think altruism is something that exists. The idea is to give without an expectation of anything in return. That's a nice premise. However, it isn't actually possible. We all want something in return for our actions. In most cases, people are looking to provide themselves with a vehicle to experience positive emotions within themselves. People want to feel like they are good, when the truth is that none of us are. We all give lip service about kindness, care, and helping others, but usually don't recognize that our ability to provide these things is entirely dependent on sitting at the higher end of a global system which creates the very problems we are attempting to assist with. Nobody here reading this handbook would be reading it if they didn't expect some kind of return for their efforts, efforts which cost energy. Those attempting to be altruistic are, at the very least, getting memories in return for their efforts. The very idea of altruism is a suggestion that Equivalent Exchange can be broken through nothing but good will. This is a Law that cannot be broken. There's no such thing as a free lunch in this world. Even in the case where that lunch materializes from the mist, it still costs the physical space it takes up, it costs time and energy to interact with through the senses, it costs these to consume, and all of these have carry-on effects for all parties involved in the interaction. Perhaps true altruism is possible when an unfeeling, etheric robot, that operates independently of reality, is the one being altruistic. Even then, that etheric entity is probably gaining second or third order rewards for the actions it takes, in the form of memories instilled into other sentient beings, as well as through proliferating itself within existence.
I'm probably obfuscating the concept quite a lot, but I simply don't believe altruism is a real thing.
Regardless, I'm interested to see where pursuing this little venture goes. Onward and upward!
I was thinking about this a few days ago, about why i would rather work for a cause that helps than fill a shareholder's pocket. It felt to me that maybe I want my work to feel meaningful that has results larger than me, a form of ego that is stroked at the binary of good and evil. In the end, this is still the human experience, and I relate with OP. Parallely, I believe I'd rather channel my human flaws towards the better
I had similar conflicts on this topic, however some reading about the Buddhist views on altruism helped. A lot of your points resonate. I do think you can do good to feel better, and also just feel better about doing good which is ok and probably the place most of us want to be in.
I feel you- ideally we wouldnt need an organizazion seeking for altruistic actions at all.