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This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
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TL;DR: I'm releasing a website that ranks philanthropists according to EA principles and research, and allows users to re-rank the list using their own assumptions. I'd like feedback and help making it better. I'd especially like ideas for how to make the results more trustworthy. Funding may be available.
I recently built Impact List (impactlist.xyz), a site which ranks people by their positive impact via donations.
The goal is t...
Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
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Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
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Whenever I talk about Effective Altruism (EA) to someone new, I talk about EA-the-Movement and EA-the-Philosophy. EA-the-Movement draws a specific kind of person (quantitative, techy, philosophical) and has selected a few causes it has determined to be the most effective. EA-the-Philosophy is about asking whether our donations and volunteering are going to places that get the most bang for our buck and those questions can be applied to anything we care about.
It's a way of easing people into our way of thinking without insisting that they join our particular group or adopt our priorities. I find it's especially useful if the quantitative or strong recommendations from EA-the-Movement to be offputting, or if they have previous associations with the movement. I think it's worth making people who are doing good in some way more effective, even if it doesn't end up getting them to do what we'd consider the most good. Although if someone spends enough time thinking with the EA Philosophy, it might end up leading the straight back to the EA Movement.
So, for example, if you're talking with a feminist you can ask them where their donations or volunteering could do more or the most good, and they could think about that and come up with answers. And you could give suggestions, e.g. charities that focus on girls education in LMICs, or reproductive health for women, or maternal health charities.
If you're talking with MRAs, you could ask them what are the more effective ways to help men and boys, and they could research ways to help in cases of IPV or MGC, etc.
And the same goes for environmentalists, civilisation collapse doomers, vegetarians and vegans, liberals, conservatives, proponents of free and open source software, people suffering from specific physical and mental health disorders, and so on.
Do you think it's useful to talk with people online (e.g. on YouTube, X, other social media, forums) about EA-as-philosophy? Although I think that EA-as-philosophy still requires some quantitative analysis of data, research and ethics to find better ways to help, people can still simply ask each other about how they can better help people.