Learn More About Effective Altruism

Some of the Effective Altruism Organisations:

• Effective Altruism (international)
  • Forum (high quality discussions) (also see LessWrong)
  • Track your donations (login to your dashboard)
• Effectief Altruïsme (The Netherlands)
  • Doneer Effectief (information on how to donate in NL)
• GiveWell (evaluating which charity does the most good)
• Giving What We Can (motivating people to give 10%)
• Open Philanthropy (mega grants and research)
• Double Up Drive (doubling donations, $16 million raised so far)

Stuff I’ve read and found interesting:

• The Comparative Impact of Cash Transfers and a Psychotherapy Program on Psychological and Economic Well-being (NBER, November 2020)
  • Cash transfers worked, but psychotherapy not, also not extra beneficial when doing both (synergy)
• An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism (Nature Reviews, October 2020)
  • Scientific article, argues that we give ineffectively because we can’t/don’t evaluate giving that way, we focus on social signals (and other reasons)
• The Rise of Rational Do-Gooders (Washington Post, September 2020)
  • Expose of effective altruists, good intro, interviews
• Why we should donate more and better (Christiaan Broekman (personal friend), December 2018)
  • Reasons for giving – giving more
• Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable (Slate Star Codex, December 2014)
  • Great essay by Scott Alexander on thinking about how to do good, why 10% is a good number to give, and why giving is better than being involved in politics
• A Case Against Strong Longtermism (Vaden Masrani, December 2020)
  • Great essay on why the reasoning behind (strong) longtermism isn’t sound
  • It made me update more towards giving now (e.g. AMF) versus the focus on longterm effective charities
• Why I’m Giving 10% of my Income to Charity (Ali Abdaal, YouTube)
  • Great intro to GWWC, excellent child-in-pond example
• Malaria is notoriously hard to vaccinate against. A new vaccine technology might change that (Kelsey Piper/Vox, March 2021)
  • RNA-based, human challenge trails (to be done), but still a long way to go
• Food Impacts
  • Ranking of impacts of suffering per product
  • With adjustable settings to finetune based on your priorities
• What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food? (Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie, March 2021)
  • If we don’t grow food (e.g. livestock with a big footprint), that land can be used to grow forest (CO2 storage)
  • Possible total savings, reduced emissions + carbon sequestration (opportunity costs) of vegan diet = 14.7 Gt CO2 p/y
  • Beef and dairy are the biggest contributors, so for CO2 considerations, cutting this makes the most sense (or replacing them with clean meat)