It's an idea and a way of life that is all about doing good, helping others, and improving the world in the most efficient way possible.
In this episode, we'll be talking about Effective Altruism, its core principles, and its unique approach to addressing the world's most pressing problems.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Effective Altruism.
[00:00:28] It’s an idea and a way of life that is all about doing good, helping others and improving the world, in the most efficient way possible.
[00:00:37] It’s a super interesting idea, and I’m really excited to tell you more about it today.
[00:00:42] OK then, Effective Altruism.
[00:00:47] Let me start this episode with a theoretical situation.
[00:00:52] Imagine that it is a lovely day, and you are walking through a park in your town or city.
[00:00:59] The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a Saturday morning and you have the whole weekend ahead of you.
[00:01:08] As you turn the corner to the duck pond, you see a young child crying out for help in the middle of the pond. The child must have fallen in, they clearly cannot swim, and there is nobody else around to help them.
[00:01:25] The pond isn’t very deep, and what’s more, you are a confident swimmer. Diving in to save the child will mean that your clothes will get wet and you’ll need to change them before the cinema that afternoon, but it will only be mildly inconvenient.
[00:01:44] You have an important choice to make.
[00:01:47] If you dive in, you will save the child’s life.
[00:01:52] If you do nothing, the child will die.
[00:01:55] What do you do?
[00:01:57] Now, I’d be very surprised if anyone was sitting there listening to this and thinking, “I’ll just keep on going, that child means nothing to me”.
[00:02:06] Of course, you dive in and save the child. A minor inconvenience to you, in the form of wet clothes, is far outweighed by the saving of a child’s life.
[00:02:19] But, to take this thought experiment one step further, what if you cannot see the child; they might be several thousand kilometres away. And you wouldn’t be saving them personally, you wouldn’t be diving into a pond or river, or doing anything like that.
[00:02:38] Instead, you would have to endure a mild inconvenience in the form of giving away the money that you were planning to spend on a cinema ticket in order to save an unknown child’s life.
[00:02:50] Now, perhaps it gets slightly more complicated, but I’m sure that most people would say “yes, if you told me with absolute certainty that by giving up my cinema ticket this afternoon, a child’s life would be saved, yes I would do it”.
[00:03:07] But let’s take it one step further again.
[00:03:11] Imagine that you needed to give up, let’s say, 10% of your annual income, the money that you might spend every year for things like cinema tickets or holidays or general nice things in your life. In exchange, the lives of some children might be saved.
[00:03:30] Would you do it? Now how about 30% of your income? 50%? 90%?
[00:03:38] This, at least the first example of the drowning child, is one of the core arguments of the most influential essays in Effective Altruism.
[00:03:48] It was called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, and was written by an Australian moral philosopher called Peter Singer.
[00:03:58] In it, Singer writes, and I’m quoting directly: “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away...“
[00:04:15] In other words, a life is a life, and if you can do something to help, you should do it.
[00:04:23] We know that people are suffering and their lives are at threat, and if we can, we have a moral obligation to do something about it.
[00:04:33] This essay was published in 1972, and is considered to be one of the most important essays in 20th century moral philosophy.
[00:04:44] This essay was well-received when it was published, but it wasn’t until 2005, more than 30 years later, that it would have a particularly important reader.
[00:04:58] The reader was an 18-year-old Scottish man by the name of William MacAskill.
[00:05:04] Now, at the time he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Cambridge University, but Singer’s writings struck such a chord with him that he would go on to be one of the founders of a movement called Effective Altruism, the subject of today’s episode.
[00:05:23] Now, you’ve heard a little bit about what Effective Altruism is, but let me read you out the official explanation from its own website:
[00:05:34] “Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
[00:05:56] This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.
[00:06:14] This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.“
[00:06:24] In other words, the goal of effective altruism is not just to improve the world, but to do this in the most efficient way possible.
[00:06:35] The movement is particularly focussed on attracting often very clever young people, people who might go on to great success in whatever field they want, and encouraging them to become an Effective Altruist, or an EA for short.
[00:06:51] So, what does this mean in practice?
[00:06:55] How do you have the greatest possible impact on humanity?
[00:06:59] How can you do the most good?
[00:07:01] How can you use the time that you have on this Earth most effectively?
[00:07:07] It is, according to Effective Altruism, a question of mathematics and statistics.
[00:07:15] You might think that the automatic reaction for someone who wants to “do good” in the world might be something like becoming a doctor in a rural village in India or by digging wells in Kenya, where they directly help people who need it.
[00:07:32] According to Effective Altruism, these might be good things to do, but they are typically not the most effective things to do.
[00:07:42] Instead, a person should look at how to maximise their impact; how not only to work on the most important problems, but how to solve these for the greatest number of people.
[00:07:56] This could be in groundbreaking scientific or medical research, where you might discover something that can impact the lives of hundreds of millions, or billions of people.
[00:08:06] It might be by entering politics, where you can influence policy and direct government money towards “good” causes, in a way that you could never do as an individual actor.
[00:08:18] It could be by convincing other people to become effective altruists, as if you can convince multiple people to become EAs, then your impact will be multiplied.
[00:08:29] It could even be by joining a bank or hedge fund and earning vast amounts of money. This might sound like a strange way to “do good”, but according to Effective Altruism, earning huge amounts of money can be one of the best possible ways to help. Providing, that is, that you give it away.
[00:08:53] Let me illustrate this with two different examples.
[00:08:57] Imagine that there are two twins, a brother and a sister. They are both very intelligent, they have been to the best universities and can go on to any career they want.
[00:09:11] The brother decides to become a doctor and help rural children in Bangladesh. He saves the lives of 100 children per year personally, with his own hands.
[00:09:25] Now his sister takes a different path. She takes a job with a top financial company in New York City. She does very well at her job, and before long she is making $10 million dollars a year, sometimes more on a good year. After taxes and living expenses, let’s say she gives away $5 million dollars a year to organisations with a proven track record of efficiently training rural doctors in the same region her brother is working in.
[00:09:59] Let’s say, for sake of ease, it costs $50,000 to train a doctor in Bangladesh, meaning that the sister’s donation can train 100 new doctors every year. And let’s assume that each new doctor is as efficient as the brother, so can save the lives of 100 children per year.
[00:10:21] Let’s do the sums then. The brother has gone out and become a doctor himself, and is responsible for 100 children’s lives saved every year. Certainly, an admirable achievement, well done him, but let’s run the numbers for his twin sister who went to work in finance.
[00:10:41] Her job allows her to pay for 100 new doctors to be trained every year. After 10 years, she has paid for the training of 1,000 new doctors, each of whom saves 100 children per year, so her contribution has led to 100,000 children’s lives being saved every year, while her brother is still saving 100.
[00:11:06] Now, the numbers might be slightly off, and of course there might not be the need for an additional 1,000 doctors in that region, but you see what I mean.
[00:11:17] The choice proposed by Effective Altruism is not to do the thing that seems obvious, to go and work in the field, directly “saving lives”, but to look at the skills and opportunities that you possess and use those skills to have the greatest possible impact. As we saw with the example of the sister, sometimes the most efficient way to have an impact is to earn lots of money to pay for others to do the hands-on work for you.
[00:11:47] And this kind of, perhaps obvious, humanitarian work is just one example of a life being “directly” saved, and impact being delivered.
[00:11:58] The Effective Altruism website has a bunch of different examples that demonstrate Effective Altruism in practice, how to actually have an outsized impact.
[00:12:09] These typically involve areas which have not historically attracted much attention or funding, but could have a huge positive impact on society.
[00:12:22] The first example on the website is to do with preventing pandemics, and comparing this to global terrorism.
[00:12:30] Statistically speaking, in terms of the number of global deaths, terrorism is a very minor problem compared to pandemics.
[00:12:40] In the last 50 years, fewer than 500,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks, while over 21 million people died in COVID-19 alone.
[00:12:52] Yet the US government spends $280 billion per year on counterterrorism but only $8 billion on pandemic prevention.
[00:13:04] Put another way, despite the fact that more than 40 times more people died from the last pandemic than have died in terrorist attacks in the last 50 years, pandemic research gets less than 3% of the funding.
[00:13:19] In the eyes of Effective Altruism, this makes little sense. Yes, preventing terrorist attacks is important, but pandemics seem like such a greater threat to human wellbeing.
[00:13:34] Or let me give you another example, if you believe that animals deserve a dignified and happy life, not to suffer, like Effective Altruists do, where should you focus your attention?
[00:13:47] Animal shelters, which provide a home for unwanted pets?
[00:13:51] Or on pushing for systemic change to end the practice of factory farming of animals?
[00:13:58] Again, with our good Effective Altruist hat on, let’s look at the numbers to evaluate the scale of the problem, and therefore the potential impact by solving it.
[00:14:10] In the United States, there are 7 million animals in animal shelters, but over 10 billion animals in factory farms. 10 billion, not 10 million, so there are 1,400 times more animals suffering in factory farms than in animal shelters.
[00:14:31] Animal shelters receive $5 billion per year in funding, but less than $100 million is spent every year on advocacy to end factory farming. Again, $5 billion with a b spent on animal shelters but only $100 million with an m on ending factory farming.
[00:14:52] With an EA mindset, you might look at this problem and think, ok, it seems like this is an area in which I can have a high level of impact, either by working directly on ending factory farming, working with a politician perhaps, or if you take the example of the sister we heard about earlier, earning lots of money and putting it towards ending factory farming advocacy activities.
[00:15:19] The point is, and this is one of the key beliefs of Effective Altruism, you should work on the area where you can have the greatest impact, not on one particular cause or impact that you might like.
[00:15:35] The movement has a term for this. It’s “open truth-seeking”, and it’s one of the core principles of the movement.
[00:15:44] Now, moving on to the people behind the movement, one of the most visible recent proponents of Effective Altruism is someone who has now been completely cast out from the movement, and that’s Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he is known.
[00:16:01] You might know him as the boss of the former multibillion dollar crypto trading company, FTX, a man who was recently convicted of 7 counts of fraud and is, at the time of recording this episode at least, awaiting a very lengthy prison sentence.
[00:16:19] Now, the interesting thing about SBF in the context of this episode is that he wasn’t some multi-billionaire who then decided he wanted to give his money away; he was first and foremost an Effective Altruist, and FTX, his crypto business, was his way of earning enough money so that he could give it away to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
[00:16:45] In our twins example, he was the sister, apart from we would have to add on a few zeroes to the amount of money he was able to make, and how much he ended up giving away.
[00:16:58] It’s not clear exactly how much SBF gave away before he was arrested, but it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and he pledged to give away most of his multi-billion dollar fortune during his lifetime.
[00:17:14] In fact, according to a recent book about FTX by Michael Lewis, one of SBF’s biggest concerns was how to give his money away most effectively. He thought of everything in percentage terms, calculating the cost of something and its probable return, so he ended up giving millions to pandemic research groups, to political groups that would further policies that SBF supported, and to animal welfare organisations.
[00:17:46] He even, according to Michael Lewis, asked the Trump campaign how much it would cost for Donald Trump not to run in the next election, with SBF thinking that this could be a good use of his money if he removed what he saw as a danger for the country and humanity.
[00:18:08] Unfortunately the price, $5 billion proposed by the Trump campaign, was a little too high even for the billionaire SBF, and the deal never went through.
[00:18:20] Anyway, the reason to mention SBF was because he was, for many, the poster boy for Effective Altruism, he was the world’s best-known effective altruist, and his reason to get into crypto was a rational choice because it presented him with the best possible way to make a fortune.
[00:18:40] And this was all, at least if we take SBF at his word, with the express intention of giving it away to do good in the world.
[00:18:51] Now, taking SBF "at his word” might be a difficult thing to do now, given his crimes, but until his downfall, he was the embodiment of Effective Altruism, a man who publicly pledged to the world’s media that his mission was to make the world a better place.
[00:19:11] And getting involved in Effective Altruism certainly does not require you to make an SBF-style fortune, maximising your earnings solely in order to be able to give money away to effective charities.
[00:19:25] If you read the literature on Effective Altruism, it becomes clear that it’s actually a relatively liberal philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word. There are recommendations for what people should look into and what they should do. There’s even an affiliated group called “Giving What We Can”, where members are encouraged to give at least 10% of their income to good causes.
[00:19:52] But it is far from prescriptive.
[00:19:55] The general idea seems to be to attract people first to the concept of Effective Altruism, to show the disparity that often exists between minor problems that are treated as serious problems and serious potential problems that are treated as minor problems.
[00:20:15] And then, when someone sees this and subscribes to the overall philosophy and takes it to its logical conclusion, it brings them to a point where they look at the working hours that they might have in their life and think “how can I spend this time to do the most good in the world?”
[00:20:33] As we see from the very prominent example of Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism is certainly not without its contradictions and problems, but it is a unique and novel way of looking at the world.
[00:20:47] It’s an interesting lens through which someone starting out on their career can make a choice, but it’s also interesting for anyone thinking about “doing good” in the world.
[00:20:59] Peter Singer, the father of this type of moral philosophy, summed it up like this: “If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”
[00:21:13] Critics of Singer, and of Effective Altruism, would certainly argue that this is a simplistic way of viewing the world’s problems, that it puts too much responsibility on the shoulders of individuals, that it can get in the way of personal liberty and that it just isn’t practical.
[00:21:31] These might all be perfectly valid arguments, but the one final thought I’ll leave you with is that having even a small number of incredibly smart people thinking about solving the world’s most pressing problems in the most impactful way, well that certainly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea in my book.
[00:21:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Effective Altruism.
[00:21:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:05] Are you an effective altruist? Had you heard of effective altruism before? What do you think about it?
[00:22:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Effective Altruism.
[00:00:28] It’s an idea and a way of life that is all about doing good, helping others and improving the world, in the most efficient way possible.
[00:00:37] It’s a super interesting idea, and I’m really excited to tell you more about it today.
[00:00:42] OK then, Effective Altruism.
[00:00:47] Let me start this episode with a theoretical situation.
[00:00:52] Imagine that it is a lovely day, and you are walking through a park in your town or city.
[00:00:59] The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a Saturday morning and you have the whole weekend ahead of you.
[00:01:08] As you turn the corner to the duck pond, you see a young child crying out for help in the middle of the pond. The child must have fallen in, they clearly cannot swim, and there is nobody else around to help them.
[00:01:25] The pond isn’t very deep, and what’s more, you are a confident swimmer. Diving in to save the child will mean that your clothes will get wet and you’ll need to change them before the cinema that afternoon, but it will only be mildly inconvenient.
[00:01:44] You have an important choice to make.
[00:01:47] If you dive in, you will save the child’s life.
[00:01:52] If you do nothing, the child will die.
[00:01:55] What do you do?
[00:01:57] Now, I’d be very surprised if anyone was sitting there listening to this and thinking, “I’ll just keep on going, that child means nothing to me”.
[00:02:06] Of course, you dive in and save the child. A minor inconvenience to you, in the form of wet clothes, is far outweighed by the saving of a child’s life.
[00:02:19] But, to take this thought experiment one step further, what if you cannot see the child; they might be several thousand kilometres away. And you wouldn’t be saving them personally, you wouldn’t be diving into a pond or river, or doing anything like that.
[00:02:38] Instead, you would have to endure a mild inconvenience in the form of giving away the money that you were planning to spend on a cinema ticket in order to save an unknown child’s life.
[00:02:50] Now, perhaps it gets slightly more complicated, but I’m sure that most people would say “yes, if you told me with absolute certainty that by giving up my cinema ticket this afternoon, a child’s life would be saved, yes I would do it”.
[00:03:07] But let’s take it one step further again.
[00:03:11] Imagine that you needed to give up, let’s say, 10% of your annual income, the money that you might spend every year for things like cinema tickets or holidays or general nice things in your life. In exchange, the lives of some children might be saved.
[00:03:30] Would you do it? Now how about 30% of your income? 50%? 90%?
[00:03:38] This, at least the first example of the drowning child, is one of the core arguments of the most influential essays in Effective Altruism.
[00:03:48] It was called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, and was written by an Australian moral philosopher called Peter Singer.
[00:03:58] In it, Singer writes, and I’m quoting directly: “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away...“
[00:04:15] In other words, a life is a life, and if you can do something to help, you should do it.
[00:04:23] We know that people are suffering and their lives are at threat, and if we can, we have a moral obligation to do something about it.
[00:04:33] This essay was published in 1972, and is considered to be one of the most important essays in 20th century moral philosophy.
[00:04:44] This essay was well-received when it was published, but it wasn’t until 2005, more than 30 years later, that it would have a particularly important reader.
[00:04:58] The reader was an 18-year-old Scottish man by the name of William MacAskill.
[00:05:04] Now, at the time he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Cambridge University, but Singer’s writings struck such a chord with him that he would go on to be one of the founders of a movement called Effective Altruism, the subject of today’s episode.
[00:05:23] Now, you’ve heard a little bit about what Effective Altruism is, but let me read you out the official explanation from its own website:
[00:05:34] “Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
[00:05:56] This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.
[00:06:14] This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.“
[00:06:24] In other words, the goal of effective altruism is not just to improve the world, but to do this in the most efficient way possible.
[00:06:35] The movement is particularly focussed on attracting often very clever young people, people who might go on to great success in whatever field they want, and encouraging them to become an Effective Altruist, or an EA for short.
[00:06:51] So, what does this mean in practice?
[00:06:55] How do you have the greatest possible impact on humanity?
[00:06:59] How can you do the most good?
[00:07:01] How can you use the time that you have on this Earth most effectively?
[00:07:07] It is, according to Effective Altruism, a question of mathematics and statistics.
[00:07:15] You might think that the automatic reaction for someone who wants to “do good” in the world might be something like becoming a doctor in a rural village in India or by digging wells in Kenya, where they directly help people who need it.
[00:07:32] According to Effective Altruism, these might be good things to do, but they are typically not the most effective things to do.
[00:07:42] Instead, a person should look at how to maximise their impact; how not only to work on the most important problems, but how to solve these for the greatest number of people.
[00:07:56] This could be in groundbreaking scientific or medical research, where you might discover something that can impact the lives of hundreds of millions, or billions of people.
[00:08:06] It might be by entering politics, where you can influence policy and direct government money towards “good” causes, in a way that you could never do as an individual actor.
[00:08:18] It could be by convincing other people to become effective altruists, as if you can convince multiple people to become EAs, then your impact will be multiplied.
[00:08:29] It could even be by joining a bank or hedge fund and earning vast amounts of money. This might sound like a strange way to “do good”, but according to Effective Altruism, earning huge amounts of money can be one of the best possible ways to help. Providing, that is, that you give it away.
[00:08:53] Let me illustrate this with two different examples.
[00:08:57] Imagine that there are two twins, a brother and a sister. They are both very intelligent, they have been to the best universities and can go on to any career they want.
[00:09:11] The brother decides to become a doctor and help rural children in Bangladesh. He saves the lives of 100 children per year personally, with his own hands.
[00:09:25] Now his sister takes a different path. She takes a job with a top financial company in New York City. She does very well at her job, and before long she is making $10 million dollars a year, sometimes more on a good year. After taxes and living expenses, let’s say she gives away $5 million dollars a year to organisations with a proven track record of efficiently training rural doctors in the same region her brother is working in.
[00:09:59] Let’s say, for sake of ease, it costs $50,000 to train a doctor in Bangladesh, meaning that the sister’s donation can train 100 new doctors every year. And let’s assume that each new doctor is as efficient as the brother, so can save the lives of 100 children per year.
[00:10:21] Let’s do the sums then. The brother has gone out and become a doctor himself, and is responsible for 100 children’s lives saved every year. Certainly, an admirable achievement, well done him, but let’s run the numbers for his twin sister who went to work in finance.
[00:10:41] Her job allows her to pay for 100 new doctors to be trained every year. After 10 years, she has paid for the training of 1,000 new doctors, each of whom saves 100 children per year, so her contribution has led to 100,000 children’s lives being saved every year, while her brother is still saving 100.
[00:11:06] Now, the numbers might be slightly off, and of course there might not be the need for an additional 1,000 doctors in that region, but you see what I mean.
[00:11:17] The choice proposed by Effective Altruism is not to do the thing that seems obvious, to go and work in the field, directly “saving lives”, but to look at the skills and opportunities that you possess and use those skills to have the greatest possible impact. As we saw with the example of the sister, sometimes the most efficient way to have an impact is to earn lots of money to pay for others to do the hands-on work for you.
[00:11:47] And this kind of, perhaps obvious, humanitarian work is just one example of a life being “directly” saved, and impact being delivered.
[00:11:58] The Effective Altruism website has a bunch of different examples that demonstrate Effective Altruism in practice, how to actually have an outsized impact.
[00:12:09] These typically involve areas which have not historically attracted much attention or funding, but could have a huge positive impact on society.
[00:12:22] The first example on the website is to do with preventing pandemics, and comparing this to global terrorism.
[00:12:30] Statistically speaking, in terms of the number of global deaths, terrorism is a very minor problem compared to pandemics.
[00:12:40] In the last 50 years, fewer than 500,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks, while over 21 million people died in COVID-19 alone.
[00:12:52] Yet the US government spends $280 billion per year on counterterrorism but only $8 billion on pandemic prevention.
[00:13:04] Put another way, despite the fact that more than 40 times more people died from the last pandemic than have died in terrorist attacks in the last 50 years, pandemic research gets less than 3% of the funding.
[00:13:19] In the eyes of Effective Altruism, this makes little sense. Yes, preventing terrorist attacks is important, but pandemics seem like such a greater threat to human wellbeing.
[00:13:34] Or let me give you another example, if you believe that animals deserve a dignified and happy life, not to suffer, like Effective Altruists do, where should you focus your attention?
[00:13:47] Animal shelters, which provide a home for unwanted pets?
[00:13:51] Or on pushing for systemic change to end the practice of factory farming of animals?
[00:13:58] Again, with our good Effective Altruist hat on, let’s look at the numbers to evaluate the scale of the problem, and therefore the potential impact by solving it.
[00:14:10] In the United States, there are 7 million animals in animal shelters, but over 10 billion animals in factory farms. 10 billion, not 10 million, so there are 1,400 times more animals suffering in factory farms than in animal shelters.
[00:14:31] Animal shelters receive $5 billion per year in funding, but less than $100 million is spent every year on advocacy to end factory farming. Again, $5 billion with a b spent on animal shelters but only $100 million with an m on ending factory farming.
[00:14:52] With an EA mindset, you might look at this problem and think, ok, it seems like this is an area in which I can have a high level of impact, either by working directly on ending factory farming, working with a politician perhaps, or if you take the example of the sister we heard about earlier, earning lots of money and putting it towards ending factory farming advocacy activities.
[00:15:19] The point is, and this is one of the key beliefs of Effective Altruism, you should work on the area where you can have the greatest impact, not on one particular cause or impact that you might like.
[00:15:35] The movement has a term for this. It’s “open truth-seeking”, and it’s one of the core principles of the movement.
[00:15:44] Now, moving on to the people behind the movement, one of the most visible recent proponents of Effective Altruism is someone who has now been completely cast out from the movement, and that’s Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he is known.
[00:16:01] You might know him as the boss of the former multibillion dollar crypto trading company, FTX, a man who was recently convicted of 7 counts of fraud and is, at the time of recording this episode at least, awaiting a very lengthy prison sentence.
[00:16:19] Now, the interesting thing about SBF in the context of this episode is that he wasn’t some multi-billionaire who then decided he wanted to give his money away; he was first and foremost an Effective Altruist, and FTX, his crypto business, was his way of earning enough money so that he could give it away to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
[00:16:45] In our twins example, he was the sister, apart from we would have to add on a few zeroes to the amount of money he was able to make, and how much he ended up giving away.
[00:16:58] It’s not clear exactly how much SBF gave away before he was arrested, but it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and he pledged to give away most of his multi-billion dollar fortune during his lifetime.
[00:17:14] In fact, according to a recent book about FTX by Michael Lewis, one of SBF’s biggest concerns was how to give his money away most effectively. He thought of everything in percentage terms, calculating the cost of something and its probable return, so he ended up giving millions to pandemic research groups, to political groups that would further policies that SBF supported, and to animal welfare organisations.
[00:17:46] He even, according to Michael Lewis, asked the Trump campaign how much it would cost for Donald Trump not to run in the next election, with SBF thinking that this could be a good use of his money if he removed what he saw as a danger for the country and humanity.
[00:18:08] Unfortunately the price, $5 billion proposed by the Trump campaign, was a little too high even for the billionaire SBF, and the deal never went through.
[00:18:20] Anyway, the reason to mention SBF was because he was, for many, the poster boy for Effective Altruism, he was the world’s best-known effective altruist, and his reason to get into crypto was a rational choice because it presented him with the best possible way to make a fortune.
[00:18:40] And this was all, at least if we take SBF at his word, with the express intention of giving it away to do good in the world.
[00:18:51] Now, taking SBF "at his word” might be a difficult thing to do now, given his crimes, but until his downfall, he was the embodiment of Effective Altruism, a man who publicly pledged to the world’s media that his mission was to make the world a better place.
[00:19:11] And getting involved in Effective Altruism certainly does not require you to make an SBF-style fortune, maximising your earnings solely in order to be able to give money away to effective charities.
[00:19:25] If you read the literature on Effective Altruism, it becomes clear that it’s actually a relatively liberal philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word. There are recommendations for what people should look into and what they should do. There’s even an affiliated group called “Giving What We Can”, where members are encouraged to give at least 10% of their income to good causes.
[00:19:52] But it is far from prescriptive.
[00:19:55] The general idea seems to be to attract people first to the concept of Effective Altruism, to show the disparity that often exists between minor problems that are treated as serious problems and serious potential problems that are treated as minor problems.
[00:20:15] And then, when someone sees this and subscribes to the overall philosophy and takes it to its logical conclusion, it brings them to a point where they look at the working hours that they might have in their life and think “how can I spend this time to do the most good in the world?”
[00:20:33] As we see from the very prominent example of Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism is certainly not without its contradictions and problems, but it is a unique and novel way of looking at the world.
[00:20:47] It’s an interesting lens through which someone starting out on their career can make a choice, but it’s also interesting for anyone thinking about “doing good” in the world.
[00:20:59] Peter Singer, the father of this type of moral philosophy, summed it up like this: “If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”
[00:21:13] Critics of Singer, and of Effective Altruism, would certainly argue that this is a simplistic way of viewing the world’s problems, that it puts too much responsibility on the shoulders of individuals, that it can get in the way of personal liberty and that it just isn’t practical.
[00:21:31] These might all be perfectly valid arguments, but the one final thought I’ll leave you with is that having even a small number of incredibly smart people thinking about solving the world’s most pressing problems in the most impactful way, well that certainly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea in my book.
[00:21:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Effective Altruism.
[00:21:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:05] Are you an effective altruist? Had you heard of effective altruism before? What do you think about it?
[00:22:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Effective Altruism.
[00:00:28] It’s an idea and a way of life that is all about doing good, helping others and improving the world, in the most efficient way possible.
[00:00:37] It’s a super interesting idea, and I’m really excited to tell you more about it today.
[00:00:42] OK then, Effective Altruism.
[00:00:47] Let me start this episode with a theoretical situation.
[00:00:52] Imagine that it is a lovely day, and you are walking through a park in your town or city.
[00:00:59] The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a Saturday morning and you have the whole weekend ahead of you.
[00:01:08] As you turn the corner to the duck pond, you see a young child crying out for help in the middle of the pond. The child must have fallen in, they clearly cannot swim, and there is nobody else around to help them.
[00:01:25] The pond isn’t very deep, and what’s more, you are a confident swimmer. Diving in to save the child will mean that your clothes will get wet and you’ll need to change them before the cinema that afternoon, but it will only be mildly inconvenient.
[00:01:44] You have an important choice to make.
[00:01:47] If you dive in, you will save the child’s life.
[00:01:52] If you do nothing, the child will die.
[00:01:55] What do you do?
[00:01:57] Now, I’d be very surprised if anyone was sitting there listening to this and thinking, “I’ll just keep on going, that child means nothing to me”.
[00:02:06] Of course, you dive in and save the child. A minor inconvenience to you, in the form of wet clothes, is far outweighed by the saving of a child’s life.
[00:02:19] But, to take this thought experiment one step further, what if you cannot see the child; they might be several thousand kilometres away. And you wouldn’t be saving them personally, you wouldn’t be diving into a pond or river, or doing anything like that.
[00:02:38] Instead, you would have to endure a mild inconvenience in the form of giving away the money that you were planning to spend on a cinema ticket in order to save an unknown child’s life.
[00:02:50] Now, perhaps it gets slightly more complicated, but I’m sure that most people would say “yes, if you told me with absolute certainty that by giving up my cinema ticket this afternoon, a child’s life would be saved, yes I would do it”.
[00:03:07] But let’s take it one step further again.
[00:03:11] Imagine that you needed to give up, let’s say, 10% of your annual income, the money that you might spend every year for things like cinema tickets or holidays or general nice things in your life. In exchange, the lives of some children might be saved.
[00:03:30] Would you do it? Now how about 30% of your income? 50%? 90%?
[00:03:38] This, at least the first example of the drowning child, is one of the core arguments of the most influential essays in Effective Altruism.
[00:03:48] It was called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, and was written by an Australian moral philosopher called Peter Singer.
[00:03:58] In it, Singer writes, and I’m quoting directly: “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour's child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away...“
[00:04:15] In other words, a life is a life, and if you can do something to help, you should do it.
[00:04:23] We know that people are suffering and their lives are at threat, and if we can, we have a moral obligation to do something about it.
[00:04:33] This essay was published in 1972, and is considered to be one of the most important essays in 20th century moral philosophy.
[00:04:44] This essay was well-received when it was published, but it wasn’t until 2005, more than 30 years later, that it would have a particularly important reader.
[00:04:58] The reader was an 18-year-old Scottish man by the name of William MacAskill.
[00:05:04] Now, at the time he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Cambridge University, but Singer’s writings struck such a chord with him that he would go on to be one of the founders of a movement called Effective Altruism, the subject of today’s episode.
[00:05:23] Now, you’ve heard a little bit about what Effective Altruism is, but let me read you out the official explanation from its own website:
[00:05:34] “Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.
[00:05:56] This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.
[00:06:14] This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.“
[00:06:24] In other words, the goal of effective altruism is not just to improve the world, but to do this in the most efficient way possible.
[00:06:35] The movement is particularly focussed on attracting often very clever young people, people who might go on to great success in whatever field they want, and encouraging them to become an Effective Altruist, or an EA for short.
[00:06:51] So, what does this mean in practice?
[00:06:55] How do you have the greatest possible impact on humanity?
[00:06:59] How can you do the most good?
[00:07:01] How can you use the time that you have on this Earth most effectively?
[00:07:07] It is, according to Effective Altruism, a question of mathematics and statistics.
[00:07:15] You might think that the automatic reaction for someone who wants to “do good” in the world might be something like becoming a doctor in a rural village in India or by digging wells in Kenya, where they directly help people who need it.
[00:07:32] According to Effective Altruism, these might be good things to do, but they are typically not the most effective things to do.
[00:07:42] Instead, a person should look at how to maximise their impact; how not only to work on the most important problems, but how to solve these for the greatest number of people.
[00:07:56] This could be in groundbreaking scientific or medical research, where you might discover something that can impact the lives of hundreds of millions, or billions of people.
[00:08:06] It might be by entering politics, where you can influence policy and direct government money towards “good” causes, in a way that you could never do as an individual actor.
[00:08:18] It could be by convincing other people to become effective altruists, as if you can convince multiple people to become EAs, then your impact will be multiplied.
[00:08:29] It could even be by joining a bank or hedge fund and earning vast amounts of money. This might sound like a strange way to “do good”, but according to Effective Altruism, earning huge amounts of money can be one of the best possible ways to help. Providing, that is, that you give it away.
[00:08:53] Let me illustrate this with two different examples.
[00:08:57] Imagine that there are two twins, a brother and a sister. They are both very intelligent, they have been to the best universities and can go on to any career they want.
[00:09:11] The brother decides to become a doctor and help rural children in Bangladesh. He saves the lives of 100 children per year personally, with his own hands.
[00:09:25] Now his sister takes a different path. She takes a job with a top financial company in New York City. She does very well at her job, and before long she is making $10 million dollars a year, sometimes more on a good year. After taxes and living expenses, let’s say she gives away $5 million dollars a year to organisations with a proven track record of efficiently training rural doctors in the same region her brother is working in.
[00:09:59] Let’s say, for sake of ease, it costs $50,000 to train a doctor in Bangladesh, meaning that the sister’s donation can train 100 new doctors every year. And let’s assume that each new doctor is as efficient as the brother, so can save the lives of 100 children per year.
[00:10:21] Let’s do the sums then. The brother has gone out and become a doctor himself, and is responsible for 100 children’s lives saved every year. Certainly, an admirable achievement, well done him, but let’s run the numbers for his twin sister who went to work in finance.
[00:10:41] Her job allows her to pay for 100 new doctors to be trained every year. After 10 years, she has paid for the training of 1,000 new doctors, each of whom saves 100 children per year, so her contribution has led to 100,000 children’s lives being saved every year, while her brother is still saving 100.
[00:11:06] Now, the numbers might be slightly off, and of course there might not be the need for an additional 1,000 doctors in that region, but you see what I mean.
[00:11:17] The choice proposed by Effective Altruism is not to do the thing that seems obvious, to go and work in the field, directly “saving lives”, but to look at the skills and opportunities that you possess and use those skills to have the greatest possible impact. As we saw with the example of the sister, sometimes the most efficient way to have an impact is to earn lots of money to pay for others to do the hands-on work for you.
[00:11:47] And this kind of, perhaps obvious, humanitarian work is just one example of a life being “directly” saved, and impact being delivered.
[00:11:58] The Effective Altruism website has a bunch of different examples that demonstrate Effective Altruism in practice, how to actually have an outsized impact.
[00:12:09] These typically involve areas which have not historically attracted much attention or funding, but could have a huge positive impact on society.
[00:12:22] The first example on the website is to do with preventing pandemics, and comparing this to global terrorism.
[00:12:30] Statistically speaking, in terms of the number of global deaths, terrorism is a very minor problem compared to pandemics.
[00:12:40] In the last 50 years, fewer than 500,000 people have been killed in terrorist attacks, while over 21 million people died in COVID-19 alone.
[00:12:52] Yet the US government spends $280 billion per year on counterterrorism but only $8 billion on pandemic prevention.
[00:13:04] Put another way, despite the fact that more than 40 times more people died from the last pandemic than have died in terrorist attacks in the last 50 years, pandemic research gets less than 3% of the funding.
[00:13:19] In the eyes of Effective Altruism, this makes little sense. Yes, preventing terrorist attacks is important, but pandemics seem like such a greater threat to human wellbeing.
[00:13:34] Or let me give you another example, if you believe that animals deserve a dignified and happy life, not to suffer, like Effective Altruists do, where should you focus your attention?
[00:13:47] Animal shelters, which provide a home for unwanted pets?
[00:13:51] Or on pushing for systemic change to end the practice of factory farming of animals?
[00:13:58] Again, with our good Effective Altruist hat on, let’s look at the numbers to evaluate the scale of the problem, and therefore the potential impact by solving it.
[00:14:10] In the United States, there are 7 million animals in animal shelters, but over 10 billion animals in factory farms. 10 billion, not 10 million, so there are 1,400 times more animals suffering in factory farms than in animal shelters.
[00:14:31] Animal shelters receive $5 billion per year in funding, but less than $100 million is spent every year on advocacy to end factory farming. Again, $5 billion with a b spent on animal shelters but only $100 million with an m on ending factory farming.
[00:14:52] With an EA mindset, you might look at this problem and think, ok, it seems like this is an area in which I can have a high level of impact, either by working directly on ending factory farming, working with a politician perhaps, or if you take the example of the sister we heard about earlier, earning lots of money and putting it towards ending factory farming advocacy activities.
[00:15:19] The point is, and this is one of the key beliefs of Effective Altruism, you should work on the area where you can have the greatest impact, not on one particular cause or impact that you might like.
[00:15:35] The movement has a term for this. It’s “open truth-seeking”, and it’s one of the core principles of the movement.
[00:15:44] Now, moving on to the people behind the movement, one of the most visible recent proponents of Effective Altruism is someone who has now been completely cast out from the movement, and that’s Sam Bankman-Fried, or SBF as he is known.
[00:16:01] You might know him as the boss of the former multibillion dollar crypto trading company, FTX, a man who was recently convicted of 7 counts of fraud and is, at the time of recording this episode at least, awaiting a very lengthy prison sentence.
[00:16:19] Now, the interesting thing about SBF in the context of this episode is that he wasn’t some multi-billionaire who then decided he wanted to give his money away; he was first and foremost an Effective Altruist, and FTX, his crypto business, was his way of earning enough money so that he could give it away to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
[00:16:45] In our twins example, he was the sister, apart from we would have to add on a few zeroes to the amount of money he was able to make, and how much he ended up giving away.
[00:16:58] It’s not clear exactly how much SBF gave away before he was arrested, but it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and he pledged to give away most of his multi-billion dollar fortune during his lifetime.
[00:17:14] In fact, according to a recent book about FTX by Michael Lewis, one of SBF’s biggest concerns was how to give his money away most effectively. He thought of everything in percentage terms, calculating the cost of something and its probable return, so he ended up giving millions to pandemic research groups, to political groups that would further policies that SBF supported, and to animal welfare organisations.
[00:17:46] He even, according to Michael Lewis, asked the Trump campaign how much it would cost for Donald Trump not to run in the next election, with SBF thinking that this could be a good use of his money if he removed what he saw as a danger for the country and humanity.
[00:18:08] Unfortunately the price, $5 billion proposed by the Trump campaign, was a little too high even for the billionaire SBF, and the deal never went through.
[00:18:20] Anyway, the reason to mention SBF was because he was, for many, the poster boy for Effective Altruism, he was the world’s best-known effective altruist, and his reason to get into crypto was a rational choice because it presented him with the best possible way to make a fortune.
[00:18:40] And this was all, at least if we take SBF at his word, with the express intention of giving it away to do good in the world.
[00:18:51] Now, taking SBF "at his word” might be a difficult thing to do now, given his crimes, but until his downfall, he was the embodiment of Effective Altruism, a man who publicly pledged to the world’s media that his mission was to make the world a better place.
[00:19:11] And getting involved in Effective Altruism certainly does not require you to make an SBF-style fortune, maximising your earnings solely in order to be able to give money away to effective charities.
[00:19:25] If you read the literature on Effective Altruism, it becomes clear that it’s actually a relatively liberal philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word. There are recommendations for what people should look into and what they should do. There’s even an affiliated group called “Giving What We Can”, where members are encouraged to give at least 10% of their income to good causes.
[00:19:52] But it is far from prescriptive.
[00:19:55] The general idea seems to be to attract people first to the concept of Effective Altruism, to show the disparity that often exists between minor problems that are treated as serious problems and serious potential problems that are treated as minor problems.
[00:20:15] And then, when someone sees this and subscribes to the overall philosophy and takes it to its logical conclusion, it brings them to a point where they look at the working hours that they might have in their life and think “how can I spend this time to do the most good in the world?”
[00:20:33] As we see from the very prominent example of Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism is certainly not without its contradictions and problems, but it is a unique and novel way of looking at the world.
[00:20:47] It’s an interesting lens through which someone starting out on their career can make a choice, but it’s also interesting for anyone thinking about “doing good” in the world.
[00:20:59] Peter Singer, the father of this type of moral philosophy, summed it up like this: “If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”
[00:21:13] Critics of Singer, and of Effective Altruism, would certainly argue that this is a simplistic way of viewing the world’s problems, that it puts too much responsibility on the shoulders of individuals, that it can get in the way of personal liberty and that it just isn’t practical.
[00:21:31] These might all be perfectly valid arguments, but the one final thought I’ll leave you with is that having even a small number of incredibly smart people thinking about solving the world’s most pressing problems in the most impactful way, well that certainly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea in my book.
[00:21:53] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Effective Altruism.
[00:21:58] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:22:02] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:05] Are you an effective altruist? Had you heard of effective altruism before? What do you think about it?
[00:22:12] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:16] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:24] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:29] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
