Benjamin Todd

Effective Altruism is the project of finding better ways to have a positive impact.

For example, by looking for issues that are big in scale, highly neglected, and tractable.

It's both a research field that 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.

We helped to start the community back in 2011, along with several other groups.

Applying effective altruism means aspiring to apply four key values.

Doing more to prioritize more effective ways of helping others, striving to treat others more equally, trying harder to question our beliefs, and working cooperatively with high integrity.

Anyone who shares these values and is trying to find better ways to help others is participating in the project of effective altruism and has good reason to get involved in the community.

In fact, we know people who have been involved with Harvard Business School, the Fulbright Scholarship, the World Economic Forum, and other prestigious networks.

But many of them say they find it more useful to meet people in the effective altruism community.

Why?

One reason is that this community has a lot of amazing people, such as many of the people we interview on our podcast.

Another reason is that, as we've argued, you can increase your impact by working on issues and solutions that are more neglected.

But if you're working on something neglected, then, by definition, you won't find many others who want to work on these issues in most conventional networks.

Likewise, we'd argue it's important to focus much more on comparing different options in terms of impact than is standard.

The effective altruism community is useful because you can find lots of people working on these neglected issues and applying these norms, gathered in one place.

Behind this is an even more fundamental reason, the power of shared aims.

You can work with people who don't share your values because you can still trade with them.

But if you share aims with someone else, then you don't even need to trade.

In the effective altruism community, people share a common goal, to help others more effectively.

So if you help someone else to have a greater impact, then you increase your own impact too.