Benjamin Todd

However, rather than make personal investments, it can be even better to invest in a community of people working to do good.

In an earlier chapter, we looked at Giving What We Can, a charity building a community of people who donate 10% of their income to whatever charities are most cost-effective.

Every $1 invested in growing Giving What We Can has led to over $9 already donated to its top recommended charities, and a total of over $3 billion pledged.

By building a community, Giving What We Can has been able to raise much more money than their founders could have donated individually.

They've achieved a multiplier on their impact.

But what's more, the members donate to whatever charities are most effective at the time.

If the situation changes, then at least to some extent, the donations will change too.

This flexibility makes the impact over time much higher.

Giving What We Can is one example of several projects in the effective altruism community, a community of people who aim to identify the best ways to help others and take action based on their findings.

80,000 Hours itself is another example.

Better career advice doesn't sound like one of the most pressing problems imaginable, but many of the world's most talented young people want to do good with their lives and lack good advice on how to do so.

This means that every year, thousands of them have far less impact than they could have.

We could have gone to work on issues like AI ourselves, but instead, by providing better advice, we can help thousands of other people find high-impact careers.

And so, if we do a good job, we might hope to have thousands of times as much impact ourselves.

What's more, if we discover new, better career options than the ones we already know about, we can switch to promoting them.

Just like giving what we can, this flexibility gives us greater impact over time.

We call the indirect strategies we've covered – global priorities research, broad interventions, and promoting effective altruism – going meta, because they work one level removed from the concrete problems that seem most urgent.

The downside of going meta is that it's harder to know if your efforts are effective –

The advantage is they're usually more neglected, since people prefer concrete opportunities over more abstract ones, and they allow you to have a greater impact in the face of uncertainty.

How to work out which problems you should focus on.