Effective altruism (EA) is an ongoing project to find the best ways to do good, and put them into practice.
Our core goal with this program is to introduce you to some of the principles and thinking tools behind effective altruism. We hope that these tools can help you as you think through how you can best help the world.
We also want to share some of the arguments for working on specific problems, like global health or biosecurity. People involved in effective altruism tend to agree that, partly due to uncertainty about which cause is best, we should split our resources between problems. But they don’t agree on what that split should be. People in the effective altruism community actively discuss and disagree about which causes to prioritise and how, even though we’ve learned a lot over the last decade. We hope that you will take these ideas seriously and think for yourself about which ways to help are most effective.
Finally, we give you some time at the end of the program to begin to reflect on how you personally can help to solve these problems. We don’t expect you’ll have an answer by the end of the eight sessions, but we hope you’re better prepared to explore this further.
Each session of the program has a section of Required Materials and sometimes an exercise, which you are expected to complete in advance of the weekly meeting to help you get the most out of the program and give a better experience to your peers.
We think that the Required Materials take most people about 1-2 hours to get through, and the exercise another 30-60 minutes. We have matched the readings and exercises so that, in total, we think it will take around 2-2.5 hours per session to prepare for the session.
The exercises help you put the concepts from the reading into practice.
Beyond the required reading, there are more materials each session in ‘More to Explore’ — these are all optional and explore the themes of the session in more depth and breadth.
Approximate reading times are given for each of the Required Materials. Generally, we’d prefer you to take your time and think through the readings instead of rushing.
Taking ideas seriously.
Often, conversations about ideas are recreational: we enjoy batting around interesting thoughts and saying smart things, and then go back to doing whatever we were already doing in our lives. This is a fine thing to do — but at least sometimes, we think we should be asking ourselves questions like:
And, zooming out: