Product lead @ Molecule + VitaDAO with design and development background exploring decentralized science and longevity.


Effective Altruism

Foresight

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that encourages people to donate their time and money to the most effective causes in the world.

There are many ways to get involved with effective altruism. The easiest way to start is by reading about effective altruism and attending local events.

For people new to effective altruism, worth checking out the following reads:

Our top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world

 

-> Your career is your biggest opportunity to make a difference. But how can you make the most of it? We’ve spent the last ten years searching for the answer to that question.  

As an intro to existential risks, I put together existentialrisk.info

 

Books

 

Donating

To support a range of smaller initiatives in different cause areas such as existential risk reduction or effective altruism broadly, I can recommend the donation funds run by the effective altruism foundation with analysts evaluating the most impactful efforts to donate to, or their partner funds such as the climate fund.

A great and easy to use platform to donate is every.org Can recommend joining an EA conference and your local community to share and discuss ideas.

My case for donating to small, new efforts

I think the average donor has very little impact to donate to big established efforts (in traditional philantrophy for example greenpeace, or efforts such as against malaria in effective altruism). Think the biggest impact comes from the equivalent of angel investing but for funding novel philantropic initiaitives that could potentially be extremely impactful in relevant cause areas. On reflection for myself, donating in the first few months of the projects existence to projects such as Ocean Cleanup, NewScience or Taimaka was probably much more impactful than donating to big established efforts, as well as recommending novel potentially impactful initiatives to other donors and foundations for funding. Ones a billionaire or big foundation is funding a project it probably doesnt require your donations anymore.

In the book Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Engaging Philosophy), Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears make this case elogquently in their paper “The Hidden Zero Problem: Effective Altruism and Barriers to Marginal Impact”, can highly recommend reading the book.

I do think that efforts such as the EA funds or ACX Grants are a decent passive way to have a similar impact, as they support these small novel projects.

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A list of organization I find worth supporting:

Meta: Evaluation, Effective Altruism Movement

Long-Term: X-Risk, Ai Risk, Nuclear Etc.

Global Health And Development

Science, Tools

Climate

 

Great Videos

Existential Risk: Managing Extreme Technological Risk

 

Prospecting for gold | Owen Cotton-Barratt | EAGxOxford 2016

 

Great Videos About Specific Initiatives

The Nuclear Threat Initiative

 

Clean Air Task Force

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Organizations i supported (with a range of very different amounts)

2022

2021: see all and donate easily through every.org or endaoment: for direct crypto donations

   

2020

   

2018-2019

2017 and before