Lately I have been wondering how I can really make a substantial positive impact on the world. Obviously it's not a trivial question, and I still have a lot to learn about it, but I found an interesting piece of the puzzle to help me inform my decisions, it's called effective altruism.
The last half year I've been working with an effective altruism group in Hamburg to provide donation advice and create a web app to help people decide which charities to donate to. I've met a lot of great people there and became convinced that effective altruism can have a big positive impact on the world (I would say it already has, but there is a lot room for growth!).
Effective altruism uses evidence-based methods to find out how to do the most good. Of course a lot of what "good" means to you is determined by your personal values. Effective altruism can't provide premade solutions to difficult problems, but it can compare and evaluate different ways of helping.
One obvious way of helping is to donate. GiveWellevaluates charities that help humans right now (as opposed to focusing on the future of humanity). Animal Charity Evaluatorsis doing the same for charities that help animals. There are also fundsmanaged by experts concerning specific field such as the long-term future of humanity.
Examples for criteria for the evaluation of charities are how many beings a charity helps with a given amount of money, how severe the problem they try to solve is, and how much more money a charity can actually make use of.
Of course donating is not the only way to do good, you can also do good with your time, specifically your choice of career. 80,000 hoursprovides a lot of valuable resources how to have the biggest positive impact with your career.
I hope I could give you a bit of an overview of what effective altruism is, and perhaps inspire you to look into it more deeply.
If you want to donate a few dollars to effective charity and get something in return, check out the science e-book bundle and the Daedelic game bundle from Humble Bundle.
If there is interest in the concept of effective altruism, I will write more about it. Feel free to ask questions!
(pictures from Pixabay)
