Effective Altruism

Jeff Kaufman got into effective altruism before it even had a name. From 2009 to 2022, he and his wife, Julia Wise, donated 50% of their income, giving away over $2 million. Then, a conversation with someone from 80,000 Hours changed his trajectory. Jeff felt he could do more by applying his skills directly to help prevent catastrophic pandemics, rather than focusing on donations. Today, Jeff leads SecureBio Detection (formerly the Nucleic Acid Observatory), a project working to detect stealth pandemics before they spread beyond our ability to respond. In this video, Jeff explains how metagenomic sequencing can catch pathogens we aren't even looking for, why stealth pandemics represent one of the most serious biological risks to humanity, and what it would take to remove this risk entirely. "I think it is achievable to get to where stealth pandemics are not a feasible way to attack humanity, where if someone tried it, we would catch it and they would not succeed." • See more impact stories like this one: https://lnkd.in/gi-Fwx8a • Learn more about SecureBio Detection: securebio.org/detection • Learn more about effective altruism: effectivealtruism.org • Inspired? Take Action: https://lnkd.in/eJFehZdh #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories

Moving from heart to head in effective giving. Michael Thatcher🔸, President and CEO of Charity Navigator: “There are a lot of problems in the world, and so figuring out where you can have the highest level of impact with the resources that you have is actually the smartest thing you can do." See more impact stories at 👉 https://lnkd.in/gi-Fwx8a #EffectiveAltruism #EffectiveAltruismStories

We asked attendees at EA Global about effective altruism. Here is what Calum said. Find an upcoming conference at 👉 https://lnkd.in/gByh3RaY #EffectiveAltruism #EAVoxPop #EAGlobal

"We are much more powerful than we think." After finishing college in the Netherlands, Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸knew he wanted to do something good with his career — but he didn't know what. At some point, he sat down and Googled "how can I make the world a happier place?" That search led him to Peter Singer's TED talk on effective altruism: his first exposure to a community taking the question of doing good seriously. He learned that by “combining the head and the heart,” you can do up to a hundred times more good than you might otherwise. One example that still blows his mind: by donating a percentage of his income to high-impact charities, he could save a human life every year. Now Sjir is CEO of Giving What We Can, an organization that promotes effective giving through the 10% Pledge — a commitment to give at least 10% of your income wherever you think it can do the most good. Giving What We Can recently reached a milestone: 10,000 pledgers across 100 countries, donating more than $50 million every year. • See more impact stories like this one: https://lnkd.in/gi-Fwx8a • Birth Lottery: If you were born again, how would your life change? https://lnkd.in/eApShVkH • How rich am I? Find out how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. https://lnkd.in/eWvk4jJt

“If you want to make the world a better place, just start by thinking about what the world needs and then figure out how your passion can meet that.“ In 2016, Arden Koehler was a philosophy PhD student at NYU, studying metaethics. She was considering a career as a “middling academic philosopher.” She might write something great someday, but even if she did, she didn't think it was going to actually make a difference in other people's lives. Then a friend suggested she attend an EA Global conference in Berkeley. She found a group of people who applied the same rigor and truth-seeking she valued in academic philosophy, while maintaining a focus on improving the world. Now Arden is the Web Program Director at 80,000 Hours, helping people tackle the world's most pressing problems with their careers. The organization's name comes from the fact that on average, people work 80,000 hours in their lifetime; for most, this is the largest resource they have at their disposal to improve the world. See more impact stories like this one: https://lnkd.in/gi-Fwx8a

Kearney Capuano always wanted to help others but nothing ever felt good enough. She would volunteer and work at nonprofits, but there were always more people to be helped, more suffering to address. In university, she joined a neuroscience lab studying people who donate one of their kidneys to a complete stranger — trying to understand what drives that kind of selflessness. That's where she first encountered effective altruism. "It just blew my mind. Suddenly, there was an entire community of people working on these sort of ideas, thinking about it enough to where they were changing their life paths to do something about it." Kearney had been set on helping people through neuroscience, but her mentor asked: if your root goal is really to help as many people as possible, might other paths have even greater impact? That conversation, Kearney says, unlocked something important. "Effective altruism provided me with such a sense of hope and gave me an avenue in which I could actually make impact in the world." Now she works at Coefficient Giving (Open Philanthropy), helping to move money more effectively to high-impact grantees. What keeps her engaged is the intellectual humility at the heart of effective altruism: the idea that we don't know all the answers, but we're going to do our best to figure them out. See more impact stories like this one: https://lnkd.in/gi-Fwx8a