First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1].
The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they’re starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It’s currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle.
Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, ‘anyone giving $10 to Oxfam’ was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like.
The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn’t sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as:
Of course, the 10% commitment was chosen as a round number favored historically by the donation standard prescribed by various world religions. How arbitrary it really is, and if effective altruism should rethink it, may be a challenged posed by the possible future success of The Life You Can Save. If the The Life You Can Save, which only encourages people to pledge at least only 1% of their income, ever hits some critical mass in how much awareness it raises, and the amount of money from as many people as possible, that no other effective altruist organization had yet achieved, it may force effective altruism to rethink how it presents itself.
In a way, the already thousands of effective altruists, hopefully of whom as many as possible will continue to be effective altruists, will demonstrate a cluster-thinking approach to lifestyle design for effective altruists. Effective altruism is a voluntary movement in which, aside from the narrow standard, not yet well-defined, above, one can choose to live how they wish. The commonalities of what makes life more functional for effective altruists will come to light as time passes, so what’s ‘normal’ for effective altruism, while still being ‘normal’ for the rest of the world at large, will become apparent.
I wish more effective altruists would share their personal stories, and how they differ not only in their donations, but lifestyle choices, from others. Luckily, effective altruists don’t even need their own blogs to do so, as they can post them to this forum. I will indeed make a new thread next time encouraging others to do this.
[1] The lifestyle written about in that post was written by Jeff Kaufman about the effective altruist lives his wife and himself are leading. They’re earning to give, in addition to raising awareness of effective altruism by updating how they build their life with effective altruism in mind, without sacrifice. Since that article was written, Kaufman and Wise have increased how much of their joint income they give from 30% to 50%, while raising their first child. They may be the best existing example of how normal effective altruism can be for any middle class person.
First of all, effective altruist organizations, ones that explicitly exist because there effective altruism exists as a social movement, make it their shared mission to make people aware that people can be effective altruists, while still being totally normal. Not, like, even relatively normal, or sort of normal, but not requiring you, yes you, to sacrifice anything major you wanted out of life[1].
The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours exist to do this. The Centre of Effective Altruism incubated all these organizations, and now they’re starting a special project to build the effective altruism movement, and steer its public image, called Effective Altruism Outreach. It’s currently being led by Niel Bowerman. Your comment is one great concern that Effective Altruism Outreach was specifically started to handle.
Of course, as effective altruism grows, nobody wants it to become so diluted as a set of ideas that anyone can as validly call themselves an effective altruist as anyone else, without actually doing anything. So, the community itself must reach consensus on some standard, and each individual is responsible for holding themselves to it to maintain the integrity of effective altruism. Rob Wiblin covered this in his keynote address at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. As a shorthand, ‘anyone giving $10 to Oxfam’ was the hypothetical example of what an overly diluted effective altruism might look like.
The standard thus far seems to be 10% of lifetime income donated to the most effective charity (one can find). Now, this isn’t sufficient, so some caveats and distinctions have to be included, such as:
does this include income before or after taxes?
Personally, I would qualify this commitment with what each individual effective altruist honestly tries as hard as they can to figure out what the best charity is given their best estimates and their personal values, even as they differ from those of others. In practice, such research is difficult, so I would recommend looking to evaluations independent of one another, organizationally, and across disciplines, converging upon the same solutions. This is what effective altruism calls cluster thinking, and it’s an epistemology the effective altruist movement is turning toward.
Of course, the 10% commitment was chosen as a round number favored historically by the donation standard prescribed by various world religions. How arbitrary it really is, and if effective altruism should rethink it, may be a challenged posed by the possible future success of The Life You Can Save. If the The Life You Can Save, which only encourages people to pledge at least only 1% of their income, ever hits some critical mass in how much awareness it raises, and the amount of money from as many people as possible, that no other effective altruist organization had yet achieved, it may force effective altruism to rethink how it presents itself.
In a way, the already thousands of effective altruists, hopefully of whom as many as possible will continue to be effective altruists, will demonstrate a cluster-thinking approach to lifestyle design for effective altruists. Effective altruism is a voluntary movement in which, aside from the narrow standard, not yet well-defined, above, one can choose to live how they wish. The commonalities of what makes life more functional for effective altruists will come to light as time passes, so what’s ‘normal’ for effective altruism, while still being ‘normal’ for the rest of the world at large, will become apparent.
I wish more effective altruists would share their personal stories, and how they differ not only in their donations, but lifestyle choices, from others. Luckily, effective altruists don’t even need their own blogs to do so, as they can post them to this forum. I will indeed make a new thread next time encouraging others to do this.
[1] The lifestyle written about in that post was written by Jeff Kaufman about the effective altruist lives his wife and himself are leading. They’re earning to give, in addition to raising awareness of effective altruism by updating how they build their life with effective altruism in mind, without sacrifice. Since that article was written, Kaufman and Wise have increased how much of their joint income they give from 30% to 50%, while raising their first child. They may be the best existing example of how normal effective altruism can be for any middle class person.