I have a personal anecdote that I can use as a knock down argument against anyone on the EA forum who tells me that I am wasting my time by reading the news: I discovered EA through an article on the BBC News website.
I first heard about Effective Altruism from this article, which I read in December 2010, before the concept was even called “Effective Altruism”. The article was a profile of Toby Ord, and his decision to give away most of his lifetime income to effective causes. It made a big impact on me at the time, because I knew that I wanted to do the same thing. Or at least, I knew that I wanted to give a lot of money away. The question of charity effectiveness was not really in my thoughts at the time. BBC News was where I was first introduced to the idea that some charities are much more effective than others.
Rob Wiblin says that at one point he was spending 10% of his time reading the news, but that it was not providing 10% of the value in his life. While 10% does sound like far too much time to spend reading the news, I don’t think it is unrealistic that news consumption could provide someone with a huge amount of value. 13 years after reading that BBC article, I’ve signed the Giving What We Can pledge, and I’ve gone vegan. I consider both of those things to be important parts of my life now.
Having already won the argument with my anecdote, here’s my attempt to explain why I think reading the news sometimes makes sense:
If you only consume information from sources that you already agree with, then you are making a mistake. You should sometimes seek out information from sources you disagree with. This is because there is always a chance that you are wrong. You are less likely to discover when you are wrong if you only listen to information from one side.
Similarly, if you only consume information about topics that you think are important, then I think you are making the same kind of mistake. You should sometimes seek out information about topics which you think are unimportant. This is because there is always a chance that you are wrong about what’s important.And you are less likely to discover this if you only learn about topics that you already think are worth studying.
It might be true that to understand the world, you are better off reading Wikipedia, Our World In Data, or a textbook, than reading the news. But which textbooks should you read? Which Wikipedia pages?
When we read the news we are handing over a big chunk of the “What’s most important for me to learn today?” question to someone else. They might do a much worse job of answering that question than we could do ourselves, but it is still an important exercise to hand over that control fairly regularly. That’s how you find out when you are making mistakes. It is also important that we don’t only hand over this control to people we already agree with on most things (for example, by just listening to the 80,000 hours podcast).
All sorts of weird and wonderful groups of people can make it into the mainstream news occasionally. There was a profile of Toby Ord on the BBC News website before the name “Effective Altruism” even existed. I think it’s a good thing to expose ourselves to these kind of stories.
Some caveats
I feel the need to add some caveats.
Memory can be a tricky thing. I am certain that I read that article around the time that it was published, and I am certain that it had a profound impact on me. But I am not 100% certain that it really was the first time I had heard about effective altruism, or that I discovered it by just casually browsing the news. I think both these things are very likely, but I can’t completely rule out that I came across effective altruism somewhere else first, and/or discovered that news article through a google search.
There were very active Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours student groups at my university, when I was an undergraduate (from 2011). This means that I was going to hear about effective altruism anyway. If I’m being honest, that article almost certainly had very little counterfactual impact on my life. But this could easily not have been the case. If I’d ended up at a different university, then that article would probably have meant that I was exposed to these ideas several years earlier than I would otherwise have been.
I have a personal anecdote that I can use as a knock down argument against anyone on the EA forum who tells me that I am wasting my time by reading the news: I discovered EA through an article on the BBC News website.
I first heard about Effective Altruism from this article, which I read in December 2010, before the concept was even called “Effective Altruism”. The article was a profile of Toby Ord, and his decision to give away most of his lifetime income to effective causes. It made a big impact on me at the time, because I knew that I wanted to do the same thing. Or at least, I knew that I wanted to give a lot of money away. The question of charity effectiveness was not really in my thoughts at the time. BBC News was where I was first introduced to the idea that some charities are much more effective than others.
Rob Wiblin says that at one point he was spending 10% of his time reading the news, but that it was not providing 10% of the value in his life. While 10% does sound like far too much time to spend reading the news, I don’t think it is unrealistic that news consumption could provide someone with a huge amount of value. 13 years after reading that BBC article, I’ve signed the Giving What We Can pledge, and I’ve gone vegan. I consider both of those things to be important parts of my life now.
Having already won the argument with my anecdote, here’s my attempt to explain why I think reading the news sometimes makes sense:
If you only consume information from sources that you already agree with, then you are making a mistake. You should sometimes seek out information from sources you disagree with. This is because there is always a chance that you are wrong. You are less likely to discover when you are wrong if you only listen to information from one side.
Similarly, if you only consume information about topics that you think are important, then I think you are making the same kind of mistake. You should sometimes seek out information about topics which you think are unimportant. This is because there is always a chance that you are wrong about what’s important. And you are less likely to discover this if you only learn about topics that you already think are worth studying.
It might be true that to understand the world, you are better off reading Wikipedia, Our World In Data, or a textbook, than reading the news. But which textbooks should you read? Which Wikipedia pages?
When we read the news we are handing over a big chunk of the “What’s most important for me to learn today?” question to someone else. They might do a much worse job of answering that question than we could do ourselves, but it is still an important exercise to hand over that control fairly regularly. That’s how you find out when you are making mistakes. It is also important that we don’t only hand over this control to people we already agree with on most things (for example, by just listening to the 80,000 hours podcast).
All sorts of weird and wonderful groups of people can make it into the mainstream news occasionally. There was a profile of Toby Ord on the BBC News website before the name “Effective Altruism” even existed. I think it’s a good thing to expose ourselves to these kind of stories.
Some caveats
I feel the need to add some caveats.
Memory can be a tricky thing. I am certain that I read that article around the time that it was published, and I am certain that it had a profound impact on me. But I am not 100% certain that it really was the first time I had heard about effective altruism, or that I discovered it by just casually browsing the news. I think both these things are very likely, but I can’t completely rule out that I came across effective altruism somewhere else first, and/or discovered that news article through a google search.
There were very active Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours student groups at my university, when I was an undergraduate (from 2011). This means that I was going to hear about effective altruism anyway. If I’m being honest, that article almost certainly had very little counterfactual impact on my life. But this could easily not have been the case. If I’d ended up at a different university, then that article would probably have meant that I was exposed to these ideas several years earlier than I would otherwise have been.