The following is a tidy, oversimplified version of what happened.
I learned about Bentham and Mill in A-level history class (aged 17) and I think read a Peter Singer book. I was very left-wing at the time but I remember being really frustrated that all the other altruistically-minded kids in my class supported standard leftist policies for ideological reasons even when they harmed disadvantaged people. This influenced me to study philosophy at undergrad level, where I defended utilitarianism.
Unfortunately EA hadnāt been invented at the time so I spent the first year after graduation working in warehouses and call centers, followed by about nine years of direct development work in low-income countries. I got frustrated by the inefficiency of most development orgs and decided to switch fields into either law (āearning to giveā before Iād heard of the concept) or public health (to do direct work with more quantifiable impacts).
Around the same time I was searching online for information about charity evaluation and came across GiveWell, then the Singer TED Talk and the wider EA community. This may have influenced me to choose public health, though there were other factors (e.g. the 2008 financial crash made it even harder than usual to pursue a lucrative law career). I spent 18 months in Australia doing whatever work I could find ā mostly farm labouring ā to pay for my masterās course.
During the course I became more involved in EA, and got interested in health economics, especially methods for cost-effectiveness analysis. But I couldnāt get a job or PhD in health economics with a general public health background, so to save up for a second masterās I spent two more years doing mostly sub-minimum wage temp jobs, or saving dole money when I couldnāt find work (though I also got a bit of contract work with GiveWell towards the end of this period). Halfway through that course I ran out of money and had some health issues, so I took a leave of absence, during which time I worked on the 2019 Global Happiness Policy Report (Chapter 3), then got the Rethink job.
My reasons for continuing to work in EA are some mixture of those given by my colleagues.
Like Saulius, I am pretty sceptical about the narrative I have in my mind on this issue now. One day I would like to take time and re-read some old messages and emails to tease out what I was thinking, or at least what story I was telling myself, then.
For the moment, this is how I recall events and my thinking.
I first heard of EA when a friend at Oxford gave me Doing Good Better as a gift. I recall reading it cover to cover during a trip the following week and being enthused by it to the extent of making detailed notes and re-gifting it back to my friend with my annotations. I considered it one of many interesting frameworks to guide oneās life and took onboard some ideas I surmised from it like donating based on cost-effectiveness and thinking more deeply about the suffering of others. My engagement with EA remained quite flat for few years after that and I am not sure how āinvolvedā I could consider myself.
Later, I was accepted for intern positions with Animal Charity Evaluators and Charity Entrepreneurship. Iām unsure exactly how at the front of my mind EA was in this time. On the one hand I was applying for many positions that I thought were simply interesting, but not necessarily EA aligned. On the other hand, I attended my first EAG shortly after applying for/āstarting these positions and therefore must have applied to attend months before because it was happening in a city my then employer was based in. I think much of it came down to me having a lot of free time, the desire to find new interesting work and casting a very wide net, and to an extent being in the right place at the right time. In any case, meeting EAs in person, both at EAG and through Charity Entrepreneurship, and seeing the community behind the ideas was a revelation for me.
I keep working on it for a mix of selfish reasons like finding the work interesting and a sense of community, and to a lesser extent becoming more convinced of the impact of the movement and that my working on it is the best resource I can offer.
This is the story that I tell myself about myself but Iām really unsure about the accuracy of it.
I was utilitarian since I was a teen (way before I knew the term). I decided to earn-to-give and found out about GiveWell and ACE when researching where to give. I got really interested when I discovered Brian Tomasikās website after googling something about utilitarianism. Shortly after that I began participating in EA facebook group, I donāt remember how. I saw some people discussing donations and salaries there and they were much higher than mine because I was living in Lithuania. In 2015 I decided to emigrate to London so that I could earn and donate more money. In London, I went to an EA meetup. It was a shock because up until that point I havenāt met anyone who is altruistic and most of the people in my life were alienated by my altruism and tried to talk me out of donating my money. Making friends with other EAs at meetups in London has greatly increased my motivation to do EA stuff. Soon I was spending most of my free time on EA-related activities. Combined with other factors, this has led me to burn out in 2017. Iām not sure Iāve ever fully recovered from it.
I think I keep working on EA stuff now because:
Itās my job and it would be difficult to find a better job even from a purely selfish perspective
I still care about making the world a better place (though not as much as I used to before burning out)
It feels easy and natural to work on EA stuff because my brain is used to think in the utilitarian way and because I hang out with other EAs all the time
However, I have little faith in humans knowing why they do anything so maybe these are not the real reasons.
Some more reasons why I think I keep working on EA stuff:
EA forumās karma system and comments make it motivating to participate here, Iām slightly addicted to it.
Iām embarrassed to admit it but I have a desire to impress other people and I try to do that by writing EA forum posts. I enjoy social status it gives me in some social situations, etc.
Iām afraid that in some cases these motivations lead me to work on things that are not the most impactful and I try to watch out for that.
Upvoted for being honest about status-related desires. Good to keep an eye on them but I think they can be useful motivators when theyāre pointing in the right direction!
Like a lot of EAs, I first became convinced of these ideas through Peter Singer.
I first read him, and Famine, Affluence and Morality in particular, when I was doing A Level religious studies in 2004 and from then on was convinced that we are obliged to give all excess wealth to the most effective charities (or do something else if that was more effective of course).
I then went to study Philosophy, directly inspired by this, and spent a lot of time telling anyone who would listen about these ideas with no effect whatsoever. I was particularly shocked and appalled that not only did none of the philosophers I encountered take these or any other actually-oriented-at-helping-the-world ideas seriously, but none seemed to take utilitarianism seriously. I was therefore pretty delighted to see Toby Ord announce his intention to give everything he earned over a certain amount to charity, since I thought all philosophers should be doing this, and Iāve been following EA ever since.
As to what now keeps me working on EA: it would be the awareness of the manifold terrible horrors (horrors so great that any individual experiencing them would pay almost any price to avoid them) constantly occurring in the world.
My background is in philosophy, so Iāve been familiar with (and convinced by) Peter Singerās work since roughly 2007. I first heard about EA in early 2015 when Will MacAskill gave a talk at UT Austin, where I was working on my PhD. He and I chatted a bit about Bostromās Superintelligence, which I happened to be reading at the time for totally unrelated reasons. Talking about AI safety and global poverty (the subject of Willās talk) in the same conversation was kind of a revelatory moment, and all of EAās conceptual pieces just sort of fell into place.
The thing that keeps me motivated is how intrinsically interesting I find my research. Of course I hope to make a difference, but my work is so far removed from immediate measurable impact that I donāt really think about that on a day-to-day basis.
How did you first get involved in effective altruism? What are the main factors and events that drove you to it, and what keeps you working on it now?
The following is a tidy, oversimplified version of what happened.
I learned about Bentham and Mill in A-level history class (aged 17) and I think read a Peter Singer book. I was very left-wing at the time but I remember being really frustrated that all the other altruistically-minded kids in my class supported standard leftist policies for ideological reasons even when they harmed disadvantaged people. This influenced me to study philosophy at undergrad level, where I defended utilitarianism.
Unfortunately EA hadnāt been invented at the time so I spent the first year after graduation working in warehouses and call centers, followed by about nine years of direct development work in low-income countries. I got frustrated by the inefficiency of most development orgs and decided to switch fields into either law (āearning to giveā before Iād heard of the concept) or public health (to do direct work with more quantifiable impacts).
Around the same time I was searching online for information about charity evaluation and came across GiveWell, then the Singer TED Talk and the wider EA community. This may have influenced me to choose public health, though there were other factors (e.g. the 2008 financial crash made it even harder than usual to pursue a lucrative law career). I spent 18 months in Australia doing whatever work I could find ā mostly farm labouring ā to pay for my masterās course.
During the course I became more involved in EA, and got interested in health economics, especially methods for cost-effectiveness analysis. But I couldnāt get a job or PhD in health economics with a general public health background, so to save up for a second masterās I spent two more years doing mostly sub-minimum wage temp jobs, or saving dole money when I couldnāt find work (though I also got a bit of contract work with GiveWell towards the end of this period). Halfway through that course I ran out of money and had some health issues, so I took a leave of absence, during which time I worked on the 2019 Global Happiness Policy Report (Chapter 3), then got the Rethink job.
My reasons for continuing to work in EA are some mixture of those given by my colleagues.
Like Saulius, I am pretty sceptical about the narrative I have in my mind on this issue now. One day I would like to take time and re-read some old messages and emails to tease out what I was thinking, or at least what story I was telling myself, then.
For the moment, this is how I recall events and my thinking. I first heard of EA when a friend at Oxford gave me Doing Good Better as a gift. I recall reading it cover to cover during a trip the following week and being enthused by it to the extent of making detailed notes and re-gifting it back to my friend with my annotations. I considered it one of many interesting frameworks to guide oneās life and took onboard some ideas I surmised from it like donating based on cost-effectiveness and thinking more deeply about the suffering of others. My engagement with EA remained quite flat for few years after that and I am not sure how āinvolvedā I could consider myself. Later, I was accepted for intern positions with Animal Charity Evaluators and Charity Entrepreneurship. Iām unsure exactly how at the front of my mind EA was in this time. On the one hand I was applying for many positions that I thought were simply interesting, but not necessarily EA aligned. On the other hand, I attended my first EAG shortly after applying for/āstarting these positions and therefore must have applied to attend months before because it was happening in a city my then employer was based in. I think much of it came down to me having a lot of free time, the desire to find new interesting work and casting a very wide net, and to an extent being in the right place at the right time. In any case, meeting EAs in person, both at EAG and through Charity Entrepreneurship, and seeing the community behind the ideas was a revelation for me.
I keep working on it for a mix of selfish reasons like finding the work interesting and a sense of community, and to a lesser extent becoming more convinced of the impact of the movement and that my working on it is the best resource I can offer.
This is the story that I tell myself about myself but Iām really unsure about the accuracy of it.
I was utilitarian since I was a teen (way before I knew the term). I decided to earn-to-give and found out about GiveWell and ACE when researching where to give. I got really interested when I discovered Brian Tomasikās website after googling something about utilitarianism. Shortly after that I began participating in EA facebook group, I donāt remember how. I saw some people discussing donations and salaries there and they were much higher than mine because I was living in Lithuania. In 2015 I decided to emigrate to London so that I could earn and donate more money. In London, I went to an EA meetup. It was a shock because up until that point I havenāt met anyone who is altruistic and most of the people in my life were alienated by my altruism and tried to talk me out of donating my money. Making friends with other EAs at meetups in London has greatly increased my motivation to do EA stuff. Soon I was spending most of my free time on EA-related activities. Combined with other factors, this has led me to burn out in 2017. Iām not sure Iāve ever fully recovered from it.
I think I keep working on EA stuff now because:
Itās my job and it would be difficult to find a better job even from a purely selfish perspective
I still care about making the world a better place (though not as much as I used to before burning out)
It feels easy and natural to work on EA stuff because my brain is used to think in the utilitarian way and because I hang out with other EAs all the time
However, I have little faith in humans knowing why they do anything so maybe these are not the real reasons.
Some more reasons why I think I keep working on EA stuff:
EA forumās karma system and comments make it motivating to participate here, Iām slightly addicted to it.
Iām embarrassed to admit it but I have a desire to impress other people and I try to do that by writing EA forum posts. I enjoy social status it gives me in some social situations, etc.
Iām afraid that in some cases these motivations lead me to work on things that are not the most impactful and I try to watch out for that.
Upvoted for being honest about status-related desires. Good to keep an eye on them but I think they can be useful motivators when theyāre pointing in the right direction!
Like a lot of EAs, I first became convinced of these ideas through Peter Singer.
I first read him, and Famine, Affluence and Morality in particular, when I was doing A Level religious studies in 2004 and from then on was convinced that we are obliged to give all excess wealth to the most effective charities (or do something else if that was more effective of course).
I then went to study Philosophy, directly inspired by this, and spent a lot of time telling anyone who would listen about these ideas with no effect whatsoever. I was particularly shocked and appalled that not only did none of the philosophers I encountered take these or any other actually-oriented-at-helping-the-world ideas seriously, but none seemed to take utilitarianism seriously. I was therefore pretty delighted to see Toby Ord announce his intention to give everything he earned over a certain amount to charity, since I thought all philosophers should be doing this, and Iāve been following EA ever since.
As to what now keeps me working on EA: it would be the awareness of the manifold terrible horrors (horrors so great that any individual experiencing them would pay almost any price to avoid them) constantly occurring in the world.
My background is in philosophy, so Iāve been familiar with (and convinced by) Peter Singerās work since roughly 2007. I first heard about EA in early 2015 when Will MacAskill gave a talk at UT Austin, where I was working on my PhD. He and I chatted a bit about Bostromās Superintelligence, which I happened to be reading at the time for totally unrelated reasons. Talking about AI safety and global poverty (the subject of Willās talk) in the same conversation was kind of a revelatory moment, and all of EAās conceptual pieces just sort of fell into place.
The thing that keeps me motivated is how intrinsically interesting I find my research. Of course I hope to make a difference, but my work is so far removed from immediate measurable impact that I donāt really think about that on a day-to-day basis.
I wrote about my EA origin story here.