What is effective altruism?
Doing good better
Everyone wants to make a positive impact, but not all methods of doing good are equally effective—some can even cause harm. Effective altruism is a field of study and a community focused on discovering the best ways to do good and putting those ideas into action.
Our shared ideas
When choosing what to fund or work on we should not go for what's most personal or accessible to us.
We should focus on problems that are important, neglected, and tractable.
We should evaluate the work that policies and programmes do, and value transparency and clear evidence.
Our time is valuable, we can do a lot of good with our careers, and therefore we should think very carefully about how we spend them.
The world is threatened by existential risks, and making it safer might be a key priority.
The suffering of some sentient beings is ignored because they don't look like us or are far away.
What the EA community achieved so far
Animal Welfarae
We've worked to improve animal welfare by supporting corporate campaigns and legal reforms that have freed more than 100 million hens from battery cages.
Global Health & Development
We've prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths from neglected diseases by providing significant funding to organisations such as the Against Malaria Foundation.
AI Safety Research
We've pushed for safer technological progress by supporting initiatives such as CHAI, a research community at UC Berkeley, that works to ensure new artificial intelligence technologies benefit humanity rather than posing unacceptable risks.
Global Priorities Research
We've founded institutes that research global priorities. For example, the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, which works to identify the most pressing problems and provides ideas for how we might solve them.
Want to know more? Grab a coffee and read our introductory essay!
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