Four focus areas of Effective Altruism

Abstract

It was a pleasure to see all major strands of the effective altruism movement gathered in one place at last week's Effective Altruism Summit. Representatives from GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Effective Animal Altruism, Leverage Research, the Center for Applied Rationality, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute either attended or gave presentations. My thanks to Leverage Research for organizing and hosting the event! What do all these groups have in common? As Peter Singer said in his TED talk, effective altruism "combines both the heart and the head." The heart motivates us to be empathic and altruistic toward others, while the head can "make sure that what [we] do is effective and well-directed," so that altruists can do not just some good but as much good as possible.