New Effective Altruism guide to download

I mentioned the concept of Effective Altruism in the last post. I think it’s a helpful framework for making life decisions about charitable work and giving. Maybe because I’m an American, I tend to see it as useful through the lens of pragmatism, to be held gently and carefully like one would hold a baby bird. Some actions aren’t worth funding, not only for their inefficiency, but because the outcomes are untested or the same outcome would have happened anyway.

But I won’t try to explain it, or even suggest the 2015 book Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (which I just finished) when you can get the same concepts free of charge in a PDF or e-reader formats from the Effective Altruism site.  This is a new, second edition and while I’ve not finished it, it looks like it would take you from initial concepts to intermediate action.

It may be unrelated, but I also find Effective Altruism sites to be well-designed and easy to use, for those who care about that kind of thing. Animal Charity Evaluators, for instance. And note how they report on their past mistakes. That’s worth emulating alone.

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