Effective altruism for me must extend beyond just charitable donations. For me it's about: what is my impact on the world, and how can I do the most good?

I thought this article did a great job of simply breaking down some of the available research about how non-monetary relationships are still a big part of the picture of doing the most good: https://theconversation.com/an-upward-spiral-how-small-acts-of-kindness-and-connection-really-can-change-the-world-according-to-psychology-research-237426

I'm currently working on a small project exploring the possibility of formulating a law that will encourage more people, especially the rich to donate more and donate strategically.

But I am confused. Does having a law for something like that even make sense? If it does, what would this law look like? What would the law adress to achieve the objective of accelerating Indian philanthropy?

These are some of the main questions that I have. I need to move out of this uncertainty before starting anything.

So could you all please share some of your insights?

Thank you so much for taking your time to read this post.

Hope you all have a great day!

EDIT: I am referring to the Republic of India. Sorry for the confusion.

Hi EA community, I'm Matt Coleman, the new Executive Director at Giving Multiplier (GM). I stumbled across some previous discussion (ex. 1, ex. 2) about GM from a few years back. Our platform introduces people to effective giving by encouraging donors to split between their personal favorite charity and one of our "super-effective" charities (recommended by experts from GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, etc.), while adding matching funds on top.

To provide a quick update, our matching rates have since gone up from a maximum of 45% to a maximum of 90% (the matching rate depends on the proportion of your donation allocated to the super-effective charity). Please let me know if you have any questions about the platform!

I also wanted to pass along a few resources on the psychology of effective charitable giving that have been published since the last post about GM by co-founders Prof. Joshua Greene and Dr. Lucius Caviola:

• "Effective Altruism and the Human Mind: The Clash Between Impact and Intuition" - free book by Lucius & Stefan Schubert (summarized in 5k words and available as an audiobook here)
• "The Psychology of (In)Effective Altruism" - academic paper (Caviola, Schubert, & Greene)
• "Boosting the impact of charitable giving with donation bundling and micromatching" - academic paper (Caviola & Greene)

https://preview.redd.it/qx33iavh8i3e1.jpg?width=429&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=281b29d588a287caa19c17e52b798ab701f83fcd

I’m not sure if this is where to post this and have a feeling that the one I posted in r/therapy will not be posted. But in r/suicidewatch, each and every day and night people from around the world are asking for someone to just listen for a bit, let them know they are heard, and let them vent if they are angry and need to vent. Every few minutes a new post, often unanswered by anyone, appears.

What is scaring me is seeing the shift to even younger teens posting, losing hope at such young ages. We are losing a lot of these people. People are isolated and alone and the simple act of being there for a bit can save an amazing life and so much pain for others. Thanks.

My name is Abdul I am 39 years old, living in Colorado, and I am reaching out to you with the hope of finding a kidney donor who could give me the chance to continue my life and care for my family. Nine years ago, I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, and despite fighting it every day since, my kidneys are now failing. My medical team is preparing me for dialysis, but my only true chance to live a healthy, productive life is a kidney transplant.

Over the years, I have endured a constant cycle of treatments, doctor’s visits, emergency room trips, and numerous side effects from the medications I need to manage my condition. The pandemic brought even more hardship, as my compromised immune system put me at high risk. My condition has worsened steadily over the last seven years, bringing me to the point of kidney failure, and I am now on the transplant waitlist. However, the wait time for a kidney can be years, and I am running out of time.

I am a father of three beautiful children, aged 9 months, 4 years, and 7 years. My biggest worry each day is for them and their future, as they are so young and need a father’s guidance, love, and support. Due to circumstances in my home country and financial challenges, I have not been able to see my family for many years since I arrived in the United States. I have no close relatives here who could be a potential kidney donor, leaving me alone in this struggle for survival.

I am reaching out to communities, organizations, and compassionate individuals through every avenue possible, hoping to find a match, someone who might be willing to donate a kidney and give me the chance to live. Every day, I think about my children and worry about what will happen to them if I cannot find the help I desperately need. Without this transplant, my ability to be there for my family, to care for my children as they grow, and to continue my journey as a productive member of society, is at risk.

I hope that by sharing my story, I can find someone who understands the urgency of my situation. My wish is to raise my children to be good citizens and to give back to the community that might one day help us in our greatest time of need.

If you or anyone you know would consider helping me, I would be forever grateful. You would be giving me the gift of life and the opportunity to care for my family and continue building a future for my children.

Thank you for reading my story and for any help you may be able to provide, whether by sharing this message or considering the possibility of donation. My family and I are grateful for your time and compassion.

With heartfelt gratitude, Colorado/ USA

Hey everyone,

I am a software engineer who had the opportunity to reduce his working days to 4 a few years ago and immediately jumped to the opportunity. It was a dream come true for me since I am an extremely introverted person barely spending money and just saw a "free day" in which I can enjoy life and forget the daily stress. Back then, I wasn't too much into charitable giving and gave away maybe 2% of my post-tax income to local charities on average, so it didn't really matter much.

However, after discovering the Effective Altruism movement and more recently reading up on its "classical literature" (currently at Peter Singer - oh boy does he make you feel like miserable moral monster), I'm starting to doubt if I can do this with a clean conscience. Recently I was trying to evaluate how much money I should save for my retirement/safety net vs. how much to donate, but while doing so I always had one thought in my head: "I could just increase the pool of money with one small decision". I have it in my hands to just work a single day more and I'd enable myself to give away pretty much double of what I do now. Especially when reading about the harsh comparisons - me working comfortably from home for one day vs. who knows how many people living in horrible conditions who I could save.

On the other hand - how healthy is this for me? Am I not allowed to also enjoy the opportunities I have?

I'm really curious about your thoughts on this and how other people in a similar position or with similar offerings dealt with it. These kind of "finding a balance" question are always tricky for me.

The EA Forum Donation Election is open for one more week! Which charities do you think the effective altruism community should allocate money to? Come vote, discuss, and donate. The top three winners will split the donation pot. Here is the current leaderboard:

https://preview.redd.it/87dblxsn8a3e1.png?width=578&format=png&auto=webp&s=9b677c20a231ca5435cee96a4331dc1126a38926

A summary of the current top 8 candidates (in alphabetical order), from their Marginal Funding Week posts/comments:

• I assume Against Malaria Foundation needs no introduction. Their immediate funding gap is $81.5M, which goes towards anti-malaria net distribution programs that are currently bottlenecked by funding. In 2021, GiveWell estimated that their average cost-effectiveness is $5,500 per life saved.
• Arthropoda Foundation actively supports research on farmed insect welfare. They list three specific research projects they would like to fund, and currently they would only be able to support one of them. With ~$120K more, they could fund them all.
• The EA Animal Welfare Fund grants money to a variety of projects working to improve animal welfare. They estimated that, in the coming 12 months, they could productively absorb and grant out approximately $6.3M more than they granted in 2024 at roughly a similar level of impact.
• Observatorio de Riesgos Catastróficos Globales (ORCG) is a science diplomacy organization working to improve global risk management in Spanish-speaking countries. While they have secured funding for their AI-related work, they describe specific projects in pandemic preparedness, food security, and risk management that are unlikely to move forward without additional funding.
• PauseAI US advocates for an international treaty to pause frontier AI development via protests and lobbying. They only have funding committed to the end of 2024, and are looking for $150K to stay operating through mid 2025.
• Rethink Priorities is a think tank that conducts research around how to do good, focusing on high-impact and neglected areas. They shared a long list of research projects they would do with additional funding. For example, since Good Ventures (the main funder behind Open Philanthropy) decided to exit grantmaking on farmed invertebrates and wild animals, projects in these areas are at severe risk without additional funding.
• The Shrimp Welfare Project aims to improve the lives of farmed shrimps worldwide. Additional funding will go towards their Humane Slaughter Initiative, providing electrical stunners to producers to minimize pain during slaughter. Each stunner costs $55K and they have estimated a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped / $ / year.
• Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) aims to accelerate science that helps wild animals, via research, fieldbuilding, and grantmaking. As GV is exiting this area, WAI needs to raise an additional $2.68M as a baseline to continue their existing work.

I only covered a portion of the candidates so that this post wouldn’t be too long — you can also read this post that has AI-generated summaries of all of them. As you can see, there are many projects that could do a lot of good with more funding. If you’d like to support them, we encourage you to donate to them directly! 😊

We’re excited to run Forum events that highlight effective giving and cause prioritization, and we hope that this event has given you some valuable information for your end-of-year donations. If you want to make this event better for the community while funding impactful charities, we’d love for you to donate to the election fund. 💜

Hi All,

I hope someone could help me out here.
I wanted to donate to the organisation "United to beat malaria" through their website. Unfortunatelly my payment doesn't go through. I suspect it might have somehting to do with the fact that I'm not based in the US (the donation page requires to choose a US State, even though I chose a country of residence which is not the US).
I also contacted them a couple of days ago but no answet yet.
Do you know if there's another way to donate to them, for example via Paypal?
Or is there another organisation with a similar cause whith a simple and effective donation process online?

Thanks in advance!

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found--

was blind, but now, I see.

--

'Twas grace that brought my heart to fear

and grace my fears relieved!

How precious did that grace appear

the hour I first received.

--

Through many dangers, toils, and snares

I have already come.

'Twas grace that bought me safe thus far

and grace will lead me home.

--

When we've been there a million years,

bright shining as the sun,

we've no less days to sing in joy

than when we first begun.

The system of education, human rights, bodily autonomy and democracy that have allowed me to be who I am and have allowed me to gain the career and financial ability to donate are all under attack.

I live in America and I increasingly regret prioritizing international interventions and not spending more resources defending the institutions and processes that allowed me to exist at all in the world. This isn't a rant, it's more of a sob for anyone younger who might hear this and understand.

America is undergoing both philosophical and cultural upheaval and I find that the vast majority of it targets me as an 'other' and as something they do not want more of, in any sense. I regret not spending more of my time and resources making sure I was seen and perhaps even valued in this community and I regret that so much of my work has put me directly or indirectly in contact with the wealthy who thought that doing good only mattered abroad.

So much of the funding within America as 'charity' has come from increasingly conservative, religious-affiliated, and extremist groups that have shifted the tone in dangerous ways. It was wrong to leave these communities without the same care and attention I and others have offered the international community.

The very self-flattering effective altruism calculations that assume international charity is the best investment fails to weight the possibilities that the people making the contributions will themselves be extinguished or their ability to do so in the future destroyed by their choices to ignore local concerns, or to leave local and national issues in the hands of people whose values are in no way allow a sustainable charitable framework or for effective altruism itself to continue.

Watching women in Texas die, for democracy to be under attack, for education to be under attack, for the careers of my closest collaborators and healthcare workers to be eligible for being 'fired' or laid off or defunded is more than upsetting. I regret not defending and investing in the local communities with the charity and goodwill and energy I would send abroad. I regret assuming people were safe.

I'm not saying one episode of NOVA or NPR funding or the NSF or W.H.O. funding, or a liberal arts college, is worth more than a life that can be saved with a mosquito net, I'm saying that by not defending all those institutions we are limiting the ability to produce people who value saving lives with mosquito nets. Effective altruism was not meant to be a method of suicide for the giver.

I don't know who to pass the torch to at this point and I deeply, deeply regret not spending more time with the local communities, teaching them why this matters and why the lives of minorities, LGBTQ+, women, the disabled, the vulnerable isn't some foreign excursion, it matters here too. It matters everywhere, all at once. I'm not that 'old' yet, but I'm old enough to need younger folks to figure out this out faster than I did.

I no longer feel that I have a community after having devoted my adulthood to trying to build them for others.

Doesn't it exist anymore? The donation swap system donationswap.eahub.org

Just adopted a new boy, almost a year old. Wondering how other vegans or vegetarians feed their dogs... Just conflicted

I’m a student looking at the relationships between leadership and climate change and am feeling a bit frustrated with the futility and navel-gazing of some of the research in the social science/ climate change space.

A lot of the research seems to be catered for an elite (e.g. how willing are flood victims to pay tax for climate mitigation?) rather than getting to the real root of the problem (e.g. how can fossil fuel companies be made to pay tax for their harmful externalities?).

There’s a small pit of dread in my stomach that I’m part of the problem. Any research I do on the matter now will likely not be published for another 1-2 years, and will then most likely sit behind a paywall and only accessed by people who are already concerned anyway. And as we know, in the meantime time’s running out.

Reflecting on what I’ve been reading the last few months, this is what I think an effective climate mitigation campaign targeting leaders of corporations could look like:

• Create a “carbon tracker” that targets the top 1000 or so people whose decisions are most paramount to climate mitigation. This could include CEOs/ CFOs of major corporations, the board members of these corporations, and institutional investors. It would be a bit like the infamous BP carbon tracker that put the onus on individuals to change their behaviours, instead illustrating how the decisions these people do/ don’t make could impact the amount of ghg produced and consequent global temperatures. It would help to remove some of the ambiguity some of these people may feel about their role and responsibility in the climate crisis.
• Research suggests that many investment decisions are guided by emotions. For example, investors may be more likely to have disproportionate investments in companies from their hometown. Use emotions to increase the salience of the climate crisis for leaders. Create pictures of what the conditions in their hometowns would be like under different emissions scenarios. Bring these images to their attention by placing them in ads that appear when they search for their name.
• Then create a “golden bridge” for these leaders, with a website or somesuch outlining the choices available to them that could best help mitigate the climate crisis. Examples could include stopping quarterly earning reports to better focus on long-term goals, committing to an evidence-based zero emissions pathway, creating sustainability units that have oversight over/interact with every area of their business.

Would be great to have a network of committed citizen researchers/ software engineers who could work on these strategies and ones like them. It could be called “Better Angels” or BA for short. Or could it be picked up/ driven by an environmental org? I have no organising experience/ no idea where to start. What do you think?

Title says it all