The Nonlinear Fund

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA covered on "Stuff You Should Know" Podcast, published by Jonah Boucher on March 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Stuff You Should Know - hosted by Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from HowStuffWorks.com - is regularly a top ten downloaded podcast and has over one million weekly downloads. Today they posted the episode called “How Effective Altruism Works” with this description:

A branch of philanthropy led by philosophers is dedicated to finding the most impactful ways to help humans survive and thrive. Anyone can find that agreeable, but it can be tough to hear it also means your donations to local charities are kind of a waste.

The episode is 54 minutes long with introduction, breaks, and listener mail taking up 12 minutes. Listening at 1.5 speed it would take about 30 minutes. Below is an ~7 minute read summarizing their conversation with timestamps.

Note: I lightly edited direct quotes for clarity

3:45 Introduction. They reference their recent Short Stuff: Charity Tips episode (which heavily featured GiveWell), but note how some of their advice from that episode conflicts with what Chuck says EA recommends: “The only way you should give is just by coldly calculating what would help a human the most on planet earth.” Josh notes, “It is a very polarizing idea if you just take it at its bare bones.if everybody would just move past the most extreme parts of it and just take EA at its most middle ground.it would be really difficult to disagree with the ideas behind it.” Josh says it’s the associations with Peter Singer and “silicon valley billionaires” that get people all riled up.

6:13 A few things that “EA is,” according to Chuck:

1) A lot of good can be done with money.

2) If you can provide for yourself, you should probably be giving to charity.

3) You can literally save human lives.

Josh defines Quality Adjusted Life Years and highlights that “basically everybody living in the US can afford to give 10% of their income and forgo some clothes or some cars to help other people literally survive. So right off the bat we’ve reached levels of discomfort for the average person that are really tough to deal with. That’s the first challenge that EAs have to do: Tamp down the overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility and shame at not doing that.”

8:38 History and main organizations. EA “took hold in 2010.” They reference the Center for Effective Altruism and say Toby Ord and Will Macaskill founded Giving What We Can to start the movement. Then they mention Benjamin Todd and 80,000 Hours, The Life You Can Save, and Animal Charity Evaluators. Josh speaks very highly of Toby Ord based on how Ord’s work influenced his 2018 podcast project The End of the World with Josh Clark about existential risks.

11:20 Will Macaskill’s core commitments of EA:

1) Maximizing the good (“Which we can all pretty much get on board with”)

2) Aligning your ideas/contributions to science with evidence rather than your heart (“A tough one for people to swallow.”)

3) Welfarism.

4) Impartiality (“That’s a tough one.harder for people to swallow than science alignment.”)

They note that out of $470B Americans donate annually, only $25.9B goes outside of America. Chuck says that the idea of EA is to “shatter your way of thinking about trying to help the people in your city or state or country and to look at every human life as having equal value. And not even human life, but every life!”

Josh adds, “If #4 holds, then, from a strict EA perspective you are wasting your money if you are an American donating it in America. A dollar can do exponentially more in poverty stricken parts of the world than it can in the United States.” He laments, “It’s just a huge jagged pill that they are asking people to swallow, but if you can step back from it, what they are ultimately saying is ‘Look man, you want t...

https://www.listennotes.com/e/bc2565ade6d74f75ac36410a82569ff9/