"Calculate before you give"

Effective altruism is a recent movement that brings extensive rationality and altruism together. It aims to calculate the most effective way to spend your money or time in order to improve the world. The idea that one life can never be worth more than another is far embedded in the philosophy. Rather than just following the heart when wanting to do good, the intuitive feeling should be combined with reason and evidence, according to the people that adhere to this mindset.

In this episode, we talk with Amarins Veringa, who currently works as the community director of Effective Altruism the Netherlands. In the past, she researched the difference between ‘quality-adjusted life years’ (qalys) and ‘self-reported happiness’ as an output measure of altruism. Our second guest is Tim Bakker, a PhD candidate in machine learning. He took the Giving What We Can pledge. With this pledge, he vowed to give away part of his income to do a significant amount of good. We explore their choices and worldviews and talk about the underlying ‘science’ in altruism.