--- title: Effective altruism description: My personal involvement with effective altruism author: Issa Rice creation_date: 2015-01-02 last_major_revision_date: 2015-08-02 language: English # accepts "notes", "draft", "in progress", or "mostly finished" status: draft # accepts "certain", "highly likely", "likely", "possible", "unlikely", "highly unlikely", "remote", "impossible", "log", "emotional", or "fiction" belief: possible # accepts "CC0", "CC-BY", or "CC-BY-SA" license: CC-BY tags: ea --- [**Effective altruism**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism) (EA) is "a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to determining the most effective ways to improve the world". On this page I describe my personal involvement with EA. # Personal involvement I've been involved with the effective altruism community for some time. I first heard about EA through [LessWrong]() (I think it was a post about GiveWell). I remember reading [Holden Karnofsky's critique of the Singularity Institute](http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/) (now [MIRI](http://intelligence.org)) right when it came out (May 2012), and I remember it reaching the status of "most upvoted LW post ever". Although I was [intellectually in agreement with effective altruism](https://www.quora.com/As-someone-who-is-intellectually-in-agreement-with-effective-altruism-but-hasnt-started-earning-money-of-my-own-how-can-I-best-contribute-to-the-Effective-Altruism-Forum), I didn't actually do anything about it, thinking that working hard in school would be a form of altruism (i.e. that in the long term, working hard in school and having more opportunities would allow me to best contribute to the world). In January 2014, I contacted [Cognito Mentoring]() for the first time. Although I myself didn't seem to ask directly about EA (looking back at our correspondence), a friend contacted them regarding effective career choice, and this roused my interested in effective altruism as well. In [July 2014, I attended a Seattle Effective Altruists meetup](https://www.facebook.com/events/266352430227314/)[^why]; although I didn't contribute much to the discussion, my interest in EA increased. [^why]: Part of this was due to my interest, but part of it too was that I was working on a research project at the University of Washington over the summer, and the July meetup was conveniently situated next to campus---so the activation energy had been considerably lowered. The topic of the meetup was also "Donating vs. Working directly for impact", which was a topic of particular interest to me going into college. Following my first meetup was a period of several months where I frequently attended Seattle EA meetups. I also became more involved in online discussions of EA, and eventually in November 2014 started the [Cause Prioritization Wiki](http://causeprioritization.org/) as a place to store my research on [cause prioritization](). Also around this time, I tried to start an [effective altruism group at the University of Washington](https://www.facebook.com/groups/EffectiveAltruismUW). The group hasn't gotten much traction, so as of August 2015, the group has only had one meetup in November 2014. I continue to be involved in online discussions of EA, but have since become less involved in Seattle EA meetups. # Beliefs Although I think effective altruism is [pretty cool](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Social_Network#Sean_Parker), I've only been consistently impressed with a few people associated with the movement. I think EA uses a [clever definition](http://effective-altruism.com/ea/df/the_outside_critics_of_effective_altruism/26u) to make it irrefutable in some sense, which makes discussion and criticism of it difficult. I'm highly uncertain about what the best causes are, which is part of the reason I'm interested in cause prioritization (but again, I'm not even sure if cause prioritization is very valuable---it just seems like a promising thing to try out for a while). # Links I have a collection of [Effective altruism links]() that might interest people.