Week 1: The Effectiveness Mindset 

“We are always in triage. I fervently hope that one day we will be able to save everyone. In the meantime, it is irresponsible to pretend that we aren’t making life and death decisions with the allocation of our resources. Pretending there is no choice only makes our decisions worse." - Holly Elmore

Over the course of Week 1 and 2, we aim to introduce you to the core principles of Effective Altruism. This week we’ll investigate what opportunities to do good we have available to us; come to terms with the tradeoffs we face in our altruistic efforts, and explore tools that can help us find unusually high impact opportunities.

Some of this content has been created with people in high-income countries in mind, however, we hope it can still be valuable to fellows who aren’t from high-income countries. We are actively seeking ways to make this programme as useful as possible to people from all backgrounds, and welcome your feedback on ways it can be improved. 

Core materials

Please note: Throughout this fellowship, the core materials and exercises - for weeks that have them - will be the focus of your discussions sessions. Please treat these as mandatory. On the contrary, the recommended readings, criticisms, and more to explore sections are optional extra resources for you to look at if you’re especially interested.

  • Doing Good Better - Introduction up to and including Chapter 3 (70 mins.)

    • One important caveat on Doing Good Better is that its intended audience is people living in high-income countries. We understand that the premise of chapter 1, that you are in the global 1%, may not apply to everyone in this fellowship, and we do not wish for this to lead to feelings of exclusion.

    • The important things to consider when reading through Doing Good Better are the concepts and broad arguments it presents, as opposed to the specific examples it highlights. 

      • Chapter 1 highlights the tremendous privilege most people in high-income countries are born with, and the opportunities to do good that this presents if used effectively.

      • Chapter 2 discusses the use of quantitative reasoning when trying to allocate scarce resources.

      • Chapter 3 discusses the variance in impact between interventions, and the fact that some interventions are overwhelmingly more impactful than others.

  • We are in triage every second of every day (5 mins.)

Then check out these, which relate to how we’d like you to approach our discussion sessions:

Recommended reading 

Criticisms against RCT-based charities

More to explore