User:Vipul/Effective altruism focus areas

Focus areas
Effective altruism is not attached by definition to any particular cause or focus area, and is open to different areas with potential for doing the most good. However, people in the effective altruist movement have in recent years focused on a few specific focus areas:


 * 1) Global poverty alleviation
 * 2) Animal welfare
 * 3) The far future, including global catastrophic risks. This includes but is not limited to those who seek to bring about friendly artificial intelligence.
 * 4) Effective altruist movement-building

Global poverty alleviation
Global poverty alleviation has been a focus of some of the earliest and most prominent organizations associated with effective altruism. Charity evaluator GiveWell has argued that the value per unit money is much greater for international poverty alleviation and developing world health issues, and its leading recommendations have been in these domains (Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Deworm the World Initiative, and (earlier) VillageReach in global health, and GiveDirectly for direct unconditional cash transfers). Giving What We Can focuses on global poverty alleviation and the language of its initial Pledge also focused on that, though they later changed the language of the pledge to be more inclusive. Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save focused heavily on the moral imperative to donate more because of the extreme poverty that exists in our midst.

While much of the initial focus was on direct strategies such as heath interventions, cash transfers, micropayments and microloans, there has also been interest in more systematic social, economic, and political reform that would facilitate larger long-term poverty reduction.

Animal welfare
A number of effective altruists believe that reducing animal suffering is a worthwhile goal, and that, at the current margin, there are low-cost ways of accomplishing this. The main organization in this area that is also connected with effective altruism is Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE, formerly called Effective Animal Activism), a subsidiary of the Centre for Effective Altruism that evaluates and compares various animal charities.

Many animal welfare advocates focus on reducing the suffering inflicted by humans on animals through practices such as factory farming, and believe that promoting vegetarian or vegan diets, and generally spreading awareness about the harms of factory farming, are good options. A number of animal welfare advocates are additionally concerned about reducing wild animal suffering, including the suffering of insects (and in particular, ants, who form a substantial fraction of the earth's animal population).

The ethical imperative of being vegetarian is not a consensus view among effective altruists, and many people affiliated with the movement have been critical of it.

Charity evaluator GiveWell has looked into animal suffering in factory farms as part of GiveWell Labs (now the Open Philanthropy Project).

Far future and global catastrophic risks
The importance of the far future, specifically the idea that the total value of any meaningful metric (wealth, potential for suffering, potential for happiness, etc.) summed up over future generations far exceeds the value for people living today, has been highlighted in the work of two philosophers closely associated with the effective altruist movement:


 * Nick Bostrom has written about the "astronomical waste" in terms of value lost to future generations due to delayed or botched technological development today.
 * In his Ph.D. thesis, philosopher Nick Beckstead has highlighted the overwhelming importance of the far future and therefore of any steps we can take in the present that would affect the trajectory of the far future.

Some organizations that work actively on research and advocacy for improving the far future, and have connections with the effective altruist movement, are the Future of Humanity Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and Future of Life Institute. In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is focused on the more narrow goal of developing friendly artificial intelligence before unfriendly artificial intelligence.

The Open Philanthropy Project, a collaboration of GiveWell and Good Ventures, has looked into a number of global catastrophic risks (GCRs), including the risk of unfriendly artificial intelligence.

Effective altruism meta
Some effective altruists believe an important focus at present is in improving effective altruism itself.

Some of the focus is on building a movement and community with more members and moving and controlling larger sums of money. Another focus area is improving the underlying knowledge base and understanding of relevant background facts about the world that would help with effective allocation of future funds and resources.

Donation (financial contribution)
Most narrowly construed, effective altruism is about making one's donations in a way that does the most good. There are two related aspects to this: how much to donate and what to donate to. Charity evaluator GiveWell focuses largely on the latter question, by identifying the best giving opportunities and the extent of room for more funding available to them. Giving What We Can aims to address both aspects: its Pledge encourages people to commit to a minimum amount they should donate, and its top charity recommendations help people determine where to donate.

There are a few subtleties associated with the donation question, including the following:


 * Is it better to give now or give later?
 * Is it better to take a job to maximize for the amount one can donate (also known as earning to give) or to take a job to maximize for direct positive social impact through the job?
 * Should one donate merely to maximize the direct impact of one's donation, or in order to maximize the indirect impact by encouraging other people to donate?

Career selection
Selection of one's career is an important determinant of the amount of good one does, both directly (through the services one provides to the world) and indirectly (through the ways one directs the money earned based on the career). 80,000 Hours seeks to provide career advice to people with effective altruist goals to help them maximize their positive impact, and claims that careers should be selected based both on the immediate impact (including impact through the job and by donating money earned) and building career capital (that can be used to do other things later).

Ethical consumption
While many effective altruists support the idea of living frugal and minimalistic lifestyles, their main motivations for doing so are to save money so as to be able to donate more rather than any intrinsic virtue of living frugally.

One of the main areas where a number of effective altruists care about the ethics of consumption choices is eating meat and animal products. Many effective altruists are vegetarian or vegan because they believe that killing animals for food is unethical.