Doing Good Better

How much good could you accomplish if you dedicated your life to helping others? Most people who want to make a difference assume they know the answer: work for a charity, buy fair-trade products, donate to disaster relief, or pursue a career in medicine or teaching. Yet these intuitive approaches to doing good may be far less effective than we imagine, and sometimes can even cause harm despite the best intentions.

The central challenge lies not in our motivation to help, but in our methods for determining which actions truly create the most benefit. When resources are limited and suffering is vast, the difference between a good use of time and money versus the very best use can be enormous. Through rigorous analysis of evidence, careful reasoning about trade-offs, and systematic comparison of outcomes, we can transform our charitable impulses into dramatically more powerful forces for positive change. This approach demands that we move beyond emotional appeals and traditional wisdom to embrace a more scientific methodology for doing good.

The fundamental thesis rests on a deceptively simple premise: if we genuinely care about helping others, we should focus relentlessly on which methods actually produce the greatest benefit. This principle challenges the conventional wisdom that good intentions naturally lead to good outcomes, or that all charitable acts are equally valuable simply because they stem from compassion.

Evidence reveals startling disparities in effectiveness between different approaches to helping others. Some charitable interventions accomplish hundreds of times more good than others that appear equally worthy. For instance, providing antimalarial bed nets can save a life for approximately $3,400, while other health interventions in wealthy countries might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve similar results. These differences aren't marginal – they represent order-of-magnitude variations in impact per dollar spent.

The core argument extends beyond charity to encompass career choices, consumption decisions, and advocacy efforts. A doctor who earns a high salary and donates half of it to the most effective global health charities might save more lives than one who works directly in a developing country clinic. Someone who carefully researches the most cost-effective environmental organizations could accomplish more through targeted donations than through years of individual lifestyle changes.

This framework requires abandoning the assumption that visible, emotionally satisfying, or personally meaningful actions are necessarily the most impactful. Instead, effectiveness becomes the primary criterion for evaluating how to help others. The most powerful altruistic acts may be invisible, technical, or focused on seemingly mundane interventions that happen to be extraordinarily cost-effective.

The logical foundation demands accepting that resources – whether time, money, or attention – are fundamentally limited. Given this constraint, choosing to help some people necessarily means not helping others. This reality transforms altruism from an expression of values into an optimization problem where every decision carries opportunity costs measured in human welfare.

Effective altruism employs five critical questions to evaluate any proposed intervention or charitable activity. These questions form a systematic framework for moving beyond intuition toward evidence-based decision-making about how to help others most effectively.

The first question examines scope and intensity: how many people benefit, and by how much? This requires quantifying outcomes rather than simply assuming positive impact. Many activities that seem helpful actually provide minimal benefit when measured carefully. Others might help small numbers of people in profound ways or large numbers in modest ways, creating complex calculations about total welfare improvement.

Question two addresses comparative effectiveness: is this the most effective thing you can do? Even demonstrably helpful activities may represent poor uses of resources compared to alternatives. The best charitable interventions often outperform merely good ones by factors of ten or one hundred. This comparative lens prevents satisficing – settling for any positive impact – and demands genuine optimization.

The third question investigates neglectedness: is this area receiving adequate attention and resources? Popular causes often attract disproportionate funding and talent, creating diminishing returns on additional contributions. Meanwhile, less visible problems may offer opportunities for outsized impact precisely because they lack sufficient resources. Natural disasters generate massive charitable responses while ongoing problems with higher death tolls remain chronically underfunded.

Question four examines counterfactuals: what would have happened otherwise? Many apparently beneficial actions would have occurred anyway through other actors or mechanisms. True impact comes from creating change that wouldn't have happened without your specific intervention. This consideration proves especially important in career decisions, where replacing yourself in one role to take another may produce little net benefit.

The fifth question evaluates probability and magnitude: what are the chances of success, and how good would success be? Some interventions offer modest benefits with high certainty, while others promise transformational change with low probability. Expected value calculations help compare these different risk-reward profiles, sometimes favoring high-impact long-shots over safer but smaller wins.

The framework transforms practical decision-making across multiple domains of life. Charitable giving requires moving beyond overhead ratios and emotional appeals toward rigorous evaluation of program effectiveness. The most efficient charities often work on unglamorous problems using proven interventions with strong evidence bases.

Organizations like GiveWell have revolutionized charity evaluation by focusing on cost-effectiveness rather than financial efficiency. Their research reveals that top-performing charities can deliver benefits hundreds of times greater than typical nonprofit organizations. Deworming children, distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, and direct cash transfers to extremely poor families consistently outperform more complex or intuitively appealing programs.

Career choices present more complex optimization problems involving personal fit, skill development, and long-term impact potential. Traditional advice suggests pursuing nonprofit work or "socially responsible" careers, but earning high salaries and donating large amounts may accomplish more good. A consultant who gives away half their income might save more lives than someone working directly for a health charity, depending on the relative effectiveness of financial contributions versus labor contributions.

Some careers offer low probability but extremely high potential impact through research breakthroughs, policy influence, or entrepreneurship. Expected value calculations can justify pursuing paths with uncertain outcomes if the potential benefits are sufficiently large. Political careers, academic research, and founding new organizations all fit this high-risk, high-reward pattern.

Consumption decisions generally prove far less impactful than commonly believed. Fair-trade products, local food, and ethical fashion often provide minimal benefits to their intended beneficiaries while creating meaningful costs for consumers. The most effective personal choices involve reducing carbon footprints through major lifestyle changes or offsetting emissions through proven environmental organizations.

The framework consistently reveals that money donated to highly effective organizations accomplishes far more good than equivalent spending on ethical consumption or most volunteering activities. This insight redirects attention from symbolic gestures toward substantive impact.

Choosing which problems to focus on requires systematic evaluation across multiple dimensions. Scale measures the total magnitude of a problem – how many people it affects and how severely. Neglectedness assesses how much attention and resources the problem currently receives relative to its importance. Tractability evaluates how solvable the problem appears given current knowledge and available interventions.

Global poverty scores highly on all three dimensions. Extreme poverty affects over one billion people in profound ways, receives relatively modest resources compared to domestic programs in wealthy countries, and has proven responsive to targeted interventions. Deworming programs, malaria prevention, and direct cash transfers all show strong evidence of effectiveness at remarkably low costs.

Other cause areas present different trade-offs between these factors. Climate change represents an enormous problem in scale but receives substantial attention and poses difficult technical and political challenges. Factory farming affects billions of animals but remains extremely neglected and may be more tractable through corporate campaigns and technological alternatives than through individual dietary choices.

Some promising cause areas combine large scale with unusual neglectedness. Pandemic prevention, nuclear security, and other global catastrophic risks could affect all of humanity but receive minimal resources relative to their potential impact. While these areas may have lower tractability due to uncertainty and complexity, their enormous scope can justify significant attention even with modest probabilities of success.

Emerging cause areas like artificial intelligence safety present extreme cases where the scale could be unprecedented, neglectedness is nearly complete, but tractability remains highly uncertain. These considerations require careful expected value calculations weighing low probabilities against potentially civilization-level consequences.

The framework suggests most people should focus on global poverty as a baseline cause with exceptional cost-effectiveness and strong evidence, while some individuals with particular expertise might contribute more by working on neglected problems with higher uncertainty but potentially greater impact.

Transitioning from theoretical understanding to practical implementation requires developing concrete habits and commitments. The most straightforward step involves establishing regular donations to highly effective charities, even in modest amounts initially. This creates accountability and begins building a track record of impact that can expand over time.

Career decisions demand longer-term planning and often benefit from gradual transitions rather than dramatic changes. Building career capital through skill development, networking, and credential accumulation can increase long-term impact even when initial positions don't directly address priority problems. The key insight involves thinking strategically about how current decisions affect future opportunities to make a difference.

Community support proves crucial for maintaining motivation and improving decision-making quality. Connecting with others who share similar values provides accountability, prevents value drift, and enables collaborative projects that amplify individual impact. Online forums, local meetups, and commitment mechanisms all help sustain engagement with effective altruism principles over time.

Information gathering and belief updating remain ongoing processes as new evidence emerges and circumstances change. Effective altruists should expect to revise their views about which causes and interventions deserve priority as research progresses and new opportunities arise. This requires intellectual humility and willingness to abandon previous commitments when better options become available.

The approach scales from individual decision-making to institutional applications as organizations, foundations, and governments increasingly adopt effectiveness-focused frameworks. This broader adoption could multiply impact by redirecting large resource flows toward higher-leverage interventions rather than relying solely on individual contributions.

The systematic application of evidence and reason to altruistic decisions can dramatically increase the amount of good accomplished with limited resources, transforming well-intentioned efforts into optimally effective interventions that maximize benefit for others. Rather than accepting that all helping behaviors are equally valuable, this approach demands rigorous comparison of outcomes and consistent prioritization of the most impactful available options.

This methodology offers particular value to individuals who want their charitable activities to reflect the same analytical rigor they might apply to professional or investment decisions, and to anyone seeking to maximize their positive contribution to addressing the world's most pressing problems through systematic evaluation rather than intuition alone.