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Throughout this class you are going to learn about a bunch of different terms and topics
and ideas. First one we're going to teach you about is a term called Effective Altruism.
This is actually an entire movement of people that want to do exactly what our class is
teaching, they wanna help the world in the best way possible. We're gonna break down
the term effective altruism into what it means very specifically, and explain it with a few
examples. First let's take the word altruism. Altruism
is a pretty simple concept, it's basically trying to help people whether you want to
call it kindness, or caring, or compassion, or altruism. When people think about altruistic
people, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, people like that come to mind. People
that really cared about the whole world or at least about a lot of people, and tried
to help them out in a big way. The second part of the term is effectiveness.
Effectiveness generally means doing something really well. Well when it comes to altruism,
what is doing something really well? Well it's helping more people, and it's thinking
about the results of your actions. So I'll give some examples to break those down, because
they seem like kind of obvious concepts but they break down to be really really important.
Let's say there is a person drowning, in fact there's two people drowning in the
ocean. And you're a pretty good swimmer, say you've had lifeguard training you can
swim out and save one of them. Or you can throw a life saver and save both of them,
which one do you do? Obviously you save both of them, that's the decision most people
make at least. This is trying to help more people, and it's a pretty simple example.
Another one that's a very common example of this is say there's a train, and it can
either go down one track and kill two people, or go down a different track and and kill
one person. Generally you'd prefer it to go down the track to kill the one person so
you can save at least one of the people, save two out of the three. This is another example
of trying to help more people. The next example is one that most people don't
think of quite as strategically. When you're donating to a charity, one charity if you
donate a hundred dollars to might save one person's life. And another charity if you
donate a hundred dollars to might save a hundred people's lives. Which one do you donate
to? Again the choice seems kind of obvious, but most people don't actually think about
this kind of stuff. Most people don't look at how much good their charity is actually
doing, we'll get into how to look at that specifically later. But this is an example
of helping more people, or utilitarianism is another term for it.
The second important concept here is that we're results focused. This is called consequentialism
sometimes, because what you care about is the consequence of your actions. So back to
the drowning example, say there's the two people drowning and you personally can go
and save one of them, or you can pay the buff guy standing next to you twenty dollars to
throw a life saver, cause say the lifesaver is too heavy for you to lift. Does it really
matter who throws the life saver and who actually saves the people? No, not really. What matters
is you saved the two people, that's consequentialism, that's caring about the results. It doesn't
matter whether it was you or the buff guy. Another example is most people have the idea
not to lie, this is kind of a principle a lot of people have, and this is a good principle
to have, but it depends on the situation, it depends on the consequence. Say a Nazi
came knocking to your door, asking where's your best friend. This might be an appropriate
time to lie, because the result of telling the nazi where your best friend is is quite
negative, where the result of lying might be less negative. So this is caring about
the results in that circumstance. Now again this all seems fairly straightforward of course
we care about the results, but let's take it to the charity again.
What if I have an option of taking a job at a charity and saving two hundred people over
a year. That's a pretty good job, saving two hundred people is a lot of people. But
say I also had the choice of taking a job unrelated to helping people, say as a computer
programmer where I could make enough money to hire three people to do the same job I
was about to do, that's saving 600 people. Which one's the better choice? Although
the obvious choice is actually going and working for the charity, the better choice when we
look at the numbers is paying other people to work at the charity, in that scenario we
save 600 people instead of two hundred, so it's obviously the better choice. The general
principle is it matters what the results are, not really who accomplishes them or how they
happen. So effective altruism to put it all together,
is trying to help the most people to can in the best way possible.