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The holiday season is a time to reflect on some important questions. How did the year go? Which gifts should you buy? What are the chances that over the next decade we’ll be wiped out by an evil artificial intelligence? How best to value the lives of shrimp? Don’t worry if the list seems overwhelming. Effective altruists are here to help.
The core idea of effective altruism (EA) is that doing good is good, but some things are more good than others. It is your duty, as a good person, to work out which is most good. You might think “but the world is multidimensional, so how could I possibly rank everything?” No. Not good. Try harder.
Doing the most good means applying cool-headed cost-benefit analysis to everything. Start with gift-giving. Ask whether your funds would be best spent on a new toy for your daughter, or an insecticide-treated bed net that could save someone’s life. Little Alma may not have much to open on Christmas Day, but she’ll soon learn to appreciate the gift of smugness. (If she doesn’t and threatens to burn the house down, the toy becomes the welfare maximising option.)
Holidays are a time to grapple with the concept of opportunity cost. Perhaps you shouldn’t be taking any time off at all, as working would generate income that could be used to do more good. Frankincense and myrrh are fine, but wouldn’t a donation of bed nets be better? If only Mary and Joseph were charged rent on the stable, the innkeeper could have used the money to donate deworming pills.
The Christmas meal is the perfect time to bring up the discussion over how to value a turkey’s life. Raise the point that birds are sentient and that to ignore their lives is to practise speciesism. If someone tries to shut down the conversation (“you make a good point, Steve, but this one is already dead so can we just have a nice time?”) start throwing around precise estimates of the probability that birds enjoy consciousness.
Take the opportunity of a family gathering to influence the younger generation to make the best career choice possible. Good options include averting nuclear war, protecting against another pandemic or minimising the existential risk associated with AI. If those seem a bit hard, there’s always the option of pushing the effective altruism movement, writing or promoting books about it, or arranging conferences in country manors to discuss it.
All that might seem a little remote to a child who would rather scoff mince pies than contemplate their life choices. So after the snap of a Christmas cracker, say “that’s the sound of humanity disappearing once AI overlords take over . . . Patrick, you’re our only hope.” If any parents angrily confront you (“stop trying to get our seven-year-old to join your cult”), explain patiently that you’re just community building.
These days, it shouldn’t be hard to motivate concern about pandemics or AI. To terrify children into caring about other risks that seem more remote, proceed in two steps. First, argue that every life matters whenever it is lived. Second, deploy the power of maths. Specifically, point out that a low probability (0.00000000146 per cent, or the chance that Santa is real and has decided that everyone is naughty) multiplied by a big number (one bazillion, the number of future children he could poison) is a big number (a squillion lives saved).
If you do choose to embrace effective altruism, you should heed two warnings. The first is that some of those you encounter around the Christmas tree may be aware of certain recent events. They may ask why the EA movement bet so big on Sam Bankman-Fried, a crypto-billionaire donor who turned out to be stealing his customers’ cash.
One response is that of course everyone was horrified to learn of the fraud. On December 13 the American and British branches of Effective Ventures announced that they had repaid all the money received from FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange. Effective altruists are a diverse bunch, but few believe that rules don’t apply when you’re trying to make money, even if there are bed nets at the end of it. Another response is “whoops”.
The final warning is that there is a small chance (around 7 per cent) that your tendency to analyse and quantify everything could make you a teensy bit insufferable. Few people want to sip mulled wine while contemplating a 17 per cent probability that an existential catastrophe will kill us all in the next century. Asking anyone who mocks you how much they give to charity is fine. Taking a joke well is better.
You can actually do good and give a seasonal gift like no other by bidding for lunch with Soumaya at ft.com/appeal. All proceeds go to the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign charity.
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