Reddit mentions of Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

:-) You are not alone with that concern. You are absolutely right that there are a ton of organizations that receive millions and millions in donations, yet hardly do any good at all with the money. The donors who donate to these organizations typically feel good about their donations, yet the reality is that the donations are often spent quite wastefully and up doing very little, which I find quite sad.

There is a community of like-minded people to you and I that celebrates the concept of "effective altruism", the idea that people ought to use reason and evidence to identify the most effective ways to help others and improve the world (including the most effective charities to donate to, that actually effectively help others).

I would encourage you to check out some of the materials at the links I provided, such as this brief introductory essay or this video.

> I'd rather my money be directly responsible for helping someone else. I have a soft spot for homeless men and women because I know how it feels to want to give up. I do pity those who waste it all on more drugs and alcohol, but I try to find ways to help them other than just giving them cash. Liberty breeds personal responsibility.

One of charity-evaluator GiveWell's top charities is GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly "transfers cash to households in developing countries via mobile phone-linked payment services. It targets extremely low-income households."

If you read up on GiveWell's research and analysis of GiveDirectly I think you will find that not only does donating to GiveDirectly do a lot of good (much more than giving money to a homeless person in the US or other developed country (e.g. for reasons that this great intro book explains)), but also that you will feel very good about donating to GiveDirectly for the same reason you feel good about donating to homeless people in your community.

Let me know if you decide to donate to GiveDirectly or one of GiveWell's other top charities. I will extend your match me offer and match your donation to one of these charities.

I think these are all great. I would also recommend MacAskill's Doing Good Better. It's a book-length exploration of effective charitable giving, inspired by Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

We've been working on that for several years now as a matter of fact.

The Effective Altruism Handbook is good.

80,000 Hours has career advice.

Will MacAskill has a popular book on it called Doing Good Better.

But the goal here isn't to explore utilitarianism as a theory and see how it works in the real world; rather the goal is to apply utilitarian logic to find actions which are still maximally beneficial according to a broad set of moral values.

Academic here—probably one of the jobs with the worst pay per year spent in education.

I don't care if other people make as much money as me. I'd still have no desire to be serving sandwiches at Subway. I'd rather have the respect and satisfaction that comes from planning and delivering my own courses, being addressed as professor, researching topics of interest to me, etc.

I was reading a book recently that summarized the research on job satisfaction, and it was broken down into five categories:

1. Independence
   
2. Sense of completion
   
3. Variety
   
4. Feedback from the job
   
5. Contribution ("making a difference")
   
   Working at Subway would fail on at least three of those criteria: independence, variety, and making a difference.
   
   I don't want to be the one working such an unsatisfying job, but someone has to do it. I'd be happy for those workers to receive decent compensation. There's still no way I'd voluntarily trade places with them.

That's sometimes an oversimplification. William MacAskill talks about this a bit in Doing Good Better, where he mentions that only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation while 80% comes from production. For that reason, what you eat is much more important than where you get it from; if you eat an animal that had to eat many times more calories than it is providing you, you're using more resources than you would from eating something different, even if it costs a bit more to transport the food.

Beyond that, sometimes the exact same food can have a greater carbon footprint even if it's grown locally. A swedish study found that tomatoes grown in Sweden use up five times as many resources as those grown in Spain, because heating and lighting greenhouses costs much more than transportation does. That would be true even if you were getting the tomatoes from right next door; sometimes, transportation costs aren't the most important concern to look at.