Note: these are actions that I recommend, but as stated before, the impact of your giving will be many times larger than your habits (unless you own a yacht).
Bike > Train > Car
Plants > Vegetarian > Meat
Sweater > Heater
Durable clothes > Fast fashion
Old phone > Newest phone
More on how your consumption impacts the world can be found in The Hidden Impact.
A final part of maximizing my impact is the effort I make in promoting Effective Altruism. I do this via the monthly meeting in Rotterdam which attracts between 5-30 people each month.
You can find the meetup here (600+ members). Or on Facebook.
Also find out more on our website (sign up for the newsletter there).
In future months I plan on also doing a fundraiser and making it easier for others to do fundraisers too.
Note: in the future I want to evaluate if my time doing this is worth it (does it even get others to donate? (yes I think) or make other significant changes (maybe))
Up to this point, I’ve explained some of the philosophy behind effective altruism and introduced a few of the concepts. I think that I should have everyone on board at this point, so here comes the conclusion of the above: You should give away a part of your money.
Let me explain why.
You are rich!
If you make €15.000 after taxes in The Netherlands, you are among the richest 10% of people in the world. Bump that up to a corporate salary of €40.000 after taxes and you’re in the top 1.5%.
You can calculate your own ‘richness’ with this calculator from Giving What We Can. The median income in the world is about €2.000.
Giving away money buys happiness
Spending money on yourself brings you happiness, it makes possible great experiences and beautiful things. But spending everything on yourself isn’t effective.
For instance, buying high-quality food at €10 will for instance add one unit of happiness (utilon) to your life. But somewhere around the world, that same €10 will buy a whole family of five, one unit of happiness, for two weeks, totaling 70 units of happiness.
This is but a very course example. Still, I hope it gets the point across that money somewhere else will have a larger effect on happiness than spending everything on yourself.
Giving away money buys you happiness
Experiments show that giving away money also ‘buys’ you happiness. When participants in the study spent the money on others, they reported higher levels of happiness than those who spend everything on themselves.
Just like caring about the people close to us, altruism is also something that is baked into our genes. All EA asks of you, is to take a global and impartial perspective.
Just give away a little
Giving What We Can, is an organisation that promotes giving to effective charities. They recommend giving 10% of your income. Or put the other way around, to spend 90% on yourself and loved ones.
This means that you can still go on vacation, have a caramel latte, drink beers at the pub, etc.
I have three tips for starting giving:
It doesn’t all have to be effective
Giving effectively isn’t the perfect way to buy happiness for yourself. Helping out at a soup kitchen (and not working those hours at your high-paying job) feels much better than donating the money you could have made in those hours. Giving to that handsome guy who wrangles people for donations feels like the right thing to do.
So, here are my suggestions for thinking about giving effectively, based on the essay ‘Purchase Fuzzis and Utilons Separately‘:
“Many people in poor countries suffer from a condition called trachoma. Trachoma is the major cause of preventable blindness in the world. Trachoma starts with bacteria that get in the eyes of children, especially children living in hot and dusty conditions where hygiene is poor. If not treated, a child with trachoma bacteria will begin to suffer from blurred vision and will gradually go blind, though this process may take many years. A very cheap treatment is available that cures the condition before blindness develops. As little as $25, donated to an effective agency, can prevent someone from going blind later in life.
How much would you pay to prevent your own child from becoming blind? Most of us would pay $25,000, $250,000, or even more, if we could afford it. The suffering of children in poor countries must matter more than one-thousandth as much as the suffering of our own child. That’s why it is good to support one of the effective agencies that are preventing blindness from trachoma, and need more donations to reach more people.”
This argument from the eminent philosopher Peter Singer illustrates many of the underlying principles of EA. According to my interpretation, they are the following.
Do Good
EA asks of you to think about how you can do good. This is a bit of an open door and at the same time a profound question. How can you use a part of your resources (e.g. time and money) to do the most good?
Utilitarianism (or consequentialism) is the philosophical way of thinking that most closely aligns with EA. This ethical theory promotes actions that maximize happiness and well-being. Or put the other way around, reduces suffering the most.
Impartiality
Impartiality means that decisions (about doing good) should be based on objective (often measurable) criteria.
But, as the example above shows, we do care about our children/family/friends more than strangers. And that is normal, that is how our brains are wired. And we should care about the people close to us.
At the same time, we live in an age of affluence. If you have a new smartphone, get coffee outside the house, or vacation to the other side of the world. Then you should be able to give a little to others, and when thinking about how to do this, impartiality should be the starting point for this.
The ‘veil of ignorance‘ thought experiment asks you a simple question: What if you were born at a random place on this earth, how would you want the world to look? If you could have been born anywhere, would you want the affluent to give to those in need?
Thinking about impartiality also brings up questions around caring (as much) for animals and people who will live in the future, I hope to answer these in later parts.
Measure What Matters
A company would be crazy not to measure how much profit they were making. They aren’t perfect at it, but they try their best to do so. So, what if I told you that until relatively recently most charities didn’t measure the outcomes of their actions.
GiveWell, one of the key EA organisations, in 2007 started researching how much good charities were doing. At that time data on how much charities were helping was scarce.
I do need to make two clarifications here. Charities do work, and as you will see some do much more than you expect. At the same time, not everything can be measured and it can be difficult to compare between charities.
Two terms that you may hear in the EA community are the following:
DALY is mostly used as a societal measure (the total burden of a disease), QALY measures the benefits (the added good years by an intervention like bednets against malaria).
Effective
Using these terms, it becomes possible to compare the impact between charities, and (a bit more abstractly) broader actions like your career choice and behaviours like food and travel choices. What will become clear below is that giving usually has a much larger effect than individual actions.
EA considers the effectiveness of charities among a variety of factors. Here are so of them:
Neglected as a term can also be explained by the concept of counterfactual reasoning. This poses the question: What would have happened if I didn’t do X? For instance, if I didn’t donate, would someone else have taken my place?
When asked about your career, a counterfactual may lead to surprising results. What if I give up the high paying job that allows me to donate much and do direct charity work (where I’m ‘average’ in doing the work), would that bring extra good to the world?
And through this lens, you can also better evaluate the following statement:
Giving money to a charity that is promoted by someone handsome on the street or at your door is most likely not effective.
Finally, the effectiveness of different charities is widely different. The QALY (added positive years) of malaria nets or deworming is 100s of times greater than giving money to sponsor the opera, make a football court for kids, or even providing food for the homeless.
As I will argue in the end of the next session, it may still be good to give some to these charities, but most of it should go to where it’s most effective.
The goal of Effective Altruism is doing as much good as possible for the world. It’s a personal commitment to improving the lives of others. And it’s a global movement of other altruists who are also doing good.
To me, Effective Altruism (EA) is both deeply emotional and rational. The ‘why’ comes from your heart. The ‘how’ comes from thoroughly and fairly evaluating what action the most good.
EA asks of you to make a commitment to doing good. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t require you to devote your whole life to charity. You can live a normal life. It will be a life that is just a little more fulfilling, just, and fair.
My commitment is to give to an effective charity (10% of income), be conscious about my personal impact (habits), and promote EA. My work should also be net-positive at the end of the day, adding happy years to the world.
EA covers many domains and can sometimes be overwhelming. Altruists in the (global) community have worked on everything from effective donations to career advice. Just start with one of the areas below and take your time to discover what is out there.
This page covers my understanding of EA and aims to give you a window into what it’s all about and how you can contribute. See this as an invitation to explore the world of effective altruism, and always feel free to shoot me an email.
Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers is a great little book with life advice from a man who has figured out some good things about life. The thinking is clear, concise, and evergreen. Definitely a book to re-read/listen to (parts of) again every year or so.
First/key idea in this blog post. And great supplement here.
“Use this rule if you’re often over-committed or too scattered. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.” When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!” Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.”
And another great idea is one about being now or future focussed.
—
Also see this review (selected experts) by Josh Spector.
Measure What Matters by John Doerr is the management book around goal setting as a company. From legendary investor John Doerr and influenced by Bill Campell (executive coach), and full of examples from Google and the like.
The core of the book should also be possible to be applied to oneself. So let’s dive in.
Too much to read? Watch John Doerr’s TED Talk about OKRs (11min)
“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
Objective: what is to be achieved
Key Results: how we get to the objective
Goals can be harmful, people can only work towards them and ignore opportunities and ‘goal-hack’. But don’t be mistaken, goals are necessary (insert Yogi Berra quote 😉 ).
Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction.
The rest of the book dives deeper into the ‘superpowers’ of OKRs:
and the applications and implications
OKR Hygiene
chapters 4, 5, and 6
“What is most important for the next three (or six, or twelve) months?”
Many people can’t name the priorities of their companies (or themselves for that matter).
“… nothing moves us forward like a deadline.”
Quarterly OKRs are advised.
You need to pair OKRs to measure both effect and counter-effect. This means quality and quantity. Or speed and robustness. Only measuring one can lead to goal-hacking.
OKRs also mean that you don’t work on other things. These are the projects that need to get done, you can only work on another project if you update your OKRs.
“The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”
“Put more wood behind fewer arrows.”
Chapters 5 and 6 are examples from two companies that implemented OKRs.
“Instead of reacting to external events on the fly, we’re acting purposefully on our plans for each quarter.”
chapters 7, 8, and 9
OKRs lead to alignment because you know what everyone/the company is working on (and only 7 percent of employees fully understand the goal of a company).
Chapter 7 has an example of OKRs for a football team, some good, some bad.
OKRs should work towards the greater goal, but also can/should come from bottom-up. At that level, people know best what to do to achieve the goals. Doerr says 50-50 is a good mix.
OKRs may be internal (do X) or external (get Y revenue). Depending on the phase of a company and how much you know of the environment, you can finetune this.
One good (alignment) question to ask is: Will this thing work towards our North Star?
chapters 10 and 11
OKRs can be tracked, and revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.
Cloud-based software could help with:
Track the goals for yourself (weekly, monthly, or whatever frequency works best). Preference of Doerr is weekly.
Then you can choose the following:
Scoring (at Google) is done as follows. A bit objective with subjective ‘did I put in the effort’ mixed in:
Always reflect on the progress made, as also to inform making new OKRs.
Possible questions:
After this feedback, take a breath to savour your progress.
chapters 12, 13, and 14
“If companies don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die – and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.” – Bill Campbell
Google divides their OKRs into two buckets
Stretch goals should be fine-tuned to an organisation. You should have some, but not all. And they shouldn’t be ‘fly to Mars next year’, but ‘build a working rocket next year’ (difficult, but remotely possible).
(fun fact: it was Susan Wojciki’s garage where Google started, she was employee nr 16 and YouTube’s 10x’er)
OKRs can also be seen as the ‘big rocks’ (Stephen Covey). Do those first, then add smaller and smaller pebbles and sand (to fill a jar).
chapters 15 and 16
“A manager’s first role is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence … the creation of a community.” – Peter Drucker
This is in response to not everything being able to be captured by numbers, by OKRs.
The idea is that OKRs get coupled to continuous performance management in the form of:
What is noted again is to decouple OKRs from compensation (otherwise the goals will be too low/high/goal-hacked). Feedback from the team and context is more important for compensation. (see graph p182)
Conversations
The conversations are driven by the subordinate. It’s about goal setting/adjusting, update on progress (what works/doesn’t work), coaching both ways, career growth, mini-performance review.
Feedback
Specific feedback to gauge if you’re doing well, what others need from you, etc. Also, feedback on the company.
Recognition
Continuous, peer-based, objective, sharing stories, tied to company goals and strategies.
chapter 17
Story about Zume, but alas OKRs didn’t help them in the end.
chapters 18, 19, and 20
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – saying/John Doerr.
Culture is the parts that include someone that champions the goals (OKRs) and others that help others and motivate (CFRs).
This part is a bit more vague, but it comes down to having a culture where people are going in the same direction, OKRs can help with getting that so.
“If you want to cut a man’s hair, is it better if he is in the room?” – Senegalese saying
“Ideas are easy; execution is everything.” – John Doerr
Objective
Key Results
Review
Broken Stars is an anthology of short stories by different Chinese writers. They are collected by Ken Liu (an awesome writer in his own right). I can’t say that I enjoyed every story as much, but there are some really innovative ones in there.
I don’t have the best mental map of Chinese history (but do know some things), so a lot of the subtle hints when using historic rulers/periods do get lost on me.
And I think I like sci-fi that plays with concepts (e.g. time) more than those that incorporate too much historic or today’s concepts.
The stories are:
*”I’ts simple when you put it like that right? What doesn’t make sense to me is this: lots of times, when the starting point and the destination are fixed – say, birth and death – why do most people rush towards the end?“
Network Effect by Martha Wells is the fifth installment in the Murderbot Diaries series. It was a bit longer than probably necessary and I wasn’t totally focussed, so it wasn’t as engaging as with the earlier editions.
See a fuller review here.
This year my theme is Upgrade. The goal is to use the things I already know, and apply/improve/renew it to build more new things.
Besides the goals listed below, the biggest thing I’ve done is to start a Zettelkasten. This is a method of making (atomic) notes that are heavily interlinked. The program I’m using for this is Obsidian.
The main feature is the idea that you can link, well, ideas, between different topics. So instead of containing everything to one book review (where I already did some linking to other concepts too), its main function is interlinking.
Another tool I might use is Anki, which is a flashcard program. I think this is for slightly different knowledge, things you want to remember (separately). So individual concepts, but also facts (e.g. when Rome was built, or when someone’s birthday was).
The division of different types of knowledge (notation) would then be as follows:
For instance, reading a book would mean the following:
Alright, that was a lot about how I keep track of things. Over the next few months I think the system will keep evolving and I hope to settle on something that helps me stay productive, focussed, and fulfilled.
Now onto the goals.
Goal 1: Write Nova (and possibly other short stories)
Still on hold, maybe something to do during a small ‘vacation’.
Goal 2: Improve this website
Already done in the first quarter. I do plan to add a dark mode, for which I have made the basics, but need to further finetune it.
Goal 3: Do something crazy for love
Not yet, but have planned a fun day for Lotte’s birthday.
Goal 4: Write essays about 6 topics
After the first two, I haven’t really progressed much. I started with music production but found I didn’t like it at this time. Then I worked on my stretching routine and have added a lot to the fitness page, but still need to write up one article about stretching itself.
I plan to do that this week.
The next one after that is probably plant-based or Effective Altruism.
Goal 5: Start a new and successful venture
You can check out the progress/projects under this venture at Blossom Act.
The last three months have still been an exploration. But things are starting to become more clear. I haven’t made any revenue, but see a way forward towards that soon.
With COVID, the in-person practice hasn’t started, but let’s see if this quarter (especially with not going on vacation), that could be done sooner than later.
Alright, that brings this update to an end. I’m still really satisfied with how life is going. And really happy that I can spend my time as I please. Things with Queal are still going well and this quarter we will celebrate its 6th birthday.