Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Most of us are taught to care about what's happening right in front of us. The people we can see, the problems we can touch. But this focus on the near and visible may lead us to ignore vast amounts of suffering that we could address — suffering that is just as real, even if it is distant or statistical.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Most people think about doing good in the world in terms of the causes they care about — animal welfare, climate change, poverty. But the choice of cause is only one factor in maximizing your impact. An equally important factor is your choice of career, because this determines how much you can contribute to any cause you care about.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you think about what makes someone a good person, you might think about their values, their character, their integrity. But researchers who study effective altruism argue that being a good person is not enough — you also have to think carefully about how to translate good intentions into good outcomes.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you want to make a difference, the things that feel the most natural — giving to causes that are close to you, that touch your heart, that are tied to your own experience — are often not the most effective ways to help. Our emotional responses are not calibrated to the scale of need in the world.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Most people assume that if they want to help others, they should focus on doing good in their immediate surroundings — helping neighbors, giving to local charities, volunteering in their communities. But the data suggest this impulse, while understandable, can lead us away from doing the most good we can do.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you want to do the most good in the world, you should think carefully about where to direct your efforts. The problem is that our intuitions about impact are often badly miscalibrated — we're drawn to problems that are visible and emotional rather than problems that are large and tractable.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you want to help others, you should be aware that a lot of the most important work happens in unglamorous places, doing unglamorous things. The problems that are easiest to see and that tug most at our heartstrings are not always the problems where we can do the most good.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

If you want to help, your goal should not be to feel good about helping. Your goal should be to actually help. And the trouble is that the strategies that make us feel best about our giving are often not the strategies that do the most good.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

If you want to make a difference, the best thing you can do is to give to the most effective charities, not the ones that make you feel the best. The difference in impact between the most effective charities and average charities isn't 10% or 50% — it's often 100 times or more.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us have been taught that the way to make a difference is to follow your passion. But when researchers studied the most effective altruists — people who are actually doing the most good in the world — they found that passion had little to do with it.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us think about the problem of how to do good in the world the wrong way. We focus on what's in our hearts — whether our motives are pure — rather than thinking carefully about the effects of our actions. But doing good is actually a skill, and like any skill, it requires learning, feedback, and sustained effort.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

If you want to make a difference, the truth is that some ways of helping are far more effective than others — and the differences between them are not marginal. They can be enormous, sometimes a factor of 10, 100, or even 1,000 times more impactful.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us know that we should give to causes we care about, but we rarely stop to ask whether the charities we support are actually effective. When psychologist Paul Bloom looked at how people make charitable decisions, he found something troubling: we are far more moved by a single identifiable victim than by statistical evidence of mass suffering.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us are limited in how much we can give. But what if the key to maximizing our impact isn't just giving more, but giving smarter? Research by psychologist Paul Bloom and philosopher Peter Singer suggests that where you donate matters enormously — that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us think of ourselves as moral people. We believe we care about the world, and that we would help those in need if given the chance. But what if our good intentions are actually getting in the way of doing real good? What if feeling moral is crowding out being moral?

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

If you want to help others, you might assume the best approach is to focus on problems that affect the most people. But our guest says that's not quite right. She argues that what matters most isn't how many people are affected by a problem, but how many people are already working on it.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most people think about doing good in terms of the actions they take — the causes they support, the donations they make, the volunteer hours they put in. But researchers who study effective altruism say there's a factor that dwarfs all of these in importance: career choice. The career you choose will determine how much money you have to give, what skills you develop, and what problems you're positioned to solve.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us want to make a difference in the world. But when we try to figure out how to do that — how to direct our time and money — we often fall prey to a predictable set of biases. We're swayed by emotional appeals rather than evidence. We give to causes that are visible rather than causes that are most in need. And we vastly underestimate how much good we can do.

Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Most of us want to help others, but we often focus on the wrong things. We tend to act in ways that feel good rather than ways that do good.

EconTalk

Making Your 80,000 Hours Count (with Benjamin Todd)

Most people end up in their jobs through a combination of accident and inertia. They don't really think carefully about what they could do with their career. And yet your career is probably the biggest opportunity you have to do good in the world, if that's what you care about.

EconTalk

Making Your 80,000 Hours Count (with Benjamin Todd)

"Follow your passion" turns out to be a trap. Chasing a big paycheck barely moves the happiness needle. And being a doctor has a smaller impact than you might think, says Todd.