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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: doing more good vs. doing the most good possible, published by ruthgrace on January 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. According to Wikipedia, Effective altruism is a philosophical and social movement that advocates "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". According to logic, if it's good to do good, then it's better to do more good, therefore you should try to do the most good possible. But I wonder if the social movement of Effective Altruism would be able to do the most good if it encouraged people to do incrementally more good instead of holding a gold standard of people dedicating their lives to the cause. Most people aren't able to optimize their career for EA and/or donate most of their income due to lack of motivation, executive function, resources, or other reasons, and even those who do are often trapped in guilty thoughts about whether or not they are doing enough. This is unhealthy. Similarly, animal advocates such as the Good Food Institute and the author of How to Create a Vegan World believe that to improve animal welfare, the movement should reduce meat consumption by focusing on changing institutions to make dairy and meat substitutes that match the original in taste, appearance, and price. This would result in less meat being eaten in total, compared to the strategy of convincing people to become completely vegetarian or vegan by moral argument. Convincing the world to become vegan or vegetarian one by one is very difficult: while people generally believe in better treatment of animals, most find the barriers to vegetarianism too high to be able to do it for longer than a year, with a third stopping before the 3 month mark. Using a strategy of promoting incremental meat reduction in all individuals over total meat abstinence in some individuals makes the goal much more tractable. Going a step further: I think that EA should be more actively welcoming of, not only people who forgo significant lifestyle change, but also people who want to donate to or work on causes that aren't identified as effective by the EA community. As Julia Galef said in a 2017 talk at EA Global (yes, that's JGL sitting beside her), there are three buckets in which people spend their money: personal expenses, donations to causes that they personally care about, and donations to improve the world, via causes identified to be cost-effective by the Effective Altruism community.[1] Messaging used to try to guilt people into switching money between these three buckets isn't effective. Julia talks about how EA messaging should focus on the third bucket (giving to improve the world), and I think the next evolution in this movement is that there's huge potential in promoting effectiveness in furthering personal charitable causes. People normally don't think at all about effectiveness when they are donating, since they assume that charities have similar levels of effectiveness. In an ideal world, effectiveness would automatically cross someone's mind whenever they are thinking of giving, no matter what they are giving their money or time to. Does money spent more effectively on causes that aren't popular in the EA community result in more money being available to spend on EA causes? It seems reasonable that it might, by raising the general awareness of effectiveness in charitable giving. When GiveDirectly (a non-profit that gives cash to help with poverty) started operating in the United States, they found that donors who started off donating to Americans would later also give money to people in extreme poverty developing countries.[2] What could it look like if Effective Altruism was focused on making altruism more effective instead of practicing altruism in the most effective way possible? Maybe there w...