Should you become a charity entrepreneur? (with Joey Savoie)

1. Adopt Altruism as Purpose

Set altruism as your fundamental life purpose and build your life around it, as it can be a deeply satisfying way to find meaning and accomplish significant good.

2. Maximize Good with Resources

Strive to do as much good as possible with your available resources, as different actions yield different levels of positive impact.

3. Quantify Good & Maximize

Actively quantify the good different actions can achieve and choose options that offer the best output for your time, energy, or donations, such as giving to highly effective charities.

4. Develop Personal Principle System

Create a structured personal framework, like the ’three H’s’ (Helping, Happiness, Health) with pillars and heuristics, to align your actions with your core values and track progress.

5. Satisfice Health & Happiness

Aim for ‘good enough’ levels of health and happiness rather than optimizing them infinitely, allowing you to quickly gain benefits and allocate more energy to unbounded goals like helping others.

6. Find Meaning Through Purpose

Cultivate a central purpose in life, such as altruism, to drive motivation and indirectly achieve happiness by chasing meaning rather than explicitly seeking happiness.

7. Assess Entrepreneurial Autonomy

Before starting a charity, honestly evaluate your ability to complete independent projects without external management, as charity founders require strong self-direction.

8. Align Drive with Impact

Combine an entrepreneurial mindset—liking to start new things—with a strong, ideally top, drive for impact, to ensure your charity stays aligned with its core mission.

9. Consider Charity Entrepreneurship

Explore charity entrepreneurship as a career path if your primary goal is to have a significant impact, as it offers advantages like a less competitive market and direct focus on doing good.

10. Aim for High-Impact Charities

Strive to create charities that are highly effective and can significantly outperform existing organizations, as even a slightly more effective charity can have a much greater impact.

11. Focus Narrowly for Impact

Design charities to be smaller and more narrowly focused on specific activities, as it’s easier to achieve high impact in one area than across many diverse activities.

12. Choose Diverse Co-Founders

Select co-founders with complementary skill sets to avoid internal competition and ensure a broader range of expertise for the organization’s success.

13. Avoid Premature Idea Lock-In

Resist locking into a specific charity idea too early, especially if it’s not a great fit, to allow for flexibility and better alignment with your strengths and market needs.

14. Self-Assess Risk Tolerance

Understand your personal tolerance for risk, pressure, and intensity, as charity entrepreneurship can be demanding and may not be a suitable career fit for everyone.

15. Utilize Charity Evaluation Resources

Consult resources from established charity evaluators like GiveWell and Charity Entrepreneurship’s website to understand what makes a charitable organization effective and identify promising areas.

16. Seek Impact-Focused Donors

Align your charity with donors who are primarily impact-oriented, as this helps align incentives and makes it easier to secure funding for truly effective work.

17. Incubate Independent Charities

When building a multi-charity organization, foster independent charities rather than large departments, allowing them to fail or succeed on their own merits and promoting market selection for impact.

18. Schedule Project Reevaluation

Implement specific reevaluation points for projects (e.g., every 2-3 years) to assess progress, explore new opportunities, and make informed decisions about continuing or switching focus, preventing aimless ‘flipping’.

19. EA: Defer Less, Think Independently

For effective altruists, actively resist deferring too much to thought leaders and instead cultivate independent critical thinking about strategies, ethics, and effectiveness.

20. Improve Governance & Diversity

Implement better governance, avoid excessive funding assumptions, and foster diversity of perspectives and viewpoints within organizations to prevent major failures like FTX.

21. Distinguish Trivial from Catastrophic Risks

Differentiate between acceptable, trivial risks (e.g., a charity failing) and catastrophic risks (e.g., causing widespread harm), and avoid becoming risk-averse for the former while being extremely cautious about the latter.

22. Prioritize Proven Interventions

Focus on interventions that are traditionally good and uncontroversial across many ethical metrics, such as distributing bed nets or reducing lead exposure, as they offer robust and widely accepted benefits.

23. Strengthen Ethical Scrutiny

If you possess social resilience and are willing to deviate from societal norms for altruism, you have a greater obligation to be exceptionally thoughtful and scrutinize your ethics to ensure actions are constructive across diverse viewpoints.

24. Employ a Moral Parliament

Use the ‘moral parliament’ framework, assigning seats to different ethical viewpoints, to ensure that decisions consider a wide range of moral principles, even if some are minority views.

25. Integrate Modesty in Ethics

Approach ethical decision-making with modesty, acknowledging the possibility of being wrong and considering other plausible viewpoints, as even small adjustments can significantly benefit other ethical systems.

26. Act Positively Across Ethics

Strive to take actions that are viewed positively across a plurality of ethical views, rather than solely optimizing for one, to ensure broader acceptance and epistemic safety.

27. Use Expected Value as Tool

Treat expected value calculations as one valuable tool among many for assessing impact, rather than the sole determinant, especially when other evidence points in a different direction.

28. Seek Convergence Across Models

Aim for decisions and insights that are supported by the convergence of multiple analytical models (e.g., expected value, expert wisdom, multi-factor scoring), rather than relying on a single, potentially outlier model.

29. Sandbox Multiple Worldview Models

Systematically evaluate decisions using different ‘sandboxed’ models or frameworks (e.g., expected value, expert wisdom, multi-factor scoring) to ensure robustness and avoid repugnant conclusions from over-reliance on one.

30. Prioritize Instrumental Rationality

Focus on instrumental rationality—accomplishing your goals effectively—over purely epistemic rationality, recognizing that being ‘right about the world’ is valuable only insofar as it helps achieve desired outcomes.

31. Favor Simple, Robust Models

Opt for models with fewer, well-cited inputs over complex models with many guessed variables, as simpler models are easier to check, explain, and lead to more reliable predictive validity.

32. Keep Models Simple & Memorable

Design models and frameworks to be simple enough to hold in your head, facilitating easier reasoning, flaw detection, explanation, and critique by others.

33. Simplify Principles for Memory

Structure personal principles and heuristics into memorable, concise formats (e.g., lists of three) to ensure consistent application and easy recall in daily decision-making.

34. Shape Environment for Habits

Actively modify your environment to make good habits easy to perform and bad habits difficult, thereby improving adherence to healthy routines.

35. Avoid Major Unhealthy Habits

Consciously avoid significant unhealthy habits like smoking, excessive drinking, drug use, and maintaining a low BMI, as these are fundamental to overall health.

36. Embrace Openness to Ideas

Maintain an open mindset within effective altruism, being receptive to new ideas and potential shifts in cause areas, rather than rigidly adhering to existing answers.

37. Cultivate Value Plurality

Encourage and accept a diversity of value systems and epistemologies within the effective altruism movement, recognizing that different plausible viewpoints can lead to similar high-impact conclusions.

38. Diversify Funder Worldviews

Large funders should adopt a strategy of worldview diversification, supporting a range of promising cause areas and approaches, rather than going ‘all-in’ on a single perceived best option.

39. Recognize Diminishing Returns

Understand that marginal returns for funding or talent in a specific cause area diminish quickly, meaning that the first investments are far more cost-effective than subsequent ones.

40. Prioritize Talent Acquisition

Acknowledge that talent is the most limiting factor for impact, as the pool of highly skilled individuals interested in a specific cause area saturates quickly, leading to diminishing returns for ideas.

41. Foster Decentralized Funding

Promote a decentralized network of independent, impact-oriented funders with diverse epistemologies and values, to create a healthier ecosystem and avoid over-reliance on a few central figures.

42. Scrutinize Longtermist Arguments

Deeply engage with and critically scrutinize the specific assumptions, evidence, and historical track record of arguments for long-termist cause areas, rather than accepting naive expected value calculations at face value.

43. Apply Evidentiary Threshold

Require arguments, especially those with potentially astronomical expected values, to pass a rigorous evidentiary threshold before being considered valid, regardless of the theoretical magnitude of their potential impact.