And the three things you need first

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I had requested forty-seven one-to-ones through the app before I arrived. Volunteers, most of them a few years out of university, directed traffic at the stairwells for free. Nobody was late.

It was the last weekend of May and I was at a conference put on by effective altruists.

Last week I wrote about our tendency to confuse choosing a simpler problem with making the solution easier. A lot of people assumed it was an underhanded indictment of effective altruism (EA).

After all, EA get accused of this a lot: bednets instead of health systems; the countable thing instead of the thing that matters.

It wasn’t. In just seventeen years later it has become one of the most influential epistemic forces in philanthropy, and there are lessons for all of us who want to make big problems easier to move.T

They turned an obscure, fuzzy question into a question ordinary people could understand, evaluate, and act on.
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“How do I do the most good?” went from a philosophical question to something people could actually work with. EA gave people a concrete way to compare interventions (such as estimating how much money it takes to avert a death), made the underlying evidence and assumptions public, and created clear on-ramps for action: donating a portion of your income, choosing a career around particular problems, or helping build organizations to address them.

That is a powerful thing to do with a problem: make it visible, understandable, and actionable.

And you don't have to agree with EA's particular answers to recognize the achievement. You can reject cost-effectiveness as the primary metric in favour of solidarity or rights. You can disagree with tractability as a reason to prioritize one problem over another. You can believe the right response is changing the systems that produce poverty, rather than donating more money within those systems.

The important contribution was not that they proved their metrics, assumptions, or solutions were correct. It was that they showed how to take a question that felt impossibly broad—how should I use my resources to help?—and turn it into something people could understand, scrutinize, and do something about.

Try this

Take the problem you are working on and answer three questions in writing.

Visible: Can someone outside your field explain the problem back to you in one sentence?

Understandable: Can you name the conditions that keep the problem in place, and show how you know they are changing?

Solvable: If someone decided today that they wanted to help, would they know what to do to start?

Can’t answer? Now you know what to work on next :)

🌿 Everyone has something to teach us