Most of us want to make the world a better place. But what should we do if we want to generate the most positive impact possible? It’s definitely not an easy problem. Lots of smart, talented people with the best of intentions have tried to end war, eliminate poverty, cure disease, stop hunger, prevent animal suffering, and save the environment. As you may have noticed, we’re still working on all of those. So the track record of people trying to permanently solve the world's biggest problems isn’t that spectacular. This isn’t just a “look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year”-kind of thing, this is more like “behold the trail of dead and dying who line the path before you, and despair”. So how can you make your attempt to save the world turn out significantly better than the generations of others who've tried this already?

It turns out there actually are a number of things we can do to substantially increase our odds of doing the most good. Here's a brief summary of some on the most crucial considerations that one needs to take into account when soberly approaching the task of doing the most good possible (aka "saving the world").

1. Patch your moral intuition (with math!) - Human moral intuition is really useful. But it tends to fail us at precisely the wrong times -- like when a problem gets too big [“millions of people dying? *yawn*”] or when it involves uncertainty [“you can only save 60% of them? call me when you can save everyone!”]. Unfortunately, these happen to be the defining characteristics of the world’s most difficult problems. Think about it. If your standard moral intuition were enough to confront the world’s biggest challenges, they wouldn’t be the world’s biggest challenges anymore... they’d be “those problems we solved already cause they were natural for us to understand”. If you’re trying to do things that have never been done before, use all the tools available to you. That means setting aside your emotional numbness by using math to feel what your moral intuition can’t. You can also do better by acquainting yourself with some of the more common human biases. It turns out your brain isn't always right. Yes, even your brain. So knowing the ways in which it systematically gets things wrong is a good way to avoid making the most obvious errors when setting out to help save the world.

2. Identify a cause with lots of leverage - It’s noble to try and save the world, but it’s ineffective and unrealistic to try and do it all on your own. So let’s start out by joining forces with an established organization who’s already working on what you care about. Seriously, unless you’re already ridiculously rich + brilliant or ludicrously influential, going solo or further fragmenting the philanthropic world by creating US-Charity#1,238,202 is almost certainly a mistake. Now that we’re all working together here, let's keep in mind that only a few charitable organizations are truly great investments -- and the vast majority just aren’t. So maximize your leverage by investing your time and money into supporting the best non-profits with the largest expected pay-offs.

Related to: Shut up and multiply, Politics is the mind-killer, Pascal's Mugging, The two party swindle, The American system and misleading labels, Policy Tug-of-War 

Jane is a connoisseur of imported cheeses and Homo Economicus in good standing, using a causal decision theory that two-boxes on Newcomb's problem. Unfortunately for her, the politically well-organized dairy farmers in her country have managed to get an initiative for increased dairy tariffs on the ballot, which will cost her $20,000. Should she take an hour to vote against the initiative on election day? 

She estimates that she has a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of casting the deciding vote, for an expected value of $0.02 from improved policy. However, while Jane may be willing to give her two cents on the subject, the opportunity cost of her time far exceeds the policy benefit, and so it seems she has no reason to vote.

Jane's dilemma is just the standard Paradox of Voting in political science and public choice theory. Voters may still engage in expressive voting to affiliate with certain groups or to signal traits insofar as politics is not about policy, but the instrumental rationality of voting to bring about selfishly preferred policy outcomes starts to look dubious. Thus many of those who say that we rationally ought to vote in hopes of affecting policy focus on altruistic preferences: faced with a tiny probability of casting a decisive vote, but large impacts on enormous numbers of people in the event that we are decisive, we should shut up and multiply, voting if the expected value of benefit to others sufficiently exceeds the cost to ourselves.

Meanwhile, at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Eric Schwitzgebel reports that philosophers overwhelmingly rate voting as very morally good (on a scale of 1 to 9), with voting placing right around donating 10% of one's income to charity. He offers the following explanation:

Previously in series:  Money: The Unit of Caring

Yesterday:

There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone...

If the lawyer needs to work an hour at the soup kitchen to keep himself motivated and remind himself why he's doing what he's doing, that's fine.  But he should also be donating some of the hours he worked at the office, because that is the power of professional specialization and it is how grownups really get things done.  One might consider the check as buying the right to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or validating the time spent at the soup kitchen.

I hold open doors for little old ladies.  I can't actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I'm sure it has, sometime in the last year or so).  But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car's interior.  I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so.  I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car.  And finally I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell.  And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.

Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify true concern for another's welfare, or fear of guilt for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable.  I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn't deduct any penalty points for the others.  Just so long as people get helped.

But in my own case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises as to whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others.  That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?

Previously in series:  Helpless Individuals

Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in anything ought to be about equal.  Or, to put it a bit more exactly, shifting a unit of resource between any two tasks should produce no increase in expected utility, relative to the agent's utility function and its probabilistic expectations about its own algorithms.

This resource balance principle implies that—over a very wide range of approximately rational systems, including even the interior of a self-modifying mind—there will exist some common currency of expected utilons, by which everything worth doing can be measured.

In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money".  It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny.

With this audience, I hope, I can simply state it and move on.  It's not as if you thought "society" was intelligent, benevolent, and sane up until this point, right?

I say this to make a certain point held in common across many good causes.  Any charitable institution you've ever had a kind word for, certainly wishes you would appreciate this point, whether or not they've ever said anything out loud.  For I have listened to others in the nonprofit world, and I know that I am not speaking only for myself here...