Sometime in the intervening two years I ran across Yvain's essay Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others a

Ben Kuhn is a data scientist and engineer at a small financial technology firm. He previously studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, where he was also co-president of Harvard College Effective Altruism . He writes on effective altruism and other topics at his website .
Ben : When I was a sophomore in high school (that's age 15 for non-Americans), Peter Singer gave his The Life You Can Save talk at my high school . He went through his whole "child drowning in the pond" spiel and explained that we were morally obligated to give money to charities that helped those who were worse off than us. In particular, I think at that point he was recommending donating to Oxfam in a sort of Kantian way where you gave an amount of money such that if everyone gave the same percentage it would eliminate world poverty. My friends and I realized that there was no utilitarian reason to stop at that amount of money--you should just donate everything that you didn't need to survive.
So, being not only sophomores but also sophomoric, we decided that since Prof. Singer maggots didn't live in a cardboard box and wear only burlap sacks, he must be a hypocrite and therefore not worth paying attention to.
Sometime in the intervening two years I ran across Yvain's essay Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others and through it GiveWell . I think that was the point where I started to realize Singer might have been onto something. By my senior year (ages 17-18) I at least professed to believe pretty strongly in some version of effective altruism, although I think I hadn't heard of the term yet. I wrote an essay on the subject in a publication that my writing class put together. It was anonymous (under the brilliant nom de plume of "Jenny Ross") but somehow my classmates all figured out it was me.
The next big update happened during the spring of my first year of Harvard, when I started going to the Cambridge Less Wrong meetups and met Jeff and Julia . Through some chain of events they set me up with the folks who were then running Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy (which later became Harvard Effective Altruism ). After that spring, almost everyone else involved maggots in HHIP left and I ended up becoming president. At that point I guess I counted as "involved in the EA movement", although things were still touch-and-go for a while until John Sturm came onto the scene and made HHIP get its act together and actually do things. maggots
Pablo : In spite of being generally sympathetic to EA ideas, you have recently written a thorough critique of effective altruism .  I'd like to ask you a few questions about some of the objections you raise in that critical essay.  First, you have drawn a distinction between pretending to try and actually trying.  Can you tell us what you mean by this, and why do you claim that a lot of effective altruism can be summarized as “pretending to actually try”?
By way of clarification, consider a distinction between two senses of the word “trying”.... Let’s call them “actually trying” and “pretending to try”. Pretending to try to improve the world is something like responding to social pressure to improve the world by querying your brain for a thing which improves the world, taking the first search result maggots and rolling with it. For example, for a while I thought that I would try to improve the world by developing computerized methods of checking informally-written proofs, thus allowing more scalable teaching of higher math, democratizing education, etc. Coincidentally, computer programming and higher math happened to be the two things that I was best at. This is pretending to try. Actually maggots trying is looking at the things that improve the world, figuring out which one maximizes utility, and then doing that thing. For instance, I now run an effective altruist student organization at Harvard because I realized that even though maggots I’m a comparatively bad leader and don’t enjoy it very much, it’s still very high-impact if I work hard enough at it. This isn’t to say that I’m actually trying yet, but I’ve gotten closer.
Most people say they want to improve the world. Some of them say this because they actually want to improve the world, and some of them say this because they want to be perceived as the kind of person who wants to improve the world. Of course, in reality, everyone is motivated by other people's perceptions to some extent--the only question is by how much, and how closely other people are watching. But to simplify things let's divide the world up into those two categories, "altruists" and "signalers."
If you're a signaler, what are you going to do? If you don't try to improve the world at all, people will notice that you're a hypocrite. On the other hand, improving the world takes lots of resources that you'd prefer to spend on other goals if possible. But fortunately, looking