Most forms of do-gooding start out with a What (“I want to promote microfinance!”), move to a How (“maybe I should do a sponsored marathon?”) and simply take the Why for granted (“because of course microfinance is good!”).
Effective altruism, in contrast, starts with a Why and a How, and lets them determine the What. Let me explain:
The Why is to make the world as good a place as it can possibly be. Rather than merely aiming to make the world better than when we found it — "to make a difference" — we want to make the most difference. So, for example, rather than simply trying to find a development charity that “does good work”, Giving What We Can seeks to find those charities that do the very most to help people in developing countries with every pound or dollar they receive. In general, we seek out those activities that will do the most good with our time or money.
The How — how to find those activities that do the most good — is by using good evidence and good reasoning. Where a question concerns a matter of fact, we try to find the best empirical evidence that is relevant to that question. (An anecdote is bad, a double-blind randomized controlled trial is better, a well-performed meta-analysis is best.) Where a question concerns values, we use clear arguments, rational reflection, and the latest insights from ethics, economics, and psychology to help us come to the right view. So, for example, rather than going with feel-good slogans like “follow your passion”, or passing on anecdotes about specific people, at 80,000 Hours we’re busy digging into all the available academic research related to doing good through your career, and getting clear, conceptually, on what making a difference involves.
From these two ideas, the What follows. Effective altruists currently tend to think that the most important causes to focus on are global poverty, factory farming, and the long-term future of life on Earth. I'll talk more about the reasons why these are generally thought to be the highest-impact cause areas in later posts, but in each case, the reasoning is that the stakes are very high, and there is the potential to make a lot of progress. Right now, within the Centre for Effective Altruism, the What consists of the organisations listed to the right: organisations that, for example, promote donating a good chunk of one's income to the causes that most effectively fight global poverty (Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save); or that advise individuals on which careers enable them to have the greatest positive impact (80,000 Hours); or that try to figure out how best to improve animal welfare (Effective Animal Activism). But these activities are just our current best guesses. If we had good evidence or arguments that showed that we could do more good by doing something else, then we'd do that instead.
Part of Introduction to Effective Altruism
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I think you are proposing a kind of matchmaking system for volunteer teachers and students, or maybe a coordination website/institution for the same.
The challenge is that this system (jargon: “two sided marketplace”) is hard to execute.
The root issue is that there needs to be value for the students and teachers. But teachers are volunteers, commitment and quality requirements are deceptively high and require a lot of support, and so match quality is low or unreliable.
When it does exist, this match value can be further undermined in many ways. One way is the existence of for-profit competitors (e.g. a for-profit academy teaching blacksmithing). For-profits can be wholesome and impactful. However, these services with greater pay and resources will often poach the best teachers or students (or they can depart through intrapreneurship). The resulting adverse selection and loss of resources can collapse the non-profit.
Separately and additionally, there’s another objection to this idea that is sort of hard to unpack (like it gets into ideology/”dinner party economics”). Basically, the lack of payment or a loan system might be inefficiency or hardship, as I think you are characterizing. But also could be a strong signal that there is no real demand or value for the services (or the society is so dysfunctional that investment is uncertain and not viable).
The above issues lowers match value. In turn, this lower match value limits the resources that can be reasonably dedicated in a “professional” or “institutional” way that is needed to attract and maintain students/teachers in your proposed matching/coordination service. Again, I think this is hard and costly to do, even if most participants are volunteers.