Explaining EA: What I learned from giving a TEDx talk about EA

How to explain Effective Altruism to someone who’s never heard of it—and make them interested?

A few months ago, I was given the opportunity to give a TEDx talk about Effective Altruism.

As a former community manager of EA Israel, I’ve spent years explaining EA to newcomers, refining how I communicate its principles, and observing the common misconceptions that make it harder for people to engage with EA ideas. Preparing for the talk forced me to organize my thoughts on what works—and what doesn’t—when I try to convey EA to a broader audience.

I would love to discuss with you some of the choices I made when I wrote this talk, and hear your thoughts about them.

Note: I don’t read the forum often, so the writing might not be in the usual style of the forum. I use many anecdotes, personal stories, and my views. However, hopefully, these ideas could start a conversation I think is important about EA communication and community outreach in general, and I hope that they could spike that conversation.

1. Generic Examples → Shared personal stories

Like many people, my first experience with social impact was purely driven by passion, and not by calculations of effectiveness. In the talk, I chose to describe this experience. It went something like this:

“When I was 14, I found out my friend was harming herself. It shook me. I wanted to help her, and other people that suffered.

So I did what felt right—I launched a mental health campaign to reduce self-harm among teenagers.

And, to my surprise, it worked- we received thousands of followers, interviews on TV, and hundreds of messages from people saying how much it helped them. It felt like a success. 

Until one day, another friend told me: 

“Your campaign gave me the idea to hurt myself.”

She said she had already been struggling with anxiety and depression. But self-harm wasn’t something she’d considered— until she came across our campaign.

It crushed me. 

I had tried to do good in the world, but I may have done the opposite. 

I didn't know whether or not the good outweighed the bad.

That moment changed me- I knew I couldn't let it happen to me again. It led me to start to take the uncertainty and doubt very seriously- and to understand how difficult it is to help others.”

This is the story I share when trying to explain why I’m excited about EA—I shared it with organizations, at “discussing effectiveness” (an IF-funded project), in social media posts and in causal talks. 

The reason I share a personal story is because it’s similar to the storytelling style often used in the business world, where entrepreneurs share their personal stories when they pitch startups and interview on podcasts. They share how they came to this idea, what mistakes they made, and why they care (falling in love with the problem, fuck-up nights, ect.). When I share my story, it seems that people in my area understand this “format” of storytelling, and connect emotionally.

In the past, I used to share other people's mistakes - I gave examples like playpumps and scared straight, instead of talking about what convinced me, what mistakes I made, and what makes EA personally exciting for me. I also tried to use various persuasion techniques - but instead of persuading, I got resistance and backlash.

However, now, when I share this personal story—people connect emotionally to why I care about EA. Sharing something personal is simply much more engaging, and being honest and straight instead of talking about abstract ideas helps me create more casual conversations. 

I don’t think you need to share big personal failures to make this work. It could also be more similar to another example I give later in the talk — where I share a conversation I had with @sella  Nevo that convinced me to care about global health and development (in which he mostly asked me questions rather than stating his opinion). This could mean sharing about a conversation, lecture, or post that convinced you to care about AI risks, care about pandemic preparedness, sign the giving pledge, or change the place you decided to donate your money to. 

When I started to share the story that convinced me instead of trying to persuade, I started to have more interesting and meaningful conversations.

2. Expected Value → Venture Capitalist Investing

In EA we often talk about expected value —allocating resources based on maximizing impact. However, expected value calculations can feel abstract, “cold” and unintuitive to many people.

Instead of explaining expected value in my talk, I compared EA’s cause and intervention prioritization to venture capital (VC) investing:

• VCs don’t want to fund average startups- while they (usually) care about evidence and research, they still look for high-risk, high-reward opportunities with asymmetric upside.
  • When I had an internship at a VC-like department at Microsoft, we spent hours trying to project what are the blue ocean markets and fields, while still learning rigorously about the specific startup in mind and its competitors. We looked for startups with competitive advantages and chose to proceed with them.
• Similarly, in EA, we don’t just fund any intervention. We prioritize causes and interventions that have the highest potential for outsized impact—balancing a somewhat risk-neutral mindset with predictive calculations.
  • Also, in EA, we look at comparative advantage when trying to choose an impactful career.

3. ITN → Blue Ocean Strategy

Similarly, instead of talking about the ITN framework for prioritizing cause areas → I talked about the Blue Ocean Strategy framework:

• The ITN framework is powerful but not always intuitive. Even if people understand it, it often takes a long time to explain. Instead, I explained cause prioritization using the Blue Ocean Strategy framework:
  • Red Ocean Markets = Competitive, oversaturated markets.
  • Blue Ocean Markets = Untapped, big, neglected opportunities with space for new players.

I explained that the cause areas I care about are "Blue Ocean Cause Areas", and then gave a specific example in order to make it concrete.

4. Niche EA examples →Broad Familiar Examples  

Instead of using niche EA examples for intervention prioritization that in the past, unfortunately, raised eyebrows when I explained them in causal conversations without thorough explanation (shrimp welfare project, wild animal initiative)— in the talk I chose to give an example that is more familiar and could resonate → Bill Gates, which actually Peter Singer also used as an example. I explained how Bill Gates focused on reducing poor sanitation, and explained that he chose a neglected “blue ocean problem” to expand his impact. 

But even without giving Bill Gates as an example- in casual conversations, when I give EA examples, I usually prioritize giving examples that resonate more broadly with the specific person I’m talking to:

• Ambitious Impact - when I'm talking to entrepreneurs.
• Against Malaria Foundation - when I want to explain how much does it cost to save a life (I say that~1000 nets to save 1 life).
• GiveWell - when I want to give an example about how impact can be measured and I usually point out that Bill Gates also supports it in order to create a familiar consensus.
• Good Food Institute - when I want to talk about animal welfare. Here I don't only talk about animal welfare - but also about the environment, food security, and helping startups (I chose this example although it's not a recommended charity anymore because there's a branch in Israel, and also it resonates in my startup- entrepreneur friends community) 

These examples, I believe, make the intervention prioritization concept less abstract and more intuitive.

5. Should I mention EA?

I actually thought about this a lot, and I chose not to mention EA in the talk.

In many articles, the movement gets backlash: it seems niche, overly rationalist, and disconnected from everyday thinking, while in fact the people I’ve met in EA are some of the best and most caring, thoughtful, and self-reflective people I’ve ever met. 

On one hand, referencing EA could have had a positive “follow-up” effect - introducing people to concepts beyond these 13 minutes. On the other hand, I didn’t want to take the “burden” of defending things I don’t necessarily believe in or have the time to explain the logic behind. Similarly, I didn’t give examples from Israel - knowing that would spike another complicated conversation.

So ultimately I chose to solely explain the concepts behind EA, which Gidi Kadosh I believe put greatly in a forum post titled “The Explanatory Obstacle of EA”. I believe that engaging with the concepts and the ideas and coming to various conclusions — is what makes this movement great.

Closing thoughts

I'm trying to compile a list of successful analogies or ways of framing ideas - how do you explain EA to people? What analogy, story, or framing worked best for you?

Thank you kindly.