Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team, "80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good", Centre for Effective Altruism, 2016. As an appropriate follow-up to my book review of Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better ( link ), I have recently read 80,000 Hours's career guide in book form. Their career guide is available for free online (on their website 80000hours.org), but I thought the PDF edition would be nice. And as I'm soon finishing my Master's degree, it was personally relevant. For the unfamiliar, 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit organization that is part of the effective altruism movement, and focuses on giving advice on how to choose and plan a career that is both fulfilling and has a maximally-positive social impact. Their name comes from the fact that the average person does about eighty thousand hours of work in their career over a lifetime. This is relevant because it puts into perspective the importance of making the right care...

Book Review: William MacAskill, "Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference", 2016, Guardian Books & Faber. This is a book that introduces the core ideas behind the effective altruism movement. It is also, I think, a book that conveys the principles of good reasoning. Writing with clarity, Will MacAskill tells us how to select a charity to which to donate, how to pick a career or cause area to work in, and how to make the greatest difference as consumers. However, the principles underlying his advice -- the "five key questions of effective altruism" as MacAskill calls them -- could also be adapted to decision-making in general. Doing Good Better begins by discussing two different approaches to helping others: the first is exemplified by the PlayPump (a kind of water pump that doubles as a roundabout/playground for kids), which caught a lot of attention in the early 2000s and raised millions of dollars. People thought ...