Effectivity Habits Notice: updates on this will be sparse and brief I realized that I was burning a lot of mental CPU cycles thinking about updating this page, and not enough on actually becoming more

Sorry for the length. In a few paragraphs there's a reader's guide so you can skip around. I have tried to put the most valuable stuff up first. Consider only reading the introduction. Starting from e

We all want to find a dream job that’s enjoyable and meaningful, but what does that actually mean? Some people imagine that the answer involves discovering their passion through a flash of insight, wh

People are working harder and harder to clean up otherwise avoidable messes they created by making poor initial decisions. There are many reasons we’re making poor decisions and failing to learn from

Mendelsund / Munday T hese should be boom times for sex. The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time l

Entrepreneurs need to be prepared in pitching their startup companies to a venture capitalist by anticipating the questions they will receive. The failure to have thoughtful and reasonable answers to

TL;DR version: Mental illness is probably much worse than poverty or physical illness. Interventions which change how people think - i.e. reduce mental illness and increase happiness - may be more cos

Benjamin Hardy, PhD Aug 26, 2016 · Unlisted The traditional 9–5 workday is poorly structured for high productivity. Perhaps when most work was physical labor, but not in the knowledge working world we

Eric Paley Contributor Eric Paley is a managing partner at Founder Collective . More posts by this contributor Confidence: The currency of acceleration Redefining dilution Venture capital should come

Today, as part of the UNSW Grand Challenge on Inequality, we release a study entitled A Climate Dividend for Australians that offers a practical solution to the twin problems of climate change and ene

TL;DR I argue effective altruists can and should use happiness surveys to determine cost-effectiveness and show how doing this generates some substantially different charity recommendations from those

This list is preliminary. We wanted to publish our existing thoughts on what to do with each skill, but can easily see ourselves changing our minds over the coming years. You can read about our genera

“You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.” ― M. Scott Peck *** The Basics The sense that we are not being listened to is one of the most frustrating feelings imaginable

2 Jun 2015 It’s all too easy to let a false understanding of something replace your actual understanding. Sometimes this is an oversimplification, but it can also take the form of an over complication

I wonder how many times I’ll say this. This will be my last Bayes’ theorem post. At this point a careful reader should be able to extract most of the following post from the past few, but it is definitely worth spelling out in detail here. We’ve been covering how academics have used Bayes’ theorem…

Context In Autumn 2015, the Giving What We Can Cambridge chapter organised an event described as a "poverty simulation.” Many found the content and presentation of the event disrespectful. We thought

24 Jul 2014 Growth mindset is a thing. You can read lots more about it elsewhere, including Mindset by Carol Dweck , which has a 4.5 star rating with >500 reviews. I’m not here to explain in-depth wha

Scholarship is an important virtue of rationality , but it can be costly . Its major costs are time and effort . Thus, if you can reduce the time and effort required for scholarship - if you can learn

Summary We were two people who got a short-term EA community building grant from CEA to work on EA Denmark part-time (Sebastian Schmidt and Philip Porter). In the following, I (Sebastian) will share t

Table of Contents 80,000 Hours regards itself as an effective altruist organisation and also wrote this profile. Given our potential to be biased, our views should be taken with a grain of salt. What

“Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people.” — John Gray *** We like to think that the tide of history is an inexorable march from barbarity to civilization, with humans “pr

With so much content competing for attention on the Internet, do you ever wonder if you start a blog if your content stands a chance? According to the journal Science , we have to process five times m

People sometimes talk about “improving decision making” as a way to improve the world - if we could find ways to overcome the various ‘biases’ and ‘irrationalities’ that people are prone to, we’d be b

Today we are witnessing an irrepressible and admirable pushback against the specters of ‘cultural relativism’ and moral ‘nihilism.’ On the Right, thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Jordan Peterson ha

Intuitively, everyone realizes that they should read to some extent. I’ve never heard someone say “I don’t think I should read more,” but I’ve heard “I should read more” a lot more than I’ve heard “I

F ive hundred years ago cartographers believed California was an island. Doctors believed that slicing your arm open and bleeding everywhere could cure disease. Scientists believed fire was made out o

In this series, we have invited philosophers to write about what they consider to be the greatest moral challenge of our time, and how we should address it. It would be easy to conclude that there’s a

Why do humans drink? To the person waiting at the bar on a hot summer evening, the answer seems simple: drinking is a pleasure and a relief. To the public health official reading the latest reports of

S uccess is often the first step toward disaster. The idea of progress is often the enemy of actual progress. I recently met a guy who, despite having a massively successful business, an awesome lifes

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a

The 8 Things The Happiest People Do Every Day University of California professor Sonja Lyubomirsky details the things research shows the happiest people have in common. They devote a great amount of t

What’s the point of sending all children to school if they can’t get jobs when they graduate?Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP How can we alleviate extreme poverty? It’s the question that underpins the UN