Transcriber: Peter Van de Ven Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
When I was ten years old,
instead of asking for gifts at my birthday party,
I asked if my friends would donate items to the homeless shelter.
And I remember my mom driving me down to the shelter to drop off the items,
and I was thinking that I would come away from this
feeling so good and happy about myself.
But instead, I came away in tears.
I was bawling my eyes out
when I realized I couldn’t give everyone there a gift.
And then on the car ride home, it hit me.
I remember feeling the weight of the world’s suffering on my shoulders
when I realized
just how many homeless shelters were out there in the world
and just how many people I couldn’t go give a gift to.
Growing up, I was that child who wanted to save the world -
as I can imagine plenty of you in this audience felt or still feel -
and every time I cried for the help I felt I couldn’t give.
My mom would come sit on the edge of my bed and say to me,
“Well, honey, you may not change the whole world,
but you can change someone’s world or save someone’s life every day.”
And that stuck with me.
If we all went around changing someone’s world
or saving someone’s life every day,
it would be a chain reaction.
And wouldn’t this then result in the whole world being changed?
But how, though, do we set off this global chain reaction?
How do we shift our concern into actually helping others?
Well, I’m going to take you with me through my journey
as I learn how I can best help the world.
First, it started with realizing it’s not just the thought that counts;
it’s the action.
It’s the going and doing the helping that actually works.
Like, what would it look like
if I committed to saving one life a year for the rest of my life
without ever changing the standards of my own living?
If every day I saved up around $5,
well, near the end of my life,
I could either purchase over 90,000 malaria nets,
which is the most cost-effective way towards saving a life,
or go and save the lives of 80 babies that otherwise would have died.
And that’s only using the $5 a day, which, according to the global income curve,
is money that many people would probably never even notice.
And I’m just one person,
but one person with $5
who really wants to make a positive impact in the world.
Sometimes I get really sad that I cannot help everyone,
but I have a lot of hope that we can.
Now more than ever,
as the rate of technological and economic advancements
are at a steep incline,
I think that we are in dire need of a moral revolution.
I think that we need to learn how to do “helping people” better.
The world as we know it today is deeply injured.
The world as we know it tomorrow will continue to be deeply injured
if we do not shift our efforts towards a more effective methodology.
Too many are hurt and will be hurt
by global poverty, by global health problems,
by climate change, by factory farming,
by racial injustices, and countless other problems
that endanger present and future generations.
As I sat in my global-health classes over the years,
learning about all these sufferings, I began to lose hope.
The mantra “the world is too big to be helped”
permeated my mind on a 24/7 loop.
I felt guilty sitting in my $50 Georgetown sweatshirt
that could have instead been sold to save a life.
But as a 21-year-old college student,
what good could I actually be doing in the world right now?
Well, I wanted to know.
So I asked myself,
“Is the world really too big to be helped
or are we simply not using our resources effectively enough to help it?”
I held on to some of that childhood naivety
and looked up how much it would actually cost to save the world,
in terms of ridding of all preventable diseases,
abolishing global poverty,
eliminating all suffering from animals at factory farms,
and turning around our countdown on climate change.
And it began to look like I wasn’t so naive after all.
It started to look like the world actually could be saved
if we started using our resources more effectively.
But what does it then mean to learn how to change the world effectively?
Well, secondly, I realized
that we use our brains to learn about all these sufferings;
now, how do we train our brains to learn to actually go do something about it?
I was always confused why there was never a helping-people school
or a class that teaches us how to, right now, go out into the world
and reduce other people’s sufferings.
It always perplexed me why we use the foundations of neuroplasticity,
you know that whole learn-a-new-skill, rewire-your-brain thing,
to learn basic math, reading, writing, other languages, dance, art,
but we don’t use these neuro-education tools
to learn how to help people?
Like,
to learn about the cost-effectiveness of different charities
or what it looks like to go into a career that’s actively helping others every day.
No one told me that right now,
I could be saving hundreds of lives
or curing thousands of people of preventable diseases.
And that seems like pretty cool and relevant information
that I wish I had learned earlier.
But, like, in my school, growing up,
we even took time out of our day to learn circus and swing dance.
And these are beautiful and entertaining art forms
that I’m really glad I learned,
but I now know how to juggle three scarves,
walk on stilts,
and play Hot Cross Buns badly on the violin,
but I never learned how to help people?
And then, it is so inspiring
for those who do develop passions to help certain cause areas,
but most of the time,
we never have the opportunity to learn how to go and do something about it.
Like, I could post on my Instagram that I care about malaria,
or I could research the most cost-effective charities,
find out that it only costs $0.66 to $2 for treatments,
and then go and save the lives of many children
as a 21-year-old college student.
So what I’m here to talk about
is turning our concern into actually helping.
Remember,
it’s not just the thought that counts.
A lot of people don’t care,
and that’s just sad.
A lot of people do care,
but we never learn how to put that care into practice.
So about a year ago,
I was researching in one of Georgetown’s neuroscience laboratories
on the neuroscience of altruism,
or what it is in our brains that leads us to want to help others.
And as I stayed up late researching altruism,
I came across a discovery,
one that would lead me to stop crying about all the homeless people
and instead actually do something about it.
I discovered Effective Altruism.
Effective Altruism is a philosophical and social movement,
started in Oxford about 15 years ago,
that asks the question, “How can we do the most good?”
and then uses rigorous scientific data analyses
to figure out how we can go make an impact on the world right now.
I was feeling pretty insignificant about my contributions to others,
and then I found Effective Altruism.
I found out that I had the power
to help hundreds of thousands of people throughout my lifetime.
I finally found my helping-people school.
The Effective Altruism movement
has changed the lives of millions of people across the globe.
They have saved lives of millions and hundreds of thousands of people
as well as donated billions of dollars to different causes out there.
I could show you
where the Effective Altruism movement has done all these things,
but you could just see those lists by googling GiveWell,
an independent nonprofit focused on doing the most good as possible.
And listing statistics won’t do much to persuade you to give more effectively.
We know this because almost everyone says
they care about the effectiveness of where they’re helping,
but only 3% of people measurably do.
Like, I could show you, for example,
how much further your dollar would go
in helping a blind person in a developing nation
over a blind person in America:
Because it costs $50,000
to train a guiding-eye dog for a blind person in America
versus only $50 for surgery
to prevent preventable blindness from trachoma in a developing nation.
But maybe you know someone blind in America,
and, obviously, our empathy leads us to want to help them instead.
Our psychology persuades us
to want to help those who are most similar to us,
socially and geographically.
But what would happen if we donated our time and resources unbiasedly?
Now, by “unbiasedly” and “effectiveness,”
I'm referring to the $1,000
to a deworming-children-with-parasites- in-sub-Saharan-Africa initiative
that could do so much more good and help so many more people
than $1 million to a really cost-ineffective charity
where maybe the CEO is getting all the money,
or they’re not really doing much good.
Every year,
hundreds of thousands of people go into careers that seem good
or donate to charities simply because a well-spoken fundraiser asked them to.
But most of the time,
we have no way of knowing how much good we’re doing,
where our money and time is even going,
and if we’re even helping people.
Maybe choosing to deworm children is not the sexiest cause to work on,
but perhaps choosing to work on the issues that the world isn’t paying attention to,
we can do so much more good
and help so many more people.
I grew up watching myself and others do charity that made ourselves feel good,
but now I’m learning how to do charity that actually is good.
Good intentions can sometimes lead to bad outcomes,
like in the case of that well-known program Scared Straight -
you know, the one where they brought a bunch of at-risk youth to prisons
to show them the horrors
of what it would look like to live in jail.
Well, after years of this program going on,
people finally analyzed the impact of it
found out that it was doing active harm, wasting a lot of money,
and made it more likely for these youth to go on to commit crimes later in life.
But good intentions can lead to good outcomes
if we use our heart and our head
to apply data and reasoning to our altruistic actions.
Like,
if I got a group of a few of my friends together at Georgetown,
we could reduce the suffering of hundreds of people with malaria
with the simple click of a button.
We can help a lot if we learn how to help well.
Many of us could transform the lives of thousands of people
throughout our lifetime.
And that's the world I want to see.
I want to help the most amount of people possible
to the deepest extent that I can throughout my life,
and to do this, I have to learn about effective giving.
I think that we need an intellectual response
on how to best help others,
and some ideas in Effective Altruism pose an ethical revolution.
Like, one idea in particular is that we should actively compare
between all the different causes and interventions out there,
figure out which one is doing the most good,
and then go and do that one.
At first I thought something like,
“Well, don’t all causes deserve some support?”
But then I realized
that the emphasis here should be shifted:
Causes don’t deserve support, people do.
If we want to best support people,
then we have to go and do the ways in which we can do that.
So let’s consider an example,
of which intervention increased school attendance the most in rural Kenya:
unconditional cash transfers to families;
merit-based scholarships;
informing parents about the benefits of education;
deworming; or free uniforms.
I’ll give you a second to think.
Well, researchers found
that informing parents about the benefits of education
and deworming
to be 40 times or more cost-effective than the other interventions.
So I know if I had just gone with my gut and jumped in to work
at an organization that seemed like they were doing good,
I would have wasted a lot of my time and a lot of my efforts in an organization
where I could have been doing so much more good
and helping so many more people someplace else.
Some efforts to improve the world are just far more effective than others.
So if our goal is to really help the most,
then we have to figure out what’s really working
and what’s really not,
which is why it’s so important to use careful evidence and reasoning
to decide what to work on and how to work on it.
I definitely don’t know all the answers,
no one does,
but I want to keep learning.
I want to keep asking the question “How can I do the most good?”
and then go forth and do it.
But what I do know
is that learning about effective giving allowed me to realize that we can help.
This whole change-the-world thing that everyone talks about,
well, I think we can do it.
We just have to learn how.
Isn't it beautiful that many of us could change thousands of people's lives
throughout our lifetime?
No one has to give you permission to do this. Just go do it.
Well, first learn how to do it effectively,
and then go do it if you can.
I am so excited
about what the world could look like
for our children
and our children’s children
and the future animals sitting there so happy
and the beautiful earth that I want my grandchildren to see.
So, now let’s work to make that happen.
I think for me, it started by recognizing what I was given.
I am so incredibly thankful to my mom and dad
for instilling in me the virtue of gratitude.
I was so lucky to be born into a family that valued education,
and I am so lucky to be here at Georgetown.
Guys, I literally have food on my table whenever I want it.
A lot of people don’t.
How cool is it
that I get to go learn things of my choosing
with really fun and interesting people every day?
A lot of people never get to go to school,
never get to learn about the wonders of philosophy and literature and math,
because what they need to learn is how to survive.
I have the privilege of choosing my educational route,
choosing my career path, choosing my activities,
and then the opportunity to go on to make money for myself.
A lot of people don't.
So let's use our education to learn for good.
I imagine a world in which many of us are going off into jobs
to help others that didn’t have the opportunities that we had
and learning how to help them effectively.
So how do we apply these lessons to our lives?
Well, people on average spend 80,000 hours working,
so the most relevant decision when deciding how to help people
is probably deciding how to spend these hours.
Or by reading books like Doing Good Better,
which have tremendously transformed
the amount of impact that I’ll have in my own life.
Almost no human in the generations prior to us
will have had so much power to help others.
Many of us could save someone’s life or change someone’s world every day.
I am not someone with special medical skills,
nor am I an expert in economics.
I’m definitely not a person in a position of any power.
I'm a typical college student,
but I was a little girl who dreamed of saving lives.
And now I’m still a little girl that can save lives.
So let’s help each other learn how to help the world.
Thank you.