How to Do the Most Good
b'Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?\\n\\nThis is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky\\u2019s current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn\\u2019t find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.\\n\\nBut in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle \\u2014 how can we do the most good possible? \\u2014 but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil\\u2019s areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we\\u2019re living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.\\n\\nIn all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that\\u2019s come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.\\n\\nYou probably won\\u2019t agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that\\u2019s only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy\\u2019s career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.\\n\\nMentioned:\\nThe "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky\\u2019s blog, Cold Takes\\nGiveWell\\nMore on Open Philanthropy\\u2019s approach to worldview diversification\\n\\u201cWhat Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism\\u201d by William MacAskill\\n\\u201cThe Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective\\u201d by Charles I. Jones\\n\\nBook recommendations:\\nDue Diligence by David Roodman\\nThe Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. Kelly\\nThe Precipice by Toby Ord\\n\\nYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.\\n\\nThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.\\n\\n\\u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\\u201d is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rog\\xe9 Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.'