Effective Altruism: Using Reason and Evidence to the Most Good

Join us for an evening with Effective Altruism Cambridge
presented by Amrit Sidhu-Brar

A great many of us feel a drive to help others, out of concern or empathy, or even a sense of moral obligation. However, facing the scale of the world’s problems, it’s easy to become discouraged. How can any one person’s effort make the slightest dent in the enormity of the world’s injustice? Indeed, how can we know that our efforts are doing any good at all?

As it turns out, though, using reason and evidence to approach these questions gives exciting results: while a great many projects don’t have significant positive impact, the very best opportunities for doing good are astronomically more effective – and by applying a little research to the question of where to direct their efforts, anyone can have a real, significant, and measurable impact on the lives of others.

How can we do the most good? Effective altruism is a movement dedicated to asking this question, using evidence and reason to find the answers, and helping each other to put those answers into practice.

Amrit Sidhu-Brar, a member of Cambridge’s effective altruism community, will present the evidence-backed case for putting one’s effort and resources towards helping with the world’s most pressing problems, by sharing some of effective altruism’s key insights: how a critically-minded person can choose which of the most important cause areas to work on (or donate to), the criteria that researchers have been using to assess the effectiveness of the top interventions within each, and the open questions that we need to address to best achieve our goals of helping others.

Empathy gives us the drive to help those in need. Amrit will seek to show us that the use of evidence and good reasoning could help us do best by that empathy, by directing that drive towards efforts to have the greatest impact we can achieve.

FREE ENTRY (registration required)
http://buytickets.at/cambridgeskeptics/219340

Accessibility: Ramp access. 76cm doorway opening.