“Judgement, which I roughly define as ‘the ability to weigh complex information and reach calibrated conclusions,’ is clearly a valuable skill.

In our simple analysis of which skills make people most employable, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics across the US economy, ‘judgement and decision making’ came out top (though meant in a broader sense than we do).

My guess is that good judgement is even more important when aiming to have a positive impact.

What follows are some notes on why good judgement matters, what it is, and what we know about how to improve it.”

“If someone offered you a free beer, but told you there’s a 1% chance it contains poison, you wouldn’t drink it. That’s because the badness of drinking poison far outweighs the goodness of getting a free beer, so even though you’re very unlikely to end up with poison, it’s not worth drinking.

We all make decisions about risk and uncertainty like this in our daily lives. And when trying to do good, we often face even greater uncertainty about the ultimate effects of our actions, especially when we consider all their long-term effects.

In practice, we don’t — and can’t — know for sure what the effects of our actions will be. The best we can do is to consider all of the good and bad things that could result from an action, and weigh them by how likely we think they are to actually happen. So you should think of the possibility of dying in a car crash as twice as concerning if it’s twice as likely.

We call this the ‘expected value’ of our actions, which is the technical term for the sum of all the good and bad potential consequences of an action, weighted by their probability.”

Imagine you’re at the scene of an accident and you see an injured person. In your enthusiasm to help, you push the paramedics out of the way and perform CPR on the injured person yourself. You’re successful and bring them back to consciousness, but because you’re less well-trained than the paramedics, you cause permanent damage to the person’s spine. If you had let the paramedics perform CPR instead, the injured person would have made a full recovery. In this case, your tangible impact was to save their life, but your true impact compared to the counterfactual was to cause the person spinal damage.

This illustrates the idea that you can have a negative counterfactual impact, even while appearing to do good directly.

“What are some reasons I might be wrong?

What would I do if it turned out I was wrong?

Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we’d like to happen, thinking about reasons the things we believe (or the things we want to believe) are likely to be true. We very rarely do the opposite: really thinking through worst case scenarios, or actively looking for reasons our deepest held beliefs are false. Why would we want to do this? We might found out something we don’t want to know. But this is exactly why we should do it.”

“We can be uncertain about matters of fact, like whether it’ll rain tomorrow, but we can also be uncertain about moral claims, like how much to value the interests of future generations.

In the last decade, there has been more study of how to act when uncertain about what’s of value, and our cofounder, Will MacAskill, has written a book on the topic.

An approach that’s common is to pick the view that seems most plausible to you, and to go with that. This has been called the ‘my favourite theory’ approach.

But this approach seems bad. Consider a situation like this:

You’re at a restaurant and can order either foie gras or vegetarian risotto. You think there’s a 55% chance that animal welfare has no moral significance, and a 45% chance that it does, which would mean it’s deeply wrong to eat the foie gras. Personally, you’d find either meal equally delicious.

The favourite theory approach would say you should act as if animal welfare doesn’t matter, and so it’s equally good to order either the foie gras or the risotto. But it seems clearly better to pick the risotto.”

“Consider one billion animals. Now consider one trillion animals. The second number is vastly higher. However, it is difficult for many people to have a clear idea of what the magnitude of that difference is. As a result of this, we often fail to assess properly what we should do when large numbers of individuals are affected.”

“Fermi estimation is a method for arriving an estimate of an uncertain variable of interest. Given a variable of interest, sometimes you can decompose it into steps, and multiplying those steps together gives you a more accurate estimate than estimating the thing you want to know directly. I’ll go through a proof sketch for this at the end of the post.”

”Your independent impression about something is essentially what you'd believe about that thing if you weren't updating your beliefs in light of peer disagreement - i.e., if you weren't taking into account your knowledge about what other people believe and how trustworthy their judgement seems on this topic. Your independent impression can take into account the reasons those people have for their beliefs (inasmuch as you know those reasons), but not the mere fact that they believe what they believe. Meanwhile, your all-things-considered belief can (and probably should!) also take into account peer disagreement.”

“When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I've been there.

Cost-effectiveness analysis is a very useful tool. I wish more people and institutions applied it to more problems. But like any tool, this tool will not be applicable to all parts of your life. Not everything you do is in the “effectiveness” bucket. I don't even know what that would look like.”

“There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone...

If the lawyer needs to work an hour at the soup kitchen to keep himself motivated and remind himself why he's doing what he's doing, that's fine.  But he should also be donating some of the hours he worked at the office, because that is the power of professional specialization and it is how grownups really get things done.  One might consider the check as buying the right to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or validating the time spent at the soup kitchen.”

“Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain them to an alien:

"Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the discourse. But it's one step on the road to things like banning unpopular political positions or religions, and we right-thinking people oppose that, so we won't ban Holocaust denial."

And the alien might well respond: "But you could just ban Holocaust denial, but not ban unpopular political positions or religions. Then you right-thinking people get the thing you want, but not the thing you don't want."

This post is about some of the replies you might give the alien.”

“Imagine meeting someone for the first time, and knowing nothing about them except that they’re shy.

Question: Is it more likely that this person is a librarian, or a salesperson?

Most people answer “librarian.” Which is a mistake: shy salespeople are much more common than shy librarians, because salespeople in general are much more common than librarians—seventy-five times as common, in the United States.”

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• When to Trust Your Gut: Understanding Intuition