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+---
+title: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact"
+date: 2025-10-26T00:00:00Z
+draft: false
+---
+## Inspired By Aaron Swartz
+
+I'd like to cite [Aaron Swartz](http://www.aaronsw.com/ "Aaron Swartz") as a source of inspiration for this entry. [I don't have heroes](/2023/08/22/never-meet-your-heroes/ "Journal Entry: Never Meet Your Heroes"), but if I did, he'd be mine. He is deceased now, but he was more like myself than any other public figure I'm aware of and he had very similar long-term life goals. Here's a collection of quotes from him I picked that I believe best exemplify his outlook on life:
+
+> "Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren't natural at all. They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change, and once I realized that, there was really no going back."
+
+> "Don't just go along because that's the way things are or that's what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think."
+
+> "What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual."
+
+
+## How to Maximize Your Positive Impact
+
+One of the important problems Aaron grappled with, that all good activists *must* grapple with, is how to maximize his own positive impact on the world.
+
+Anyone can have *a* positive impact on the world. You can go straight to the nearest soup kitchen and lend a helping hand right now. But you could also become a policy wonk and try to change economic policy so that charity isn't necessary, and you'd help many more people that way if you could accomplish it.
+
+You could become a doctor and save lives. But you could also donate money to charities that distribute food and vaccines in third-world countries. You wouldn't have the respect and prestige of being a doctor, but you'd potentially save more lives than entire hospitals in the developed world.
+
+But if you're working on A.I. and you manage to contribute an idea to the field that allows us to simulate quintillions of happy humans for trillions of simulated years, and to do this several years earlier than we would've been able to without your contribution, that would outweigh the entire collective good of all volunteers, doctors, and everyone else who performed good acts through all of history.
+
+**Since we all have our own unique passions and abilities, the answer for how to maximize our positive impact in the world is different for each one of us.** For some people, working in a soup kitchen is the best way they can help. For others like Aaron Swartz, their time isn't best spent in soup kitchens. They can have a much greater positive impact on many more people by doing other things.
+
+For picking a cause, I'd suggest something close to your heart. In my case, that would be autism and digital privacy. This will help you stay motivated to work on it over the long term, and it'll feel personally meaningful to you.
+
+To decide what to do for your cause to have the greatest possible impact requires careful research. You need to know what's most needed, and what you're capable of. When you're doing the research, it's important to be aware of the broader context of your cause. For example, what are the major barriers preventing your cause from succeeding, and how does your cause play into other social causes and vice versa? The reason that's so important is because if you don't have this bird's-eye view, you risk [tunnel vision](/2021/06/30/integrated-activism/ "Journal Entry: Integrated Activism"), and also wasting time and effort on projects that just end up being nullified by some technological or social paradigm shift later on.
+
+So that's my basic advice for how to maximize your positive impact. Others have thought about this question as well, and have some ideas worth discussing.
+
+
+### Effective Altruism (EA)
+
+The organization [80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/ "80,000 Hours"), part of the broader [Effective Altruism](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ "Effective Altruism") (EA) movement, has put a *lot* of thought into the question of how to maximize impact. They've published [a framework for selecting a cause](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ "80,000 Hours: A framework for strategically selecting a cause"), a document for [assessing the impact of a career](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/ "80,000 Hours: How to assess the impact of a career"), and their founders and members also have several books out on the subject that you should consider reading. I suggest reading some of it just to get yourself thinking critically about the topic.
+
+
+### Philosophy Tube
+
+If you do read EA material, you *must* also watch [Philosophy Tube](https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2PA-AKmVpU6NKCGtZq_rKQ "Philosophy Tube Youtube Channel")'s [video essay](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Lm0vHQYKI-Y "The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash (ft. F1nn5ter)") compiling criticisms of EA as an organization, and as a philosophy.
+
+One of the criticisms against EA as a movement outlined in the video is that **EA has an observability bias. By limiting itself to evidence-based remedies, it's always working within the system, potentially reinforcing the (difficult to measure) root causes of the problems it purports to solve.** In only recommending "evidence-based" ways to do good, it discounts other unquantifiable options that may do far greater good.
+
+For example, EA would recommend getting a job in finance to have more money to give to the poor. This is evidence-based because you can quantify how much you're helping, but there are several problems with it:
+
+* It's not a solution—you will *never* fix wealth inequality or poverty this way
+* It ignores unquantifiable ways that this strategy may worsen the situation (Where is this money coming from? Might charity give people the idea that systemic solutions aren't needed?)
+
+EA wouldn't recommend replacing capitalism with something else because that's not "evidence-based"—any time you're dealing with messy human group behavior, it's not so easy to consistently replicate let alone quantify how much good it does compared to alternatives. The problem with discounting these more [complete](/2023/09/10/individual-vs-collective-advice/ "Journal Entry: Individual vs Collective Advice") solutions is that very few of them are "evidence-based" in the sense of being quantifiable and measurable as EA demands, the "evidence-based" mitigations ultimately don't cut it, and many existing systems aren't really evidence-based anyways. So at some point, we need to take the leap of faith and take our best guess based on everything we know even if there's no hard data to guarantee success.
+
+In my opinion, EA as a philosophy has some interesting ideas, especially relating to [longtermism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism "Wikipedia: Longtermism") and [existential risk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk "Wikipedia: Global Catastrophic Risk"), but what it promotes as an organization and as a movement is too business-friendly. It seems to be a modern version of Andrew Carnegie's [The Gospel of Wealth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth "The Gospel of Wealth"), which emphasizes that the rich (or the fortunate, in the EA context) have a responsibility to use their money wisely to benefit the rest of society, but avoids challenging the underlying economic system which creates these inequalities in the first place.
+
+
+### My Thoughts
+
+If you're interested in my "activism journey", you can read my entry "[A Retrospective on My Free Software Absolutism](/2025/02/01/a-retrospective-on-my-free-software-absolutism/ "Journal Entry: A Retrospective on My Free Software Absolutism")". In it, I mention a book titled "[The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way](https://hillaryrettigproductivity.com/the-lifelong-activist/ "The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way")". I highly recommend this book and I wish I would've read it before I tried to make a positive impact on the world. I also come to the conclusion that "the fight for free software (or most other social causes) is [not] winnable as long as the overriding economic incentives of capitalism are present." I think many activists eventually come to the same realization as they become more aware of the larger upstream forces affecting their cause.
+
+To be clear, this same logic doesn't apply to all social causes. There are occasionally large and small unexpected wins despite capital influence. Additionally, there are social causes that aren't, in principle, in conflict with capitalism. So don't interpret this as me saying nothing can be done until capitalism is replaced. Keep in mind that capitalism isn't the only major upstream blocker of social progress. They all play into each other, but if we could perfectly isolate them I'd say it's the most significant one at the moment that we must overcome in order to actually *win* the war for major causes, and not just a select few battles.
+
+Like many prominent EA members, I'm pretty utilitarian in my values, and thus a fan of taking that approach to doing good. But I think it's not hard to start an EA-style initiative, acquire funding from rich folks, and get media attention and clout, while not really moving the needle in the long term. I think there should be more attention directed towards testing new systemic solutions to big problems, and not towards existing workarounds (like charity) that are "evidence-based", but will never be sufficient.
+
+If you're thinking about how to maximize your positive impact on the world, I hope you'll take some time to consider everything I've mentioned here and read some other sources that I've linked here as well. If you have any questions before starting your own activism journey or you've already started it but you're having doubts, feel free to [contact me](/about/ "About Page").