![EFFALT [Effective Altogether]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.unsplash.com%2Fphoto-1548147963-30ac0d3d7723%3Fixlib%3Drb-4.0.3%26q%3D80%26fm%3Djpg%26crop%3Dentropy%26cs%3Dtinysrgb&w=3840&q=75)
Empowering Everyone To See Doing Good As The Highest Value
My Story In A Paragraph:
I have been spending a lot of time researching and seeing where I maximize my effectiveness. I am blessed to have had success multiple times as an entrepreneur at a young age, selling my CBD company, selling a distribution company, and delegating an idea for a inhaler to help quit nicotine entirely and achieving viral growth to drive 7 figure revenues. The only reason I have been able to achieve this success is an internal calling and drive I found after a dark and depressing phase of my life. At the age of 18 I should have been super happy based on all exterior things, supportive and stable upper-middle class family, great genetics (6’4”), scholar athlete of year for my school district, a D1 offer to Naval Academy for Football, full-ride scholarships, and perfect math and science scores on the ACT.
Yet on the inside I had a very very big problem. I had difficulty finding the will to exist… taking the idea that myself and everyone I knew would be dead one day poorly. School did not educate me with the mental defence to fight this idea. Instead it treated it as a taboo subject to avoid (given the religious conflict that arises). I attribute my change of will to two things.
- Internet content such as youtube videos on philosophy which were inspiring like the channel Exurb1a
- Taking magical mushrooms with my friends before one went off to the marines
Everyone has a right to a community they feel welcome in, and empowered from.
I knew I had great potential,
Turns out when you are just happy in life, you can in fact have a good life.
In building my leverage in the world, my entire mindset has been to maximize the amount of good I do in this world and this have been the most succinct philosophy I have found, compounding in my sureness of it being the right path the more I think about it and put it up against other ideas.
1. Working on helping people gives me deeper faith in the future going well (good vibes).
- If there is any hierarchy to a post scarcity society it would be based on how much good you did for the world.
is the more enlightened view than wealth farming in terms of valuing impact as a more valuable resource. One belief I hold is that the people are rewarded who predict correctly how the future universe plays out. Ineffective actions are thus based on a lack of perspective.
This perspective that good karma is the ultimate resource to accumulate is not post rationality while it may seem that way at first. Instead, a long term view on value proposes that fiat, gold, housing, cars, all deteriorate to 0 value in a post scarcity (post-agi) economy. Good karma is the most eternal currency there is (and the most important and fulfilling). In a post-scarcity world, unless we eradicate hierarchy altogether, what will there be for us to build hierarchy from besides the valuing each others prior strength and commitment to building that better world.
AI alignment is an example of a red ocean in Effective Altruism. AI alignment is well known to be a core tenant of effective altruism that has ample attention. One major tenant that is underrepresented is the spread of the Effective Altruist mindset itself. The Effective Altruism community has been very successful at garnering political support and support from billionaires worldwide. Their internal belief is against spreading worldwide, in a hope to protect this existing community structure. This creates a massive blue ocean of opportunity in the world to align a parallel but separated movement.
Obviously the building of this movement has been massively valuable to the people inside of it.
In seeking to have maximal effective impact, I believe filling in missed or underrepresented gaps of Effective Altruism to be the highest order I can follow. Of which the mindset is the act of identifying more high value impact roadmaps. Just like in business which seeks to create capital, the highest returns are in blue ocean strategies.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.
“RED OCEANS are all the industries in existence today – the known market space. In red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here, companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, leading to cutthroat or ‘bloody’ competition. Hence the term red oceans.”
“BLUE OCEANS, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. A blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space. A blue ocean is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth.”
The question then becomes:
How do we inject this mindset into culture? How do we make altruism (AKA Good Karma) the status leaderboard of society at large.
I find explaining high level concepts in super basic ways as a good way to find alignment in the truth of the information.
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” - Albert Einstein.
The ELI5 (Explain Like I Am 5) version of EA Mindset Spread as the top cause area:
Imagine you had the goal of creating as many gummy bears as possible. If you devoted your life to making gummy bears manually, you would reach the end of your productive career with 250,000 gummy bears made.
A gummy bear machine on the other hand can produce 250,000 gummy bears every single hour.
What you should do is not start making gummy bears right away, but instead look for the most effective route to afford the machinery which would produce gummy bears at scale. Imagine it takes a year to get funding for a gummy bear machine, and each year you start producing 10,000,000 EVERY YEAR.
After 30 years they have produced 300 million gummy bears, an entirely amazing feat.
Moving up another level you may realize the goal is not in fact to create as many gummy bears for yourself, but to change the total amount of gummy bears that exist in the world at the end.
You realize to maximize your gummy impact instead of following the path of getting the machinery yourself, you would look at inspiring others to believe in that goal. You would take your own reasoning for “Creating as many gummy bears as possible” as the optimal way to live ones life.
If in 10 years you can convince 10 people to live their life optimizing gummy bears as well, they could spread this dogma onward causing more people with life paths of becoming gummy bear optimizers.
Over the next 20 years, 10 people each set up a machine producing 10m gummy bears a year means the world now has 2 BILLION MORE gummy bears where you would have only created 200 million.
Realizing this, it is obvious the highest order of this idea would be aligning the world around this belief, influencing culture to value the amount of gummy bears one produced as the highest order status function.
Exiting the gummy bear metaphor for scaling doing good in the world gives us solid reasoning to focus on efforts that influence the world at large to take on the Effective Altruist mindset. While, convincing people to dedicate their lives to making gummy bears at all costs is going to be a difficult sell, luckily, Effective Altruism is a concept grounded in truthful and rational reasoning that already has an amazing undercurrent of growth.
The resource of Effective Altruism may can be deemed Good Karma and may be far less trackable than Gummy Bear production itself, but the act of obtaining the most of it remains the same. Thus, my life and this website has a focus on the spread of projects that help the effective altruism mindset spread. The best part about great work in the world is that you can turn the work into the marketing itself.
An example of this was packing orders for my no nicotine vape brand. What we did was set up Tiktok accounts and with an extra 60 seconds of effort posted short clips of orders being packed and shipped. Funnily enough, for a time period every single order we shipped results in 1.1 new orders. This became our only marketing channel, and its cost was eaten by the fact that we already needed to do that process. Simply understanding how to game these algorithms allowed us to reach over 100 million people in the course of just 6 months.
While there is plenty of work being done because of EA opportunities, EA certainly lacks mainstream virality besides the occasional Sam Bankman-Fried shoutout from his various high level interviews. While this is great for high quantity, the lack of being able to follow a direct story has a lot less pull for emotion. Anyone versed in marketing knows that re-targeting is key to optimizing conversion.
While bringing concepts of conversion into the spread of the EA mindset may be off-putting to some, it is of course a necessary component to factor into any good movement. A major lack in the EA movement is influence. The internet is raising this next generation and causing cultural shifts faster than ever possible. If someone could name one influencer group living an EA lifestyle that would be amazing because I would like to follow them.
The very vacuum of this type of personality or group sickens me and its something I want to devote my life to filling whether through empowering other individuals to take this path, taking it myself with the friends I have (and am open to finding more group members), or both. The very creation of an influencer who has this ideals will spawn countless more groups and people following the same path. As influence grows, and the pureness of the channel uplifts society, we would literally influence the influencers.
These high value impact roadmaps open up new opportunity for widespread adoption of the effective altruism mindset by weighing high value on the mimetic spread of the altruist mindset itself.
What good is the world when there is no more good to do?
The world is maximum good.
Theres too many good things to do, we need to do all of them before it’s too late.