There are many problems in the world today. Poverty, war, domestic violence, various abuses and fears, to name just a few.
Given that the world has so many problems, and that these problems are so severe, surely we have a responsibility to do something about them. The responsibility is not just optional, but also necessary, as the problems soon or later will inflict those who thought they are immune from and better off.
But what? There are countless problems that we could be addressing, and many different ways of addressing each of those problems. Moreover, our resources are scarce, so as individuals and even as a globe we can’t solve all these problems at once. So we must make decisions about how to allocate the resources we have. But on what basis should we make such decisions?
There has been a so-called effective altruism movement that focus on providing resources to those who suffer the problems, resources being chiefly funds, part of which can be used to purchase foods, clothings or shelters for those who are hungry, cold and without a place to live. However, to give people fish is not as good as providing the tools for them to fish. Charity can never solve the problems. People who are suffering from the problems may be part of the problems, or ignorant of the sources of the problems.
Thus, what is needed is actually enlightenment, which helps people identify the sources of the problems and address accordingly by themselves. How to provide such help in the most effective way is called effective enlightenment.
People who join the Effective Enlightenment movement try to figure out, of all the different uses of our resources, which uses will do the most enlightenment, impartially considered. There are now thousands of thousands of people around the world who are doing enlightenment work but they will do it more effectively with Effective Enlightenment organizations and supports. This movement will be gathering steam, when people can be more conscious about how to chose their careers, at least in part, on the basis of effective enlightenment ideas; individuals can go into scientific research, think tanks, party politics, social entrepreneurship, finance (in order to do effective enlightenment through donating), and non-profit work. Every year, every month and every day, people can communicated with each other on ways to do the job better, but can also meet in conferences to learn from and support each other. People can pledge to give at least 10% of their income for the rest of their lives to the organisations they believe to be most cost-effective just as charity do, but with the understanding that they are not just providing charity but the enlightenment mindset for them to escape poverty, violence and fear.
Money is necessary but never the only thing as in charity or as in effective altruism. Effective organization and effective effort is part of the effective enlightenment endeavor. But every journey starts at the first step and the first step can be you yourself: be enlightened and not ignorant, be considerate and not abusive, be supportive and not sabotaging, to the right people of course, and be courageous rather than fearful, be rational rather than illogical, be spiritual rather than superstitious, and so on, from there we go the next step to enlighten our friends, neighbors, relatives and ready to be enlightened by others.
Enlightenment can be subjective and has to go through multiple stages to refine. Ideas we think quite enlightened may turn out to be ignorant and stupid. Some ideas may be enlightened in one scenario but ignorant in another. But the most important thing is for us to know. In general we believe there is a difference between right and wrong, true and false, kind and cruel, beautiful and ugly, at least in each scenario. An enlightened person should do the right thing for each scenario.
Effective Enlightenment also believes the human society in general can get improved. Technologically speaking, compared with our ancestors of thousands years ago we can better sustain illness, hunger and other natural disasters because we are more enlightened, but we can continue to better ourselves as a whole with enlightenment ideas in alleviating our poverty, hunger and more importantly in reducing violence, abuses and fear.
As a result of effective enlightenment, we aim to use our resources and time most effectively and c contribute to significant achievements in the shortest time and widest scope around the globe. In a sense, ignorance can kill ourselves and effective enlightenment is a competition with ignorance to reduce suffering in the personal lives in a person’s life time and in human life in the human history. Without enlightenment, human society can continue to suffer, without effective enlightenment, people do not know how to start, how to enlighten effectively and may be too late before the worse case happens to humankind.
The Effective Enlightenment community will provide significant impetus and support in the development of ideas, methodologies and technologies for members to employ in their work.
However, we need to provide more details on what we’re talking about, mainly the definition of Effective Enlightenment.
Before we begin, it’s important to note that, in defining ‘effective enlightenment, we are not attempting to describe a fundamental aspect of philosophy. History has provided such elements through European Enlightenment for the French, British, German or even Russian people, there are also more specific ones from the Scottish Enlightenment, American Independence Enlightenment and various philosophical books from these countries throughout history. Those are the theoretical aspects that we will refer. But as in empirical research fields, we can distinguish between science and engineering. Science is the attempt to discover general truths about the world we live in. Engineering is the use of our scientific understanding to design and build structures or systems that benefit society.
We can make the same distinction here. Typically, enlightenment philosophy is concerned with discovering general truths about the nature of enlightenment — the equivalent of normative science.
But there is also scope for the equivalent of engineering within enlightenment effort, for example by creating new enlightenment concepts whose use, if taken up broadly by society, would improve the world in a more effective way.
Defining ‘effective enlightenment’ is a matter of engineering rather than of describing some fundamental aspect of enlightenment. In this vein, I suggest two principal desiderata for the definition. The first is to match the actual practice of those who are currently described as engaging in effective enlightenment, and the understanding of enlightenment that the leaders of the community have. The second is to ensure that the concept has as much public value as possible. This means, for example, we want the concept to be broad enough to be endorsable by or useful to many different enlightenment views, but still determinate enough to enable users of the concept to do more to improve the world than they otherwise would have done. This, of course, is a tricky balancing act.
The Effective Enlightenment’s definition we take is based on the following consideration: Effective Enlightenment is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to enlighten ourselves and others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.
For that reason, Effective Enlightenment is defined as:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the enlightenment among people with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the enlightenment’ in number of people and depth terms, and
(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the enlightenment of the world.
Here (i) refers to effective enlightenment as an intellectual project (or ‘research field’); (ii) refers to effective enlightenment as a practical project (or ‘social movement’).
This definition is:
● Non-normative. Effective Enlightenment consists of two projects, rather than a set of normative claims.
● Maximising. The point of these projects is to do as much enlightenment as possible with the resources that are dedicated towards it.
● Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most enlightenment is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on careful rigorous argument and theoretical models as well as data.
● Spiritually-supportive. Although we use scientific method to measure effectiveness as much as possible, we believe the measure cannot be always possible and can be misleading. Relying on scientific methods too much or blindly with do harm than good. Enlightenment is always about a person’s enlightenment, which can be difficult to know and measure.
One can try to increase the amount of enlightenment one does in two ways: by increasing the amount of resources that one dedicates to doing enlightenment; and by trying to increase the effectiveness of the resources that one has dedicated to doing enlightenment. Effective enlightenment is directly about maximising in the latter sense but can be possible in the former sense too.
Most of this “manifesto” is word by word from William MacAskill’s The definition of effective altruism. I have copied directly over unabashedly because we are almost doing the something except I don’t believe “altruism” is what is needed to improve human society and providing charity itself is not effective at all. Providing enlightenment, even without the adjective “effective” is more effective than “effective altruism”. Thus effective enlightenment is much more effective than effective altruism, and deserves a movement much larger than the effective altruism movement and can avoid the problems with effective altruism in recent years. For example, some of the donors of effective altruism have proved to commit crimes but crime is not part of enlightenment and should be avoided from the very beginning.
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