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What is Effective Altruism at Hunter?

Effective Altruism as recently covered in TIME Magazine.

Will MacAskill's TED Talk on Effective Altruism

We're a club at Hunter dedicated to helping the student body maximize the positive impacts they can have through their projects and careers. Throughout the year we host mixers, workshops, and discussions focusing on some of the world's most pressing issues and what you can do to help.

We're a part of the Effective Altruism movement. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good. 

Many of us want to do good but, with all the problems we see in the world today, it's difficult to tell where our time and resources might be used best. This is an important question because while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.

Effective altruism has now spread around the world, and is being applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries. People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic.

Effective altruism isn't defined by just the projects above. What defines effective altruism are the values that underpin its search for the best ways of helping others.

Our Team.

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