Effective Altruists

We believe that using your ~700,000 hours and millions or billions of dollars in lifetime assets to do the greatest amount of good is an extraordinarily meaningful yet difficult path to take in life.

Putting humans on the Moon required 2.8 billion hours of work and cost about $280 billion dollars. That’s often what it takes to achieve important things.

Effective altruism (“EA”) is a movement tackling an even bigger challenge: finding the best ways to help others and then putting them into practice. Whether you’re in the community or resonate with some of its principles from afar, you can do your small but meaningful part. Upgradable is here to serve you on your journey. 

An Upgrade Program (“UP”) helps you systematically improve your entire life and achieve your highest value goals. It helps you see and shape your future. 

With EAs or EA-adjacent people, we usually do UPs that are between 1 day and 1 year long focusing on measurably improving whatever is most valuable for you given your values. That varies person to person, but generally revolves around your career, productivity, emotional wellbeing, physical wellbeing, financial security, relationships, personal safety, and/or emergency preparedness. We have science-based, partly outsourceable plans (including carefully curated tools, assessments, and resources) for optimizing these and every other area of your life. The ultimate aim is to allocate the optimal number of hours for you towards your highest impact work over your lifetime.

For entrepreneurs, we also have a large set of meticulously developed startup templates, sample files, and tools. Our team has built 25+ organizations, cumulatively operating for 200+ years and earning millions of dollars. 

You can do your UP on your own for free or, if you find it cost-effective, use our aligned coaches, assistants, and wide array of specialists. We can do your personal and professional work with or for you and are especially good at helping you set life strategy and get you unstuck from your biggest systemic challenges. Our aim is to save you thousands to tens of thousands of hours over your lifetime, which you can redirect into both your life’s work and your life’s fun.

You may dream extremely big. That’s great. Just remember that to achieve what’s most important to you, it’s a team effort that might take decades. Generally speaking, you’re not going to mitigate 99.99% of existential risks with one great paper. You’re not going to end factory farming with one heroic campaign. You’re not going to become the next SBF with a few smart trades. (Nor should you be that reckless or ruthless.) But you can make progress, day in and day out. Ultimately that progress adds up for you and all other sentient life.

We’ve spent the last 20+ years researching and experimenting in self-development, behavior change, and goal attainment to create and augment the broad cluster of people now sometimes associated with the EA movement. Many of the same philosophical roots that motivate EA also motivate UP. We started what became UP before EA formally existed and our team co-founded some of EA’s early foundational organizations (including EA Global and EA Ventures). We also formerly advised 80,000 Hours and embed much of their work into our own interventions. You could call us 700,000 Hours, if you’d like. (We didn’t choose that name since we had short timelines for existential risks. And we believed we would soon solve aging, if we aligned AI.) All in, we’ve advised, consulted for, incubated or otherwise supported 50+ organizations in the broad space.

Over this time we’ve worked with hundreds of ambitious, altruistic people in a 1-on-1 or small group setting and impacted thousands more indirectly. See our research on the UP intervention that has been borne out of that early work.

Our current aim is to substantially augment the individuals and organizations working to solve the world’s most pressing problems, especially those focused on reducing existential risks from advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, nuclear weapons, and future weapons.

We believe we’re in for a radically transformative time and could use all hands on deck.

If any of this resonates with you–even if you don’t explicitly identify as an EA–please reach out. We’d love to help you achieve your most valuable goals, including your goals around living an amazing life.

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Also see our AI Safety Advocates page.

If you want to subsidize UPs for financially-constrained people doing high-impact work, please consider donating.