Schindler’s List and Effective Altruism

I was born altruistic. Some chemical combination in my genes codes for an altruistic brain. This was exacerbated by Toxoplasmosis.

From an early age, I was transfixed by Mickey’s Christmas Carol. I watched it so many times, I memorized it. It tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy old duck who kept for himself the spoils of exploiting his workers.

I’m no saint; I’ve committed many crimes in life, some of which I can attribute to prefrontal delayed development. Some of which I have no excuse for.

But I am altruistically oriented. My PhD is called Altruism: Past, Present, Propagation.

When Effective Altruism was getting started, it was a natural fit for me.

Are you, dear reader, able to do something for me? Can you somehow force your brain to watch Schindler’s List without thinking of Jews? I know, hard ask. But I can, and I’ll teach you.

Forget who is who, labels, groups, etc… Just consider who can save more lives. Any lives. In that movie it’s Schindler who does it. He saves lives multiple ways, by buying them via bribing officers, by hiring workers who would be otherwise executed, by creating ineffective shells. He tries to save them by getting the bad guy drunk and suggesting that an imperial pardon is more valuable than a murder (that doesn’t work, but he tried). And in so many other ways.

In the end two scenes capture my kind of brain and my attention. We’ll get to the second in due time. First, in the train scene, we see that Schindler has become an EA by the end of the war. He no longer sees his car, but how many lives he could have saved with that car. No longer a lappele of gold, but the life he could save with that gold. The day-to-day experience of existing with these people transformed him from a rich industrialist womanizer into a rich industrialist womanizer Effective Altruist.

When I first saw Schindler’s List, with my Jewish girlfriend at the time, I was already an Effective Altruist, and she wasn’t. So I imagine we watched two completely different movies. While she saw her dad and her people, I saw that the world can be utilized as a life-saving machine, and you can trade resources, of all kinds, time, money, etc… for actual people.
People, unfolding cascades of mesmerizing depth and experience running for 90 years, worth to themselves almost as much as you are worth to yourself.

Schindler looks in despair at his lapel and says two people, maybe 1 person. I could have got one more person, for this.

So I, who already was an EA, and wasn’t seeing it as an ethnic issue, but a lives saved question, couldn’t drive out of my head the immense privilege I have, and thought between tears that even that very television in which we were watching was possibly one life. Not in 1943 but in 2011 or so, when we were watching.

I want you to think of this as well.

Stop thinking of EAs as political left-leaning people. Think of us as people who see the whole world as a life-saving game in which you can trade tokens of resources for lives.

That’s an incredible, amazing opportunity.

And before you issue at me all the critiques you have of the African charity model, remember that it is not just in Africa that you can trade resources for a life. If you are worried that feeding Africans will lead to overpopulation, there’s plenty of hungry Brazilians for you to help. Don’t like Brazilians? No problem, there’s plenty of Armenians. Don’t like Armenians, just go up a list. There is no shortage of poor people of whatever race is your favorite somewhere out there. They need your golden lapel more than you do.

“I could have gotten a person, for this.”

This is true of you. Today, in 2025.

A person is more expensive today than in the 90s, or even 2010, but you can still get a person.

Watch Schindler’s list, feel what he feels in the outgoing scene. Make it part of you, part of your heart. Forget that those people in the movie are Jews, who cares? They are people, with lives ahead of them, which you get to see, that’s the second scene, where the real Schindler Jews come forth and lay a stone at his tomb. There were at that time 1993, over 6k Schindler Jew descendants, and today there are probably 8k or more.
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You can be Schindler, today.

That’s the spirit of Effective Altruism. Use some resources to make entire people. Every experience they will ever live, every joy and pain, etc…

We live in a universe where you, reading this, can save a life, no matter your excuses, no matter your racial preferences or religious preferences, or any other preferences. You can save a life OF THE KIND you don’t have excuses for.

So fire up the light in your heart, and think of how you can save a life. Maybe it’s donating to the most effective charities, maybe it is doing AI or some other thing.

But you have the same power as Schindler has in that scene.
He saved 1100 people.

Many of the people I know are Americans. Americans have a factory setting defect of not knowing how insanely rich they are. But you are. If you’re reading this, you are rich enough to save at least a couple of lives. Maybe more.

I think it’s important to remember that, to act on it.

This isn’t theoretical talk. This is real life.

There’s a sequence of actions you can take starting today by the end of which you will have saved many lives (or produced equivalent quality moments).

I often treat an individual’s proclivity to altruism as a fixed thing in my Facebook writings: some of you are altruistic, some are not.

But this text is different; here I am trying to show you how we altruists see the world, and inviting you to join us, to jump the fence, to see that the grass is greener on our side.

You can still have nice things; no one is coming for your stuff. But you can have nice things AND save a life. Or two. A life is a person like you, who also would like to have nice things instead of oblivion.

Keep that in mind.

But don’t overburden yourself. Don’t fall into a dark spiral because the well of people who can accept charity is infinite.

But also don’t go all the way in the other direction and save no lives. That’s even more stupid.

How can you live with yourself knowing you can save a life and not doing it? Not even one? You’re gonna let Schindler out save you by 1000? 2000, if you count the shells and all the other stuff?

Don’t commit to 1000 either. We all want to in the first day we realize the power of our altruism.

Do one. See how you feel. Then do another.

Get some speed if you enjoy it. Go back to old manners if you don’t.

But don’t just sit there, scrolling. There’s a life depending on you. Go save it.

Join us.