# Effective Pizzaism

I am an effective pizzaist. Sometimes, I want the world to contain more pizza, and when that happens I want as much good pizza as I can get for as little money as I can spend.

I am not going anywhere remotely subtle with that analogy, but it's the best way I can think of to express my personal stance.

**I.  What would it mean to be an effective pizzaist?**
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There's lot of things that prompt me to want more pizza. Sometimes I happen to remember a good pizza I ate. Sometimes my friends are talking about buying some pizza, and I say sure, I'll get some pizza too. Sometimes I'm talking to my sibling and they mention they're stressed or just kinda hungry, and because I want my sibling to be happy I'll offer to buy 'em some pizza. Sometimes I want to throw a good party and have people appreciate me for my party-throwing, and people like pizza so I get some.

I think the world does not contain enough pizza. Like, if I could have the magic ability to snap my fingers and make a free, piping hot pizza appear wherever I wanted, I'd love that power.[^qrwrazajtn8] I'd have a slice or two tonight instead of cooking dinner. I'd use it at D&D nights to save some time. Pizza's pretty great.

Pizza isn't so great that I spend all my money on it. My budget includes some dumplings, some deli sandwiches, and some burgers. Even these aren't *that* much of my budget; I think eating out winds up something like 3% of my spending, maybe as high as 5%. Sanity check; if my monthly budget is around $2,000,[^59mgt6wmds6] and I'm spending 3% of it on eating out, that's about ~$60 a month or ~$15 a week. Yep, on reflection a pizza costs about twenty bucks and I endorse myself ordering out every other week or so. Sometimes it's having friends over for D&D, sometimes I'm traveling, sometimes pizza just sounds really tasty. Seems fine.

[Money is the unit of caring.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-unit-of-caring) I care about having a roof over my head more than having pizza, and indeed I pay more for housing than I do for pizza. I care more about reading new books than I do about pizza, and indeed my monthly budget accounts for spending more than 3% of my money on books. I don't care as much about watching football as I do about pizza, and accordingly my cable subscription is $0. 

But prices aren't purely about how much you value something. They're also about supply and demand and how hard it is to create the thing. I want to go to space more than I value pizza but less than I value having a roof over my head, and yet the cost of going to space is way higher than having a roof over my head. Despite the rather large value I put on getting to read the latest Brandon Sanderson novel, he'll sell it to me for less than the price of a pizza.

It's great for me when I can get good pizza for cheap. There's some fancy "authentic" Italian restaurants where pizza costs a lot, and some beloved corner stores that offer great pizza for a surprisingly low price. Why would I pay $60 for a pizza if I can pay $20 for one that's just as tasty? Google reviews are useful; when I'm in a new town I can get a quick look at local prices and at how good the pizza place is.

I'm glad Google's list exists, because it lets me spend my money on pizza more effectively.

(Hey, I said I wasn't going anywhere subtle.)

**II. A competition of blood **
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I have many motivations for pizza. Just so, I have many motivations for doing good.

My family is pretty competitive. Many years ago my father said, in the tone of voice used for challenging me and my brother to a footrace or a baseball game, that he could donate more blood than we could. Being competitive, I took him up on that only to realize that because you can only donate blood once every so many months, it was impossible to catch up unless he slipped and stopped donating. Still, I gamely went every eight weeks, and sometimes we'd compare donation milestones. They say donating blood once can save up to three lives; I am a *bit *skeptical of that number but it sure is on[ official looking websites.](https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/education/blood/donation#:~:text=A%20single%20blood%20donation%20can%20save%20up%20to%203%20lives.) Still, even with conservative estimates it seems likely I've saved at least a couple lives via donation.

My blood donation is not primarily motivated by saving lives. My donations are motivated by *beating my dad.*

See, as he's gotten older, he's started to slip more and more. Someday he's going to be too old to donate at all, and then I'm really going to start catching up. He's got a thirty year head start on me. That means if I ever want to brag about how I've finally donated more blood than he has I need to keep up a steady habit of donating for decades after he stops. I can't just start as soon as he gives up. You might ask yourself, c'mon, is it really worth hours every other month with a needle in your arm to get to say I'm winning a silly competition with my father?

. . . yeah, kinda. Look, I also spent time studying board games to beat him at those or kicking around a soccer ball to beat him at that.

Bragging rights isn't the only thing I get from the blood donation competition. I used to get to go with him to the donation centre and he'd buy me lunch afterwards. The red cross gives out nice t-shirts and once a cool flashlight as a donation reward. There's a warm, fuzzy feeling I get from knowing dad's proud of me. There's a fuzzy feeling from knowing other people approve; I've been on dates with people who say the donation habit is a good thing about me, and even went donating blood *as* a date once or twice. Plus, you know, saving lives has some positive value.

**III. What if Effective Pizzaists were bad tho?**
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Imagine there was a cadre of people calling themselves Effective Pizzaists, and some of them did bad stuff.

Maybe one of them lied on their Google reviews of pizza restaurants. Maybe another scammed a bunch of people out of money in order to buy a lot of Orange Chicken, *which isn't even pizza.* Maybe some of them got in horribly unhealthy romantic relationships with other members of the Effective Pizzaist community. All bad things. (Especially the Orange Chicken. C'mon, General Tso's is better.)

I think there's a pretty reasonable version of the no-true-scotsman argument here. Like, if you buy two pizzas for $500 each, and then spend $135,000,000 on chicken and rice, you're kinda bad at getting pizza effectively. The Effective Pizzaist community might be too diffuse to actually excommunicate you and whoever is complaining about the scamming thing has a real case that you did something illegal, but you're still bad at effectively causing there to be pizza in the world. Maybe that's the true spirit of Effective Pizzaism.

But more importantly, that doesn't change whether I might want pizza, and whether I'd want it effectively?

Like, even if the whole edifice of Google reviews turned out to be a sham, every single person who ever identified with the movement turned out to be horrible, *I* still want some pizza. Certainly if it turned out Yelp was secretly taking bribes to hide bad reviews or star ratings were available for four easy payments of $19.99, that would *change my strategies* for getting pizza. Maybe I'd avoid loudly identifying as an Effective Pizzaist I guess. But it doesn't change my desire for a fluffy crust topped with mozzarella and red pepper, and it doesn't really change the fact that the straightforward words "effectively trying to get pizza" obviously apply to me.

If the entire Effective Pizzaist movement was rotten, I'd have to mix my dough with my own two hands, but I'd still bake a little bit of pizza.

**IV. I'm pretty happy to be on the EA's side**
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This is an obvious metaphor for the Effective Altruism movement. 

I have sometimes said I'm a non-central effective altruist. If I had to put words to my particular philosophical label, it would involve words like "Egoist" which are not typically associated with donating a few thousand dollars to purchase the third world a bunch of medical supplies. I've already said above that the primary motivation for me donating parts of my body to strangers -[ a popular EA pastime!](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney) \- is that it might let me win a goofy bragging competition with my dad, which is not really the most saintly of motivations. If the Effective Altruism community decided they didn't want me hanging around their spaces, that's pretty fair and I'd respect that.

But despite my non-central nature, I think me and the average Effective Altruist are on the same side.

First, as the Marvel movie says, "Why would you want to save the galaxy?" "Because I'm one of the idiots that lives in it." Anywhere existential risk is concerned, especially if it might happen in my lifetime, I'm pretty firmly on the side of people trying to survive. The risk doesn't even have to be existential; these days some Effective Altruists are trying to prevent gain-of-function research on pandemics that might shut down the economy and possibly kill me personally. 

Second, I do have some positive value on the lives of strangers I don't know. It's much, much smaller than many EAs! It's smaller than the stated values of most people interested in charity. But it is, crucially, a positive number. If I got to snap my fingers and have everything I wanted, all the sick would be cured and all the hungry would be fed. This means that fundamentally we're on the same side; we're just haggling over price. The useful guide to turning money into good in the world for the dedicated earn-to-give EA with low six figures of donations each year is going to look pretty similar to the guide for the person donating three and four figures.

All of this is very principles focused. I also benefit from the more community focused and more institutional parts of EA. I crib from their notes on [running local groups](https://resources.eagroups.org/). I get funding to work on some of my projects via their grantmaking programs.[^teh8iza0o0b] I ask various institutions' staff for advice sometimes, and come away better for the time spent. I've made improvements to my career based on their advice, even back when I was a straightforward software engineer. I'm glad to have known many of them as acquaintances and on occasion friends.

Someone who really really likes Chinese food doesn't have to fight against me in a mighty struggle for delivery dominance. I'll buy my pizza and you'll buy your Orange Chicken and he'll home bake fresh bread and she'll eat Soylent and Mealsquares and we'll all get what we want.[^8rsvuuu5ouj]

**V. Should I want more pizza? Should you?**
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If I wanted pizza more I could get more. During times when I'm making less money I spend a bit less on pizza. I do think I spend about the amount on pizza that reflects my values. Spending my resources in accordance to my values[ is something I've practiced](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fXMWri2XgMFNf2yBP/cambist-booking), and if you think you spend more or less on pizza than you ought, I suggest drilling the skill involved there.

But I'm not going to argue you should want pizza more than you do. That's nonsense from my perspective. My values aren't up for debate, and yours shouldn't be either. 

That's not to say I don't think some people have weird values, or are never bad at achieving them. I've observed lots of people say they want X a lot, only to take no visible actions to achieve X. I've been that person sometimes, though I think I'm better than I used to be. The reasons people might have that problem are beyond the scope of this post, and they aren't all dumb reasons either.

My values are kinda weird. They’re self-reflectively more selfish than most people. I’ve done the Drowning Child thought experiment math, and still once decided to spend most of a Drowning Child's worth of money on a computer rig. 

Weirder still? I think the people who are less selfish than I am are heroes.

I deeply respect the people I know who keep giving, sometimes so much that they could have retired and stopped work in order to go goof around on the beach or play with their kids all day. If you were on the fence about saving lives via altruism, and this essay convinced you not to, I’d be kinda sad. 

But I don’t currently plan to start being more altruistic myself, just a bit more effective.

I wrote this essay in large part because I hang out in Effective Altruism spaces from time to time and I usually feel this prickle of unease, worrying I’m there under false pretenses. To the extent that I’m an altruist, I’d like to be an effective one, and I’m at least a little bit an altruist. If we could see all of our utility functions laid out in front of us then I might even have a higher term for general altruism than the modal person, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure my term for it is a lot lower than that of other people in the EA space. 

Oddly, I expect that feeling of false pretenses to be much lower after publishing this. I don’t want people working with me under the assumption that I’m more generous than I am, but I’m cheerful to work with them where our values line up, and I think there’s a lot of cool productive projects in that overlap. For the EAs I most respect, I’d be happy to find myself in a world where they got everything they wanted to accomplish, and probably vice versa.

I'm not going to argue your values are wrong here. What I am going to do is leave you with the simple question: what is it you want, and how do you plan to get it? I want less dead kids in the world, so I appreciate them doing [the research](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-2026) on how to get that at the lowest price. I'll spend at least a pizza's worth on it.

[^qrwrazajtn8]: Yes, even without munchkinry like violating thermodynamics or appearing the pizza embedded in the head of mass murderers. We're just talking about the obvious, chicanery: no version of the power. 

[^59mgt6wmds6]: This might or might not be my actual monthly budget, I'm going to glomarize a bit here, but I do think it's not an unrealistic number for someone. 

[^teh8iza0o0b]: "get funding via" does not mean "is employed by" and does not mean "speaks for them in any capacity" and doesn't mean "they endorse all of my projects." 

[^8rsvuuu5ouj]: This is one of several reasons I prefer my EA recommendations to avoid politics. If me and my roommates are voting on what to order for dinner, now I'm pitted against the Chinese Food Contingent and they have a reason to undermine me.