Kirsten Horton: Why Ambitious Christians Should Work In Civil Service #19
(Originally recorded on March 11th 2026)
Can a civil servant really shape billion-pound budgets and shift national policy? JD explores this with Kirsten Horton, a middle manager in the UK civil service, whose journey from prairie schoolteacher in Edmonton to policy insider in Westminster, brought her to one of the most underrated high-impact career paths in the effective altruism world. Kirsten unpacks the painstaking work of navigating government bureaucracy.
Articles, Scripture, organisations, and other media discussed in this episode
EA Lifestyles- Kirsten's Substack blog exploring the intersection of effective altruism and everyday life, including takes on giving, identity, and careers.
Giving What We Can - The effective altruism pledge organisation referenced in the discussion of whether it's acceptable to pause donations during financially difficult periods.
Healthy Futures - The effective charity Kirsten currently donates to, which rolls out testing for syphilis and HIV for pregnant women.
Civil Service Jobs - The official UK government jobs portal, recommended as the first port of call for anyone looking to enter the civil service.
80,000 Hours Civil Service Report - Referenced by JD as the source of the calculation that each DFID civil servant was responsible for approximately £4 million of development spending per year.
"Keep Your Identity Small" - An essay by Y Combinator's Paul Graham arguing against strong identification with beliefs or groups, which Kirsten critiques in favour of her own "keep your identity large" philosophy.
All the Lives You Can Change - The forthcoming Christians for Impact book, referenced at the close of the episode, releasing April 28th in the US and June 28th in the UK.
CFI London Conference 2024 talk: "Why You Should Work in Government" - Kirsten's video talk from the Christians for Impact conference, recommended for listeners wanting more practical guidance on civil service careers.
Episode Highlights:
Why Government Careers Matter
“In government, there are times where you can do things at a scale that you just can't do elsewhere.”
The Real Secret to Civil Service Impact
“The thing that I think matters the most is coalition building.”
The Surprisingly Low Bar to Entry
“One of the things you're being tested for is can you read a PDF and follow what it says.”
A Safe Place to Learn
“You will be trusted to do things where you will potentially make mistakes and people will help you clean them up.”
What EA Gets Right
“I'm really grateful to effective altruism for encouraging me to be more ambitious in doing good.”
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JD (00:01.464) Kirsten, thanks so much for coming on.
Kirsten Horton (00:03.992) Thanks for having me, JD. I'm so excited to talk.
JD (00:07.104) So I think I just mentioned it, but you run this great blog called EA Lifestyles on Substack. One of the hottest takes you make on the Substack is that some effective altruists shouldn't be giving money away under certain circumstances. In fact, you stopped donating under some circumstances. So share a little bit more about that and who should think about donating less and not donating more.
Kirsten Horton (00:32.309) Well, I think people who are giving away their parents' money instead of their own money should think about donating less potentially. Maybe their parents should donate more. No, I think it's good to get in a habit of donating. I think it's great for, for example, people like students or people on lower incomes to donate maybe 1% or something like that, just so you develop that skill of really thinking about where you donate.
But if you're in a position where you're not able to be saving, or you're really in a financially precarious position where you are missing other opportunities to have an impactful career, or you're just really stressed all the time and just constantly focused on how things are going poorly for you, it might not be the time to be donating. Or things might just be better to kind of get moved around, which I found it was not as hard to take as I thought.
I stopped donating for a couple of years when we were moving into a new house, saving up for a down payment and then paying for some renovations. And then I kind of made them up in the couple of years after that. And it turns out that's just completely endorsed — anyone who does the Giving What We Can pledge or things like that, it's totally normal. They don't mind. So I thought it was a hot take, but maybe not so much of a hot take.
JD (01:43.149) Yeah.
JD (01:47.148) Yeah, yeah. Are you public about your giving? Can I ask, if so? And if not, we can cut this out. What you and your family are able to give?
Kirsten Horton (01:51.93) Too.
Kirsten Horton (01:56.014) Yeah, so I, both from my background as a Christian and then also from my involvement in the effective altruism community, I feel really drawn to, I guess, give 10% of what I make. My husband does not feel the same conviction, so he does not donate that part of his salary, but we have always donated 10% of my salary. And that's been...
something kind of ongoing. It's sometimes the details change, but I think it's important to us that the substance of that continues. And at the moment, I try to donate to effective charities. So at the moment, I donate to Healthy Futures, who help roll out testing for syphilis and HIV for mothers, for pregnant women.
JD (02:47.256) Wow. Yeah, that sounds wonderful. And this is going to be a podcast mostly about policy and policy careers in the UK. So maybe here's a good lead-in, which is: should people working in policy be thinking about effective giving? Does this just not apply to them because they've accepted a lower pay to work in the government? Or — you work in the government and you give away 10%. You prove it can be done. Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (02:53.12) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (03:06.086) I work in the government, I donate. I did even when I was a teacher. So before I was in government, I was a teacher and teachers make less than what I make in government, at least here. Maybe that's not true everywhere. And I think it's a really good habit to get into if you can do it, but you just want to be in a position where your entire budget is working towards that.
JD (03:31.63) Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm really excited to speak with you about policy careers. For listeners who know that we have a YouTube — if you don't know we have a YouTube, we do — you can go to our YouTube and you can watch a video that Kirsten gave at our conference a year and a half ago. And the video is excellent. It was actually a top rated talk from our conference that year. It's called
Why You Should Work in Government, CFI London Conference 2024. And in it, Kirsten shares really practical tips and stories of individuals who in government were able to promote really effective policies, to have a voice and a say over billion dollar budgets, and to really be a part of the renewal of the world, to use Christian language,
to really stick up for important themes that matter to God and should matter to us as Christians. So I don't want to rehash all of the details in that episode. If you want more formulaic advice or a guide on careers and policy, I recommend checking that out for the UK. We'll correct some parts of that for things that have changed maybe in the last year and a half. We'll also point to the Civil Servant Career Guide that we have on the Christians for Impact website. You can see that in the show notes.
But yeah, Kirsten, I just wanted to ask some questions I have, because we very often have career advisees that come interested in this path. And so maybe the first is just how you got into this. You were a teacher in Ottawa, right? So how did you go from being a teacher in Canada to working in civil service in the UK?
Kirsten Horton (04:52.486) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (05:05.697) Yeah, so I did my teacher training actually in Edmonton in Canada. I'm a prairie girl and then I moved to London on a working holiday to be a teacher here and I was a teacher here for three years. I'd always had a bit of an interest in policy. In Edmonton, a lot of teachers get seconded into the Department for Education and then they go back to teaching and that kind of back and forth happens a lot.
JD (05:09.633) Okay.
Kirsten Horton (05:34.426) But here in the UK, that's not as common. You kind of pick one job or the other. And I thought I would like to give policy a try. So the biggest thing that helped me, to be honest, was I got to know someone else who worked in policy. And he gave me some feedback on how to kind of approach those interviews and those answers, which was really, really helpful to me. But honestly, even if you don't — if you are able to meet someone and ask them for advice, I really recommend it.
But even if you're not, all of the rubrics are published online. Everything's published online. Genuinely, I've come to believe that one of the things you're being tested for is can you read a PDF and follow what it says? Because it is kind of a useful skill as a civil servant, but it's not hidden what people are looking for. So that was really, really helpful.
JD (06:08.991) Mm. Mm.
JD (06:23.448) So where would you go if you were getting started today? What would be your top go-to places besides this episode and the Christians for Impact Civil Service Guide? Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (06:29.806) Okay.
Yeah, so if you were looking to work in the civil service, all the jobs are on Civil Service Jobs for the UK civil service. And then if you search civil service behaviours, there's like a rubric for what level of seniority you are and what kind of things they're interviewing for, which should all be listed in the job advert. And it will tell you the six or seven traits that kind of go along with it, like communicating and influencing. Excuse me.
Kirsten Horton (07:07.536) So if you're communicating and influencing at kind of more of an entry level, then that means you're able to, you know, make trusting relationships with people and help change their minds and things like that. And at a more senior level, it means you're able to kind of be more of like a keynote speaker and really doing high-level negotiations between governments. So there's kind of a set of criteria for what people are interviewing for and it's all set out very clearly.
And it takes a little getting used to. And then you tend to get feedback as well. You tend to get kind of a score about how well your examples were. So applying for those jobs and checking the feedback — you can actually just, I knew someone who brute forced it. He applied to literally a hundred jobs. It may have been a sign in retrospect, he didn't last very long when he actually got in, but he did just learn how to
JD (07:56.28) Wow. Did he get one?
JD (08:01.91) Oh my gosh.
Kirsten Horton (08:06.17) eventually figure out the application system. You can just practice.
JD (08:12.758) So it seems like there are two types of — to paint with broad brushstrokes — it seems like there are two types of people that are interested in working in the civil service. One are people that are just interested in policy or politics and just the general apparatus, the functioning of it, believe in the institution, want to promote the institution and understand that it can support the common good and many different problems that they care about can be ameliorated or addressed through what a large government like the UK government
does. And then there's another type of person who's maybe more specific problem focused — that wants to support the plight of animals on industrial farms or wants to support international aid for the world's poorest people or wants to prevent the next pandemic, right, or address decarbonization. And that person is wondering, okay, for my issue, should I go into policy? And does a policy career make sense?
So do you think that breakdown makes sense? And do you think policy is more or less attractive for one or the other? Because you might think that like some problems just aren't best addressed through UK policy.
Kirsten Horton (09:18.01) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (09:23.534) Well, okay, maybe that's a third type of person who thinks that we should address problems, but not through UK policy. But let me take the case of someone who thinks that the UK government could be doing something better to address a problem that they really care about. I think that if the UK government is already kind of looking like they're open to working on the problem, maybe they've said a little bit already about the problem, or
JD (09:27.15) Okay, sure.
Kirsten Horton (09:53.25) the current administration is not really working on that problem but you've seen evidence that some other political parties probably would, then you want to be working in the civil service or in the political party that wants to take action on that problem. But maybe you think the UK government could be doing something much better, but you haven't seen any signs that anyone is taking that problem very seriously or that they're moving in the direction you want to move in.
In that case, you still might want a policy job, but it might not be working in the civil service or in a political party. You might want to work in a think tank or in a trade association or some other kind of advocacy group or even a corporation. And you might use that kind of platform to advocate for the policy that you want and to kind of raise it up the agenda until
the government starts to talk more about it.
JD (10:54.402) So you talked about how policy careers can be a really good path for people who are just graduating from uni because it builds skills and people are willing to train you on the government's dollar, not on the dollar of some really cash-strapped charity that's trying to treat mothers who are at risk of passing HIV to their children. We wouldn't expect them to train you to be a superstar and to help the mothers as well.
I mean, great if they can do both, but do you think that like that's a solid default path for Christians who are ambitious, who want to do good with their careers to just apply to the Fast Stream, apply to policy paths to keep that option open?
Kirsten Horton (11:39.782) I think it's a great option, honestly. I think there are a lot of really decent managers in the civil service. Sorry, I've lived in Britain for too long. That's a pretty enthusiastic phrase here, I think. Yeah, there are some really good managers. It's a very supportive environment. You will be trusted to do things where you will potentially make mistakes and people will help you clean them up.
There are other environments where this can work too. The civil service is not the only place you can get good training, but it definitely has a good reputation with more junior staff for a reason.
JD (12:15.95) And it seems like you were able to, within a few years, enter a pretty senior position and probably — it doesn't sound like you would have had a similar amount of impact had you stayed in teaching. So do you have any reflections on your own path and like your impact comparison, what kind of impact you had as a teacher versus what you're doing now?
Kirsten Horton (12:36.326) Oh yeah, no, I definitely think — I mean, there are a few reasons that I think I'm having a lot more impact in the government. One is just that my personal fit for teaching wasn't amazing. So there's that. I was an okay teacher, but I definitely saw other people who were much better teachers than I was. But yeah, I did manage to get promoted pretty early on in my government career. I taught high school English for a while and then I taught grade four for a while, year four here.
JD (12:43.949) Yeah, sure.
JD (12:56.856) What did you teach, by the way?
Kirsten Horton (13:06.994) And yeah, I don't think I was the best English teacher anyone ever had. It was fine. I feel like I've been able to use some of the same skills here in terms of taking in a lot of information and distilling it to the core messages people need to know. But I, yeah, I think because I get to work with a much broader range of more technical information,
which I think I'm just better suited to. I think it's been actually a lot more helpful. So, yeah, I did get promoted pretty quickly. I'm a middle manager in the civil service. Yeah, so what that means is that I can be managing budgets, I can be managing staff, I can be providing policy advice to the prime minister or my secretary of state.
And yeah, it's really fun. I do feel like I'm shaping the direction of some fairly niche, but also important things that our country needs to decide.
JD (14:16.898) Yeah, so I have lots of random questions that don't follow a particular flow, so I'll just fire away. Do you think the effective altruism movement that Christians for Impact is connected to through our EA for Christians project — do you think the effective altruism movement
Kirsten Horton (14:22.512) Thank you.
JD (14:37.666) puts a correct weight on civil service as an option? Do you think it undershoots the value? It sounds like that is your impression, that not enough people are taking this path.
Kirsten Horton (14:49.014) Certainly a few years ago, I went to EA Global, which is one of the global kind of conferences for effective altruists. And I met someone and within about 30 seconds of meeting, he was just like, why do you work in government? There's no impact. But genuinely, I do think some people have that mindset. And I have the completely opposite mindset.
At that same EA Global, some people were saying, the main thing that's going to help with climate change is that solar panels have gotten way cheaper. And that's just technological progress, and that would have happened anyways. And a couple of us who knew a little bit more about this were like, wait a second. The German government invested really heavily in solar panels, and there wouldn't have been a market for it if the government hadn't. If there hadn't been government intervention, there would have been no market. And the price wouldn't have come down. So
you need many, many things to have an impact. It can't all be government, but in government, there are times where you can do things at a scale that you just can't do elsewhere. Sorry, go on.
JD (15:58.254) So here's an example of that. I'm curious what you think of this example. And this is drawn from the 80,000 Hours Civil Service Report. There were in 2017 approximately 2,200 individuals working in the civil service in DFID, the International Development and Aid Department.
And so if you divide the total 10 billion pound budget by the 2,000 or so people working in it, it's roughly 4 million pounds per year per person working in that department, which is like a lot of money per person working in that department. But I hear a number like that and I think, well, if I'm a civil servant, do I really have any say so on that? Or is it just Rory Stewart or whoever's in charge of DFID at the time who really is the difference maker? So do you ever...
Kirsten Horton (16:34.458) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (16:45.436) No, no.
Yeah.
JD (16:50.476) Is that cynicism or skepticism warranted? Is there kind of like a threshold at which all of a sudden you kind of are a difference maker?
Kirsten Horton (16:59.566) No, it's both. And it's not about number of promotions necessarily. The thing that I think matters the most is coalition building, or being able to navigate bureaucracies as some people phrase it. I think it comes more naturally to some people than to others. But it's not that people will hand you four million pounds every year and say, go spend this on the most effective causes. That's not how it works. It's more likely
that there will be a couple of times where you will get the chance to put forward an idea for how to spend 100 million pounds. And your colleagues might also be putting forward ideas. And you will have to think through how do I explain this idea in a way that makes sense to people? How do I bring together a group of people who care about some of these same things that I care about? Or maybe this project affects a few different things that people care about and we can bring together a couple of groups.
So no, it's not just that you get kind of four million pounds to spend, but there's also not a particular level that you have to be at. If people trust and respect your opinion, you could be at any level. And I do find that when you're inside, it's a little bit easier to build those trusting relationships than if you're coming from the outside.
JD (18:21.134) Do you have any favourite stories of individuals in the civil service who individually — working in a coalition — but their individual volition or intentionality led to a huge windfall of funding for an impactful project or like a huge policy shift, maybe drawing from your own story or just stories of people you know or read about? Is there a standout example or two?
Kirsten Horton (18:45.959) I mean most of the policy areas that I've worked on have been not what effective altruists tend to focus on. So I've worked a lot on making life easier for lower income people in the UK to pay for their heating bills and I've also worked a lot on kind of decarbonization. So one example is when I first joined I worked on fuel poverty, which is people who can't afford their heating bills.
And I worked with some people who were really passionate about that area and worked on it for a long time. And they were very prepared and worked very hard to get quite a large amount of funding to help some of those people who were worst off. They had really done their homework. And we also kind of worked as a team in order to make it work,
because we were all kind of bought into it. So for example, I took over a lot of my manager's normal day-to-day responsibilities so he could work solely on this one thing that was much more important than basically all of the rest of his job. So that was kind of one example of a group of us working as a team — ultimately he secured several billion pounds of funding to help improve the home insulation of people who had really poor home insulation and also very low incomes.
But another example that is maybe more or less exciting depending on how you look at it — I was a bill manager, so basically a project manager for a piece of legislation. And we were deciding what to put in this bill because everyone always has more ideas than you have time for. And basically if you put too much in there, then the legislation will not make it through
parliament before the session ends and then you lose it all. You have to keep it small enough that it can all get kind of scrutinized in time, but big enough that you can get as much as you can through — if that makes sense — because there are a lot of really good ideas that can only be done with legislation. And being able to be very process-driven and very evidence-based,
Kirsten Horton (20:56.571) being really clear about what the value would be on each of these things — what's the counterfactual? What happens if this doesn't get done for another three years or another five years? Our secretary of state was willing to kind of take a punt on making it about three times bigger than he wanted to. And so because of that, a bunch of stuff happened that sounds very, very boring. Like you can now get
licensing properly for large-scale battery storage, when previously it was either generation or demand. And anyway, it sounds very, very boring, but the energy system works much better in a way that will allow us to decarbonize much better, and that has an effect on climate change and it makes things a lot cheaper for people.
And it's maybe not very exciting because there's no individual attached to it, but I'm quite excited about it that we got it done.
JD (21:54.232) So to take the flip side, are there examples of individuals that you think should really not consider civil service careers, or are just a much better fit for working at a startup, to earn to give, or to build skills there, or otherwise just work directly at an impactful charity?
Kirsten Horton (22:13.028) Yeah, yeah for sure. So the big one is the bureaucracy, right? You have to be willing to ultimately accept that some tough calls are not going to go your way for reasons that you don't agree with and you're going to have to let it go sometimes. And it might be really hard because it will genuinely affect a lot of people's lives. But you have to be willing to sometimes take a loss in order to get other victories. You have to be willing as well...
JD (22:40.428) Has that happened to you? I'm sure it's happened to you in some way, but has it been something that you thought about when you went home and, like, troubled you in the evenings? Or were you able to just kind of clock out and detach?
Kirsten Horton (22:53.448) Yeah, I've been quite lucky actually in that so far all of the projects I've worked on have eventually worked out. But eventually is maybe the key word. I have definitely had ones that have stalled for a while. Yeah, it's because everything I've touched here is gold.
JD (23:04.046) Sounds great.
JD (23:13.42) This is why you're so bullish on policy. You're just too effective, right?
Kirsten Horton (23:21.096) No, I've had ones where it stalled and it wasn't sure if it was going to keep going or not, which has been a little upsetting. But I've had close friends who they've worked on a policy area for sometimes years and then it gets cut. Or it never gets funding — they work and work and work and it just never gets funded even though they think it's a really good idea. And that's incredibly demoralizing.
So that can definitely affect them as well.
JD (23:53.964) I interrupted you — what were some other signs that someone isn't a good fit for a policy career? Or is a better fit for some other career, let's say.
Kirsten Horton (24:04.465) Mmm.
Kirsten Horton (24:08.232) Yeah, I guess one of the things that's very important in the civil service is being able to prioritize. So rather than just working really long hours to try to get everything done, being able to kind of triage and work on the most important things. And that might be important in other careers too, but this is particularly important in the civil service, especially as you get more senior because there will always be more demands on your time than you can deal with.
It's really important to be able to take someone else's point of view and to be very, very collaborative. Literally one of the tests that they do if you try to join the Fast Stream is they will get you to kind of do a bit of a negotiation. And I went into that negotiation — there were like eight of us — and I won. Like, I don't know if you can count it as winning, but I got the best result out of everyone. And the feedback I got —
and not only did I win, I was really nice about it. Incredibly nice. I gave everyone a turn to talk. I really tried to help and summarize people's points of view. The feedback I got...
JD (25:16.728) That's the teacher in you. You passed around the — in the US we have this thing where we pass around this toy or the ball, and you catch the ball and then you're allowed to talk. You did that with the civil servants. Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (25:27.368) Talking wall. Yeah, I basically did that. And the feedback I got was that the way I could have gotten a better score was if I had encouraged other people to talk more and really tried to bring out other people's perspectives more. I was like, are you kidding me? But yeah, that is really, really encouraged — to be very collaborative. Even if you're saying that...
JD (25:47.084) Man, your politics is just so much more polite than ours. I feel like we would get the opposite feedback in some kind of US context. Yeah. Oh gosh.
Kirsten Horton (25:58.157) If you're in a political party or if you're in a think tank, this might not be quite the same, but the civil service in particular, these things are really valued and if that's difficult for you, then it might be a difficult environment.
JD (26:15.074) Yeah, yeah. So what's your career plan? I mean, it's on the internet forever, right? Do you plan to stay in the civil service for the rest of your career and just work up and take on more responsibility? Do you imagine there being an exit opportunity? And if so, what are the exit opportunities? Like working in government affairs?
Kirsten Horton (26:24.145) Ha ha!
JD (26:37.406) Working as — I don't think lobbying really makes sense in the civil service context. Like it might in the US if somebody was exiting a federal agency or the Hill. So yeah, maybe you could speak also about general exit options for people that are leaving the civil service. What career capital do they have to go and do something else?
Kirsten Horton (26:58.662) Yeah, you can definitely talk about that. I have very much looked into this. I do actually really like the civil service. And I think there's a good chance that I either stay and work my way up or I leave and then come back. Because I do think there's a lot of good that can be done in there. And I just do really like it. But
there are quite a few options as well. The most common times to leave are either when you're fairly junior, so maybe you finish the Fast Stream or something — let's just say a three-year program — and then you go somewhere else and you can go kind of anywhere, having trained to be a generalist. But the other time that's pretty common to leave would be as a senior civil servant. So that's the kind of lowest level of executive —
you would be leading a team of, I don't know, maybe 20 people. It depends on what department you're in, but if you're in a policy department, it's maybe 20, 25 people and a budget of — you know, it depends again on the department — but you know, maybe millions, it could be billions, but usually millions. And those people can go to a consultancy if they want to make more money. And you can go earn to give there potentially if that's something that motivates you.
You could do some lobbying work or work in a think tank. Occasionally people even leave for a political party. I've been seeing that more recently. So all of those options are very possible. Yeah, I think for myself when I've been thinking about it, I've been thinking about a few different options. I could do a mix of trying to do something that has kind of higher-earning
advocacy work and then do some more kind of charitable advocacy work — and can you switch back and forth between the two? Maybe. Or I've thought as well about working in some charitable organisations like effective altruism organisations, either in a more generalist role like a chief of staff or
Kirsten Horton (29:08.638) in a more communications or government affairs type role, maybe translating people's research into something that is more understandable for government and how they work. There are quite a few options out there.
JD (29:22.37) Makes sense. And do you have general career advice that you'd love to share with our captive audience, especially for Christians that are ambitious, talented, thinking in an impact-focused way and in their mid to late 20s or early 20s, but mostly 20s?
Kirsten Horton (29:46.728) Yeah. I think the thing that helped me the most to develop my skills was having a really good manager and then increasingly moving from the place of instead of asking them what to do in a situation, trying to come up with a plan and predicting what they might say. And that really helped me a lot because it was really easy for me to default into a pattern of, don't worry, my manager will know what to do.
But I noticed that I didn't learn as much compared to if I tried to think through, okay, what would I do, and then go to them for feedback a little bit later. So that was the shift that I made that helped me the most.
JD (30:30.786) We haven't talked at all about AI — is AI shifting the workflow in the civil service, or does it change the kinds of paths that you think are most promising or worth prioritising?
Kirsten Horton (30:43.097) Yeah, AI is an interesting one. My department is trying to use AI more. I'm not sure how successfully. We'll see.
I actually hope that it will be able to reduce some of the work that we've done in terms of — we will sometimes open consultations to the public and we will sometimes get thousands of responses. And four or five years ago it was definitely going to be a civil servant, a junior civil servant or team of them,
kind of reading all of them and trying to summarise, okay, here's how many people think this, here's how many people think that, which was a real slog. It took months, sometimes years. So I'm hoping AI can help with that. But I'm not sure what it means for the civil service in general, other than we will continue to need people who are able to really grasp a new technology
and some pretty rapid changes to the way the world works.
JD (31:56.142) So I want to end the podcast with just a free-flowing discussion about effective altruism because you have this excellent blog, EA Lifestyles, and some really interesting takes. I remember a piece I read there a couple of years ago about keeping your identity large. What do you mean by that?
Kirsten Horton (32:02.688) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (32:13.83) Yeah, so Paul Graham has this essay called Keep Your Identity Small where he says it's not good to identify yourself as an effective altruist or as — I mean he doesn't say that, but you know what I mean — as your nationality or...
JD (32:28.96) Is this the Paul Graham — is that the Y Combinator guy? Okay, cool.
Kirsten Horton (32:31.754) The Y Combinator Paul Graham. I'm sure this essay was widely read in tech circles. He was arguing for keeping it small. So he was saying basically, don't call yourself a Christian, effective altruist, American podcaster. He would say, call yourself a person with an interest in effective altruism, who happens to live in America and currently has a podcast.
JD (32:45.966) Gosh, well, all at once. Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (33:01.398) Right now you believe in God, maybe next year you won't. Who's to say? And I think the reason he was arguing for that is because he was saying it becomes very hard to change your beliefs if your identity is really wrapped up in something. And I mean, we've seen this sometimes with Christians or with effective altruists where, you know, maybe you really identify as a Christian, that's kind of your whole life, and then you start to have doubts and it really tears you up inside.
So he's saying, simple way to avoid that, just don't be attached to being a Christian. I take kind of a different approach. To me, rather than avoiding caring about something or identifying as something, I just identify as a lot of things. So having a lot of things that your identity is based around, I think, makes you a little bit more stable. And I've heard other people say this as well. Someone I know who
donates a lot and is really kind of involved in the effective altruism community said that when he became a father, he felt like that really helped him because when there were ups and downs at work or when he maybe wasn't going to get as big of a bonus to donate as much, there was this other part to his identity that kind of helped keep him grounded and keep him stable. I really believe in that. So I think instead of keeping your identity small, keep your identity large.
Have lots of things that you're very invested in and that you really don't shy away from. That's my pitch.
JD (34:29.794) Yeah, yeah, no, I like that. I really do. And it kind of breaks down this idea that the world exists in two camps and everything, right? Where in reality, people's identities are super complicated and their stories are nuanced and complicated. And the coalitions — I think your politics do this much better than ours in the US — but coalitions are often very messy and fragmented and unexpected, right?
And that's how our communities are as well in our churches and in our lives. So why should we gloss over that? And yeah, that's very thoughtful. So I want to talk about the reputation of the EA movement because that's one identity that people don't like to embrace. People say, I'm EA adjacent. I just had a podcast with someone who called himself EA adjacent. And you blogged a lot when
Kirsten Horton (35:12.105) We know.
Kirsten Horton (35:18.737) Yeah.
JD (35:25.28) some of the FTX stuff went down. And I hear there's a movie coming out at the end of this year about EA, which is supposed to bury it even further into the grave. But yeah, maybe I'll start there. Or maybe we'll start back a couple of years ago. Do you think the movement has really recovered from
Kirsten Horton (35:31.806) Yeah.
JD (35:48.183) this identity shaming or distancing? Do you think we're kind of back to like pre-FTX days or right before? What are your thoughts there?
Kirsten Horton (35:58.38) Well, I don't know if you can ever go back exactly. I don't know if you'd really want to. I saw a really thoughtful post recently, someone saying that with Anthropic — famously EA adjacent — having such a high valuation recently, it's probably a really good thing that people are maybe feeling a little bit cautious over some of the FTX
things that went down, not because of the Anthropic business model or there was anything questionable about that, but just because when FTX was at its height, it had a lot of influence over people in a way that looking back, you might think, hmm, is that necessarily the direction we wanted everything to go? So it's maybe helpful to have some of those memories there. But I do feel —
I don't feel like people feel comfortable describing themselves as effective altruists, especially in public life, but equally EA adjacent was the new EA even before FTX blew up, so I don't know.
JD (37:08.248) Can civil servants identify as effective altruists? Is that like kind of going against the impartiality of the civil service?
Kirsten Horton (37:15.627) I think it's fine. I don't think most people in the civil service know what effective altruism is, if I'm perfectly honest. But yeah, I have met at least one person who I immediately clocked as an effective altruist and who did not identify themselves as an effective altruist to me, which I thought was really interesting. I won't —
JD (37:37.998) Do you think that's something that should be changed? Or do you think that's a cultural defect at this point and people should be more proud to be — or at least open about — identifying as such? I presume you would say yes, given the large identity concept.
Kirsten Horton (37:52.523) I like to...
I like to identify as things. I don't like to leave the identifying as something to like the boldest and weirdest of that movement. I think it's helpful for kind of everyday people who have some reservations or questions to continue to identify as something. It's also why I identify as a Christian, even though I have some reservations and questions. Because
it is a very important part of my life, just like being an effective altruist is part of my life. It doesn't mean it consumes everything I do or that I agree with everything that anyone involved in the movement says. But I think it's helpful for people to be able to see the diversity within it, rather than only identifying as an effective altruist if you are an Oxford-educated, vegan, McKinsey consultant turned charity entrepreneur.
JD (38:54.862) That's a very charitable description of an effective altruist. In the last conversation I had, insect welfare was mentioned and some other quirky traits that I'm not necessarily against, but I think people often go for like the weirdest possible thing to peg the effective altruist with nowadays. So what...
Kirsten Horton (38:58.347) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (39:11.403) There are some weird charity thoughts.
JD (39:15.046) Someone's gotta hold the line of the normie giving 10% effectively. It's just common sense using reason and evidence to find good ways to improve the world. Yeah, I'm curious if you have thoughts on things that effective altruism can learn from the church or vice versa. You can take that in any direction.
Kirsten Horton (39:24.011) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (39:37.308) Yeah, I mean, honestly, I got into effective altruism at a time that I was quite frustrated with my church. So there's definitely something there. The church I was going to, I didn't feel like their charitable giving was that effective. And that really frustrated me because I did feel that we should be stewarding our money better. It really matters to me that we spend our money both kind of personally, but
even more so I think for the church — the portion of money that the church has allocated to giving globally — that we spend that in a way that we would be willing to stand by if we had to explain it to some of the poorest people.
That doesn't mean you have to help everyone because you can't help everyone, but I want us to be able to explain why we did it in a way that's more thorough than the person who runs this soccer camp went to university with the pastor of this church.
And so that's really important to me that the church does, I think, think carefully about how it gives and that there's more to it. I think relationships are important. Maybe that's what effective altruism can learn from the church — I think the church has been really good about developing long-standing relationships with other churches in the developing world and
having kind of a more holistic view of giving and really listening. And I think that's important as well. But yeah, that kind of prioritisation — I think that's something EA does really well. I'd love to see the church learn from that and pull from that.
JD (41:32.204) Yeah, I would too. Although more and more I'm starting to wish for that more out of respect and awareness-building in churches, then out of a real sense that churches are going to be huge difference makers. I think I used to have this sense that churches have a considerable margin that they can kind of allocate to global poverty, right? And they have all of these expensive things that they don't need and are just kind of draped in opulence and gold and...
Kirsten Horton (41:54.966) Mm.
JD (42:02.326) Yeah, that's certainly true of some parishes and churches, but it seems like the median church is just struggling, dying. I mean, in some places just dying out — the roof is leaking and most of the staff are underpaid and at best they're going to give like maybe 5% of their budget to some sort of mission. And with that, I would love to see this focus on effectiveness, but
Kirsten Horton (42:28.586) Yeah.
JD (42:32.269) at best it's going to be pretty marginal. I had the head of the US Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church on the podcast last year. I asked him — because in the Episcopal Church we certainly have parishes that are very wealthy, that have very large endowments — and I asked him, in a parish like that, should we install a pipe organ for a million dollars or save 250 lives from malaria?
Kirsten Horton (42:40.406) Yeah.
JD (42:59.638) And he was just kind of taken aback by the question, you know, because he didn't read it in the prep form. Maybe I didn't send it in time. I don't know. But the fact that that question is like slightly shocking or jarring to people is worrisome.
Kirsten Horton (43:00.054) Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Kirsten Horton (43:11.884) Yeah, the church I grew up in, the roof was always leaking — very accurate. The staff were very underpaid. My mom was on staff, so I know. But there was, yeah, we did also have a pretty significant kind of national and global giving programme as well. It was a growing church, which I think maybe makes a difference compared to some churches, but I guess that's
the default model I grew up with a little bit. And so whenever I'm at another church — the church that I was really annoyed at was in a very wealthy neighbourhood in London. They were very rich, some of them, a lot of them. And yeah, a lot of who we were asked to donate to seemed to be related to who was friends with the vicar. And I was not into it. So yeah, I think there's definitely the case that
JD (44:02.126) Yeah.
Kirsten Horton (44:08.618) the billionaires will probably do more to revolutionise philanthropy than the churches. It's more just doing the right thing for its own sake that I care about. Like I just care about the integrity of the church.
JD (44:19.886) Yes, yes. Yeah, and if the church is not asking questions about how it can effectively use its resources to do good — I mean, the church is made up of congregants, and if congregants aren't asking that question, then Christians aren't asking that question, or at least the Christians that don't go to church, maybe, but that shouldn't be a question delegated
just to secular effective altruists. I agree that's something that the church can learn. And so if, listener, that's something you would like to help your church discuss, you can pre-order our book, All the Lives You Can Change. It's coming out April 28th in the US and June 28th in the UK, which is maybe a good note to end on. But Kirsten, I want to ask you, is there anything else you'd like to talk about or any closing parting thoughts about effective altruism or careers
Kirsten Horton (44:52.991) Yes.
JD (45:11.566) for those listening to this episode?
Kirsten Horton (45:15.988) I guess I would just say that I am still very grateful honestly to both the church and to effective altruism for instilling in me a sense that my life matters — and it matters not, you know, it matters both regardless of what I do, but also what I do is incredibly important. Like both of those things are true at the same time.
I'm really grateful to effective altruism for encouraging me to be more ambitious in doing good. I think that's been such an important message that I've taken away from it. And I would encourage your listeners to be really ambitious in trying to change policy where they are and trying to start some conversations. Sometimes it's easier than you think. You can be pushing on an open door.
JD (46:03.084) We talked mostly about the UK, but I assume the general vibe and optimism about working in policy or politics, you'd extend that to the US as well? Or is that just a completely different animal you would never want to touch?
Kirsten Horton (46:14.381) It's — I mean, it's different. You know what, I think the way you make your impact and the way you earn your money doesn't always have to be the same thing as well. I have been hearing that in the US in particular, there have been a lot of layoffs. It might not be the easiest time to get a job in government. Honestly, even in the UK, there have been quite a few layoffs in the civil service, not nearly to the same extent.
But I think there are a lot of people who work in adjacent careers who can still have a big influence. Honestly, possibly a bigger influence. The smaller the government is, the smaller the civil service is, the less time those people have to be reviewing things. So the more straightforward you can make it for them to understand what the most important things they can be working on are, the more of an influence you can potentially have. So if you're like a journalist or an academic, I would not say you have to quit your job and go work in the civil service —
you can have an impact on policy within those kinds of careers.
JD (47:14.862) Got it, got it. And Kirsten, I'm going to ask you a question. If you say no, I can cut this out. But for folks who are listening who are interested in a career in civil service, who really enjoyed this episode and would find it helpful to speak to you, are you in principle open to being connected through our career advising programme to talented, ambitious Christians coming out of uni interested in a civil service career?
Kirsten Horton (47:21.709) Okay.
Kirsten Horton (47:39.593) Yes, I'm happy to talk to people. I would say if you want to talk to me about working in the civil service, I will expect that you've looked at Civil Service Jobs and the civil service behaviours first. There will be a quiz.
JD (47:52.758) Okay, there will be a quiz. Good. So if you're interested in that, you can apply for one-on-one career advising through our website at christiansforimpact.org, go to get one-on-one advice, and mention that you listened to this podcast. And if it makes sense, we'll connect you with Kirsten. And yeah, with that, anything else you'd like to impart before we end?
Kirsten Horton (47:54.572) What?
Kirsten Horton (48:18.667) Now I'm just so grateful that I have gotten the chance to connect with some other effective altruism-curious Christians through Christians for Impact. The conference was amazing and I'm so glad we got to talk again. Thank you so much.
JD (48:33.206) Yeah, thanks so much for coming on.
