Do Good Better

“Do Good Better” is Kyle’s tag for the problem of doing social good well — under uncertainty, in complex systems where confident intervention can backfire. He attaches it to a Charlie Munger passage that appears in both Poor Charlie’s Almanack and the long-read Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, Revisited: “I’m all for fixing social problems… and I’m all for doing things where, based on a slight preponderance of the evidence, you guess that it’s likely to do more good than harm. What I’m against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular intervention will do more good than harm, given that you’re dealing with highly complex systems wherein everything is interacting with everything else.”

Kyle’s note on that passage reads simply “Experimentation in social good,” and he frames Munger’s caution about confident intervention as an argument for an experimental, evidence-weighted posture toward philanthropy rather than conviction-driven action. The phrasing echoes the effective-altruism spirit of testing interventions against outcomes instead of assuming impact.

Context: Doing Good Better is the title of philosopher William MacAskill’s 2015 book, a founding text of the effective altruism movement, which argues for using evidence and reason to identify the highest-impact ways to help others.

Where this appears

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Kyle’s “experimentation in social good” note on Munger’s warning against confident intervention in complex systems
• Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, Revisited — the same Munger passage and note, framed as experimentation over confident social intervention