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Just wanted to mention that reading this has made me change my donation plans—instead of donating directly, I’m going to try to use my money for donation matching and to seed prizes for EA activities / ventures that I’d like to see. I was already leaning this way, but this post made me make it official.
I’d be happy to collaborate with other people who are similarly interested in building up donation matching pools and/or seed prizes.
The idea of regularly talking to GWWC members makes me want to plug the EA Buddy System. The goals are much the same, it’s just decentralized and volunteer-based. Is it worth coordinating with GWWC on this, e.g. coming up with a set of suggestions that EA buddies can talk about with GWWC members?
I like the EA Buddy system and would be happy to see it promoted to GWWC members in some form, but I feel it’s slightly different from what we are going for here.
Many GWWC members don’t identify as ‘EAs’ and want to be talked to about GWWC issues specifically by someone highly knowledgable.
I expect someone who works on this every day to become very skilled at having these conversations.
These are good points.
Is there a reason this couldn’t be done with FHI funding? If FHI believed that this was the best use of an additional [however much it takes to hire an assistant], then an unrestricted donation of that amount would make it happen. If not, it’s much less clear that this would be a good idea.
It could probably be done through FHI funding, but it would be considerably more expensive and might be blocked by the university.
Why is that?
The university charges major overhead on all salaries (50-100%). It has regulations about who can get PAs, how much time they get, what they can do, how much they must be paid. We are talking about an 800 year old institution here.
Also, the FHI mainly focuses on raising academic grants, and it’s hard to use these to cover a PA.
Are there currently any posters/brochures for EA, Givewell, GWWC etc.?
Edit: thanks guys, glad to know these exist. Will probably print a few to dot around my university.
There are Giving What We Can ones here: https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B5tNAaAvGxc9Q0c4TGtMeGhsU1E
They are slightly out of date but mostly relevant.
There’s a .impact project to design ones, with some entries.
If I read this recent blog post correctly, it sounds like GiveWell are concerned about bumping into the room for more funding ceiling for some of their top charities. Would this be a point against trying to recruit more donors and in favour of encouraging new projects to start up? (or promoting causes that GW doesn’t really cover, such as nonhuman animals or xrisk).
Has there been A/B testing of the messaging for the book launches? It’d be a huge missed opportunity if, for example, the books hammer on the standard drowning child thought experiment type opportunity cost arguments if an excited altruism perspective turns out to be more effective for getting people to actually take action. (For example, the entire last chapter of Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism is basically about how being altruistic makes people happier. He analogizes donating to charity and volunteering to “moral jogging”—somewhat unpleasant in the short run but good for your happiness in the long run.)
Thanks for taking the time to put this together, Rob. I’m interested in the pamphleting angle, especially as someone who has studied pro-veg pamphleting in length and who is researching it further. I’d be interested in hearing if you have any plans to study EA pamphleting in any amount of depth.