My suggestion is to keep GWWC poverty-focused and keep the same pledge, but have the GWWC website also direct interested parties to an ‘effective altruism pledge’, with the informal understanding that making the GWWC pledge is tantamount to making the EA pledge, but not the other way around.
[Edit: Or GWWC-pledge doesn’t entail EA-pledge, because EA-pledge is cause-neutral and some GWWC pledgers may not be cause-neutral. Plus ‘you secretly committed to this pledge too, surprise!’ isn’t the right approach. But if the GWWC-pledge is qualified to permit cause-neutrality, and the EA-pledge is qualified to permit conditional/provisional cause-specific pledges, the two can be compatible and everyone can be happy.]
The EA pledge could be the ‘gold standard’ we use to tie the whole EA community together, without its necessarily being ‘owned’ by any one organization (though CEA is an obvious choice for hosting the thing). Riffing off the GWWC pledge, I’m thinking something like:
“I recognise that I can do a significant amount of good, by committing part of my income to those less fortunate — that I can live well enough on a smaller income — that the need is great.
“I recognise that I can help relieve the suffering and fulfill the promise of many lives, by allocating my gift wisely — to the worthiest causes — to the most credible interventions.
“I here pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever initiatives can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, now and in the years to come.
“I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.”
If this is going to be our ‘big-tent’ pledge, and is going to bear the name ‘effective altruism’, it’s important that it say a little more than GWWC does about, for example, epistemic rigor. The Church of Scientology might claim (perhaps even in good faith) to be an effective way to help people, but we have non-arbitrary grounds for excluding Scientology as a pledge-meeting organization if it fails the “credibility” test.
If we went with a pledge like this, we could also have a page informally unpacking what we mean by parts of the pledge, to further guard against diluting EA. E.g., we can unpack “worthiest causes” as “causes that purport to dramatically improve the welfare of those most in need”, and unpack “credible interventions” as “interventions whose efficacy has been argued for reasonably, explicitly, and on scientifically tenable grounds”. The latter isn’t meant to exclude promising new possibilities that are somewhat speculative; but it should exclude causes that have yet to be argued for, or whose only supporting arguments have been unambiguously refuted.
Thanks Rob, these are very useful points. (Cross-posting my response from Facebook): With regard to your point about there being multiple pledges, we have been considering various options, including GWWC having multiple pledges, EAO running a pledge through the effective-altruism.com, having a pledge as part of the forum, and looking to the donation registry to fulfil this function. None of these seem nearly as promising to us. GWWC has built up quite a base of infrastructure, credibility and branding, which it would be time-consuming and difficult to replicate. (EAO is not interested in doing so, and the forum and registry don’t seem terribly suited to doing so). I kind of agree with Jen that pledging is a little weird, so it would likely seem strange to have a series of different orgs with different pledges. This still leaves the option of GWWC having two—we already have the infrastructure and are seen as the ‘pledging organisation’. However, we’re very hesitant to have two separate pledges. When we’ve tried this in the past it hasn’t worked at all well.
GWWC has built up quite a base of infrastructure, credibility and branding, which it would be time-consuming and difficult to replicate.
GWWC has built up branding as an anti-poverty organisation. This is not an advantage when moving to more general causes, it is a disadvantage. Not only do you need to create brand equity all over again, you devalue your existing brand.
Also, isn’t most of the infrastructure just computer code? Surely GWWC would be willing to allow a more general EA organisation to copy that?
I’m not convinced this would be a disadvantage, since what we would branding as, as we do now, is an organisation which strongly encourages people to donate 10% of their income to the most effective organisations, and which highlights how amazingly effective certain global poverty eradication charities are.
Of course, we would be very happy to share the computer code. We’ve had a lot of discussion, in particular, with EAO about how it would work if they did this. But in practice it does not seem to be just a case of sharing computer code. Aside from the technical work involved in implementing the system separately again, there is the fact that building up a pledge which is appealing to take is not just a case of having the right computer code. Having a dedicated community person who reaches out to people individually and helps them along the path to joining seems to have made a big difference. It is hard to know how much difference having a credible community of people who have already taken the pledge and have stuck with it, having a feeling of a concrete community you’re joining, and an identity (of credible research into the most effective ways to help others) makes a difference. But qualitatively asking members why they have joined, what they like about being a member and why they might advise others to join these factors come up a bunch.
I think your description omits a key factor. GWWC’s brand is not just
an organisation which strongly encourages people to donate 10% of their income to the most effective organisations
but
an organisation which strongly encourages people to donate 10% of their income to the most effective anti-poverty organisations
Global poverty is all over the website, it’s the core of GWWC’s presentations, it’s explicitly mentioned in the pledge. I think any neutral outsider, having spent 10 minutes on the website, would say that GWWC was an anti-poverty (and disease, etc.) organization—and be very surprised to hear that it was also anti-robot, and anti-bacon!
Nor do the other factors you mention sound very convincing. The other EA organizations could hire someone to do outreach—they could even share the same person. And the ‘existing community’ argument is a misnomer. Firstly, there already is an existing community—I’m sure we could easily whip up a bunch of EAs to sign the new pledge. But you cannot say that the existing GWWC community could play such a role, as it is not a group of people who have taken the proposed pledge—it is a community of people who took the old pledge, which is quite different, many of whom seem quite unhappy about the change!
My suggestion is to keep GWWC poverty-focused and keep the same pledge, but have the GWWC website also direct interested parties to an ‘effective altruism pledge’, with the informal understanding that making the GWWC pledge is tantamount to making the EA pledge, but not the other way around.
[Edit: Or GWWC-pledge doesn’t entail EA-pledge, because EA-pledge is cause-neutral and some GWWC pledgers may not be cause-neutral. Plus ‘you secretly committed to this pledge too, surprise!’ isn’t the right approach. But if the GWWC-pledge is qualified to permit cause-neutrality, and the EA-pledge is qualified to permit conditional/provisional cause-specific pledges, the two can be compatible and everyone can be happy.]
The EA pledge could be the ‘gold standard’ we use to tie the whole EA community together, without its necessarily being ‘owned’ by any one organization (though CEA is an obvious choice for hosting the thing). Riffing off the GWWC pledge, I’m thinking something like:
If this is going to be our ‘big-tent’ pledge, and is going to bear the name ‘effective altruism’, it’s important that it say a little more than GWWC does about, for example, epistemic rigor. The Church of Scientology might claim (perhaps even in good faith) to be an effective way to help people, but we have non-arbitrary grounds for excluding Scientology as a pledge-meeting organization if it fails the “credibility” test.
If we went with a pledge like this, we could also have a page informally unpacking what we mean by parts of the pledge, to further guard against diluting EA. E.g., we can unpack “worthiest causes” as “causes that purport to dramatically improve the welfare of those most in need”, and unpack “credible interventions” as “interventions whose efficacy has been argued for reasonably, explicitly, and on scientifically tenable grounds”. The latter isn’t meant to exclude promising new possibilities that are somewhat speculative; but it should exclude causes that have yet to be argued for, or whose only supporting arguments have been unambiguously refuted.
Thanks Rob, these are very useful points. (Cross-posting my response from Facebook): With regard to your point about there being multiple pledges, we have been considering various options, including GWWC having multiple pledges, EAO running a pledge through the effective-altruism.com, having a pledge as part of the forum, and looking to the donation registry to fulfil this function. None of these seem nearly as promising to us. GWWC has built up quite a base of infrastructure, credibility and branding, which it would be time-consuming and difficult to replicate. (EAO is not interested in doing so, and the forum and registry don’t seem terribly suited to doing so). I kind of agree with Jen that pledging is a little weird, so it would likely seem strange to have a series of different orgs with different pledges. This still leaves the option of GWWC having two—we already have the infrastructure and are seen as the ‘pledging organisation’. However, we’re very hesitant to have two separate pledges. When we’ve tried this in the past it hasn’t worked at all well.
GWWC has built up branding as an anti-poverty organisation. This is not an advantage when moving to more general causes, it is a disadvantage. Not only do you need to create brand equity all over again, you devalue your existing brand.
Also, isn’t most of the infrastructure just computer code? Surely GWWC would be willing to allow a more general EA organisation to copy that?
I’m not convinced this would be a disadvantage, since what we would branding as, as we do now, is an organisation which strongly encourages people to donate 10% of their income to the most effective organisations, and which highlights how amazingly effective certain global poverty eradication charities are.
Of course, we would be very happy to share the computer code. We’ve had a lot of discussion, in particular, with EAO about how it would work if they did this. But in practice it does not seem to be just a case of sharing computer code. Aside from the technical work involved in implementing the system separately again, there is the fact that building up a pledge which is appealing to take is not just a case of having the right computer code. Having a dedicated community person who reaches out to people individually and helps them along the path to joining seems to have made a big difference. It is hard to know how much difference having a credible community of people who have already taken the pledge and have stuck with it, having a feeling of a concrete community you’re joining, and an identity (of credible research into the most effective ways to help others) makes a difference. But qualitatively asking members why they have joined, what they like about being a member and why they might advise others to join these factors come up a bunch.
I think your description omits a key factor. GWWC’s brand is not just
but
Global poverty is all over the website, it’s the core of GWWC’s presentations, it’s explicitly mentioned in the pledge. I think any neutral outsider, having spent 10 minutes on the website, would say that GWWC was an anti-poverty (and disease, etc.) organization—and be very surprised to hear that it was also anti-robot, and anti-bacon!
Nor do the other factors you mention sound very convincing. The other EA organizations could hire someone to do outreach—they could even share the same person. And the ‘existing community’ argument is a misnomer. Firstly, there already is an existing community—I’m sure we could easily whip up a bunch of EAs to sign the new pledge. But you cannot say that the existing GWWC community could play such a role, as it is not a group of people who have taken the proposed pledge—it is a community of people who took the old pledge, which is quite different, many of whom seem quite unhappy about the change!