Thanks for writing this! I definitely agree on not wanting the community to make big tactics shifts without carefully thinking things through. In that spirit, I want to gently push back on some points, focusing on the claim that “Giving is great scaffolding to bring people further into EA” (since this claim is emphasized as “possibly the best argument for integrating giving and pledging into your group”). My current sense is that this claim is true to some extent, but significantly overstated:
First, much of the post’s argument for the tactical upsides of promoting giving seems shaky.
The post argues:
Giving is an important factor in deepening people’s connection to EA. When asked which factors were important for EA survey respondents getting [more] involved, 35% cited GiveWell, 21% cited Giving What We Can, 12% cited The Life You Can Save and 6% cited ACE, all organisations that are primarily concerned with giving.
It’s not clear to me from the survey that giving is actually an important factor in deepening people’s connection to the community. As far as I can tell, the survey didn’t ask people what was important for them “getting [more] involved”; it just asked them what was important for “getting involved.” So another hypothesis that seems compatible with the survey evidence would be: giving-focused orgs often make people initially aware of the community, and then other factors deepen their involvement.
(We might think that benefit is a good enough alternative reason to emphasize giving, but for now let’s keep looking at the originally claimed benefit.)
It is a concrete commitment that involves self-sacrifice, which can in turn make you more committed to the community and its ideas. This aligns with the theory that ‘costly signals’ increase your commitment to a group or cause.
Does this theory have strong support? The opposite seems at least as plausible to me: maybe costly signals are annoying to give and therefore decrease commitment to a group or cause.
[Giving] (mostly) has short feedback loops, where you can see the results of your actions much more quickly than in, for example, choosing a new career
Is this true? I’ve yet to see the results of any of my donations.
The remaining reasons given in support of this claim don’t apply uniquely to giving, as far as I can tell.
(This comment was getting painfully long, so I’ll continue in a sub-comment.)
Second, tactical downsides of promoting giving seem to be overlooked.
I was a little surprised to see no acknowledgement of downsides, although maybe I missed it. I think there are several likely and significant downsides:
Opportunity costs:
Time and attention (of potential group members, active group members, and organizers) are scarce.
Running or attending a giving game often replaces running or attending a career planning workshop.
Many people lack the time or attention to develop a nuanced understanding of what groups do, and there’s anecdotally already a meme of “EA is all about effective giving.” So a group that tries to emphasize both effective giving and effective careers will often be rounded off as just being about the former.
Social capital (of group organizers) is scarce.
Many people’s altruism is probably scarce? (Maybe it can grow, but if that takes time, it suggests not emphasizing many asks from the beginning.)
Giving-focused groups have lower appeal than careers-focused groups, in a university context:
(University groups are a very significant special case of these groups, since they’re a large fraction of EA groups and are arguably unusually high-leveraged.)
Anecdotally, students seem much more excited about careers-focused pitches than about other kinds of pitches. (Presumably this is because many of them are very confused about what to do with their careers and are desperate for high-quality support.)
Many students have low, zero, or negative incomes, so they often don’t see giving as all that accessible.
In many universities, students’ political or political-adjacent views (e.g., about billionaires having too much influence, or about the importance of systemic change, or about white saviors, etc.) make some students highly skeptical of charity. So a group that very strongly emphasizes giving will be less appealing to these people (and, by social influence, to their friends) than a group with a different emphasis.
In the survey mentioned earlier, 80,000 Hours came out as the top listed contributor to people getting involved.
Group norms costs: given that career choice is (arguably) typically much more consequential than donations choices, very strongly emphasizing the latter may undermine the group norm of prioritizing what matters most.
I was just about to make a list of downsides but you did it for me! I agree it’s not a false choice, and at the city level can be incorporated well into programming. But my main beef with heavy programming and norms is that giving is actually what made me disengage with the community many years ago and I only re-engaged because of its renewed focus on careers/more of a feeling of movement. A bunch of people randomly coming together and donating their money isn’t as compelling when they lack coordination about who’s giving what and where. I don’t see a bunch of giving folks networking with other giving folks about where they’re donating or coordinated efforts on this. But I DO see career folks trying to actively figure out where the career bottlenecks are and funnel people into those positions. I suppose career building feels much more like a team sport and giving feels more like getting a bunch of people together who enjoy solitaire. Which is fine and which has a place!
But I think giving programming is fact dependent and makes more sense for different demographics and at different times than others. A city like New York or London probably has a lot of people who have careers they like and don’t want to switch but are interested in EA. The number of such people (along with how old most people in the city are) should drive giving programming. I agree that giving at unis is much trickier.
I also highly value EA becoming accessible to low-income folks, and as someone who was low-income, the giving programming at my uni group is what emphatically made me disengage with the community for a few years. I felt like the people were naive and insensitive to low-income realities or it just wasn’t a space meant for low-income people. I only came back because of longtermism. I don’t think this is something a training can solve. So main point: incorporation of giving is good but highly fact-dependent and downsides should be considered.
Thanks for this Bridges, and I’m sorry you had a negative experience with giving. It’s definitely a positive that EA has broader programming now and I agree that there is a real danger of alienating people who come from less affluent backgrounds. I’m really delighted that you’ve found a way back to EA now :-)
A couple of points: I’m not sure I agree that giving isn’t a team sport—Giving What We Can and One for the World both see a lot of engagement in our communities, from meet ups to webinars to socials.
I think our point is that it’s a shame to neglect giving entirely. As you say, it can often be part of the menu of EA without significant costs to other aspects; and while you were really inspired by longtermism and careers advice, thousands of people have presumably been inspired by Giving What We Can and One for the World when they’ve taken our pledges.
There seems to be good counter-evidence that talking to students about giving isn’t a good idea at all—it’s been done successfully in so many places for so long within EA and in so many other social movements. Tactics like future-dated donations, pledges that don’t start immediately or focussing on trivial amounts while you’re still studying can all help. But doing this sensitively is really important and that’s part of why we’re trying to offer training and resources!
Anyway, in summary, I’m really pleased you’re back in EA; and I hope we can mitigate these risks well going forward.
Thanks for this Mauricio. It’s good to have an alternative perspective added to this, which was written by quite convinced advocates for one way of thinking!
I think you make a good point that this is a theory that seems to align very closely with the reality of EA, rather than an absolutely established phenomenon. So, for example, we don’t have data in the EA survey that says ‘people say they would likely drop out if they weren’t donating’ or ‘we see higher rates of drop out amongst people who don’t donate versus those who do’. That’s not to say those statements aren’t plausibly true—it’s just the survey isn’t set up to capture them.
It seems unlikely, though, that it’s coincidental that the foremost and most longstanding members of EA have given throughout their engagement and often seem to increase their giving over time (cf. Julia, Will, Toby, everyone at Longview, ~everyone at GiveWell). This also aligns with our experience of talking to the EA community. Obviously anecdotal evidence is weaker than some sort of systematic evidence but if you have a theory that is plausibly true, aligns with common sense and then is supported by a lot individual cases, that seems enough to think this is ‘signal’ rather than coincidence.
To address some specific points:
-Careers advice may be more popular than programming about giving—it makes sense, as both parties want the thing on offer. It’s the opposite of asking for some sacrifice—you can receive careers advice purely out of self-interest. Equally, though, lots of students are passionate about social justice, making a difference etc. and can be attracted to EA precisely by talking about giving. Career change isn’t for everyone, especially when EA careers advice can focus on careers that need significant technical expertise, like biorisk or AI safety. Careers advice also has some hazier routes to impact in its theory of change than a lot of effective giving. - I’d challenge the idea that the majority of students are charity sceptics. A quick Google suggests exactly the opposite Gen Z gives more and more widely than older generations. Gen Z and Millennials are seen as activist generations, so I’d be really surprised if the median Gen Z-er is a donation sceptic, and the data seems to undermine this idea reasonably firmly. - I’m surprised a) that you haven’t seen the result of any donations and b) that you’re sceptical that is has shorted feedback loops than a career change. If you’re at university and alter your career plans, I’d guess you’d have to wait at least 2-3 years to see any impact from that? And plausibly way, way longer? If you donate $10 to AMF today, you’ll be able to see the bednet distribution you funded in a much shorter timescale. I can see a donation I made in November ’21 has already funded nets that are ready in the factory for distribution in the Congo. Maybe this changes depending on what you donate to? - costly signalling is a widely-referenced theory (the Wikipedia pages on it are instructive), although in fairness it’s more broadly cited in relation to signalling to others rather than necessarily deepening your personal commitment (a costly signal is seen as more honest and therefore more powerful) - Candidly, I think opportunity costs are frequently overstated. We do acknowledge this above and give examples of how giving can be incorporated into existing programming. However, we also think there’s a frequent fallacy in EA, where we make all decisions as if they are zero sum (e.g., to pick a particularly odd example, ‘we shouldn’t give blood because we could spend that time earning $x and giving it to an effective charity’, when of course almost everyone in EA can do both simultaneously). Often this choice isn’t real. Of course EA groups need to make some decisions about prioritisation; but are most EA groups genuinely so maxed out that they couldn’t weave giving into their existing programming or even run an extra session?
Overall, I think you do a good job of laying out possible drawbacks of this approach. I’m not convinced they add up to a really robust argument to neglect effective giving entirely, though. And I’d challenge you in return that maybe you’re understating the opportunity costs of only focussing on careers advice, while overstating some of these drawbacks.
Equally, though, lots of students are passionate about social justice, making a difference etc. and can be attracted to EA precisely by talking about giving.
Yup, agree that giving can be attracting. I’m not sure it’s equally attracting at universities though, based on what I mentioned earlier.
Obviously anecdotal evidence is weaker than some sort of systematic evidence but if you have a theory that is plausibly true, aligns with common sense and then is supported by a lot individual cases, that seems enough to think this is ‘signal’ rather than coincidence.
I agree it’s totally plausible that giving deepens involvement! Where I might be more hesitant is in whether this plausibility should make us confident. I don’t know if I can point to a single source on where my intuition here is coming from, but my impression is there’s many cases across social sciences (including RCTs on effective giving) where using plausibility, common sense, and anecdotes to make causal inferences will lead us to mistaken conclusions.
Maybe we can agree that groups should test multiple kinds of programming and then choose how much of various kinds of programming to have based on the results?
I’d challenge the idea that the majority of students are charity sceptics.
Agreed—I’m not sure I made claims about the majority of students. [Edit: looking back at my earlier comment, I see how that could have been inferred—I should have been clearer.] I also agree that this significantly limits the extent of the downside.
I’m surprised a) that you haven’t seen the result of any donations and b) that you’re sceptical that is has shorted feedback loops than a career change. [...] If you donate $10 to AMF today, you’ll be able to see the bednet distribution you funded in a much shorter timescale. [...] Maybe this changes depending on what you donate to?
I think that’s it—the charities I donated to didn’t have that nice feature. Good to learn that some do!
Candidly, I think opportunity costs are frequently overstated.
I’m sympathetic to this—I suspect it’s often overstated but still significant. (I think the attentional costs are especially significant: taking your example about a presentation on AI safety, if the call to action switches from just careers to careers and donations, that’s a ~50% dilution of how much attention is being directed to careers.)
are most EA groups genuinely so maxed out that they couldn’t weave giving into their existing programming or even run an extra session?
Maybe just the especially intense ones :)
I’m not convinced they add up to a really robust argument to neglect effective giving entirely, though.
Also agree here—my sense is they add up to an argument that should make us hesitate about giving being “a core part of pretty much any strategy for EA movement building.”
Thanks Mauricio—I think we are in roughly the same place here :-)
I especially like the idea of groups testing outreach and rebalancing on the results.
To be clear, I would expect most student groups to continue to prioritise non-giving outreach and I think that’s great—it’s likely impactful and it offers variety, and an entry point for low income students, which is super important.
Our concern is the number of groups doing no giving outreach at all. If every group did their existing programming, but added a giving session each semester (or a pledge drive), we’d be delighted!
Thanks for writing this! I definitely agree on not wanting the community to make big tactics shifts without carefully thinking things through. In that spirit, I want to gently push back on some points, focusing on the claim that “Giving is great scaffolding to bring people further into EA” (since this claim is emphasized as “possibly the best argument for integrating giving and pledging into your group”). My current sense is that this claim is true to some extent, but significantly overstated:
First, much of the post’s argument for the tactical upsides of promoting giving seems shaky.
The post argues:
It’s not clear to me from the survey that giving is actually an important factor in deepening people’s connection to the community. As far as I can tell, the survey didn’t ask people what was important for them “getting [more] involved”; it just asked them what was important for “getting involved.” So another hypothesis that seems compatible with the survey evidence would be: giving-focused orgs often make people initially aware of the community, and then other factors deepen their involvement.
(We might think that benefit is a good enough alternative reason to emphasize giving, but for now let’s keep looking at the originally claimed benefit.)
Does this theory have strong support? The opposite seems at least as plausible to me: maybe costly signals are annoying to give and therefore decrease commitment to a group or cause.
Is this true? I’ve yet to see the results of any of my donations.
The remaining reasons given in support of this claim don’t apply uniquely to giving, as far as I can tell.
(This comment was getting painfully long, so I’ll continue in a sub-comment.)
[Part 2 of my original comment]
Second, tactical downsides of promoting giving seem to be overlooked.
I was a little surprised to see no acknowledgement of downsides, although maybe I missed it. I think there are several likely and significant downsides:
Opportunity costs:
Time and attention (of potential group members, active group members, and organizers) are scarce.
Running or attending a giving game often replaces running or attending a career planning workshop.
Many people lack the time or attention to develop a nuanced understanding of what groups do, and there’s anecdotally already a meme of “EA is all about effective giving.” So a group that tries to emphasize both effective giving and effective careers will often be rounded off as just being about the former.
Social capital (of group organizers) is scarce.
Many people’s altruism is probably scarce? (Maybe it can grow, but if that takes time, it suggests not emphasizing many asks from the beginning.)
Giving-focused groups have lower appeal than careers-focused groups, in a university context:
(University groups are a very significant special case of these groups, since they’re a large fraction of EA groups and are arguably unusually high-leveraged.)
Anecdotally, students seem much more excited about careers-focused pitches than about other kinds of pitches. (Presumably this is because many of them are very confused about what to do with their careers and are desperate for high-quality support.)
Many students have low, zero, or negative incomes, so they often don’t see giving as all that accessible.
In many universities, students’ political or political-adjacent views (e.g., about billionaires having too much influence, or about the importance of systemic change, or about white saviors, etc.) make some students highly skeptical of charity. So a group that very strongly emphasizes giving will be less appealing to these people (and, by social influence, to their friends) than a group with a different emphasis.
In the survey mentioned earlier, 80,000 Hours came out as the top listed contributor to people getting involved.
Group norms costs: given that career choice is (arguably) typically much more consequential than donations choices, very strongly emphasizing the latter may undermine the group norm of prioritizing what matters most.
I was just about to make a list of downsides but you did it for me! I agree it’s not a false choice, and at the city level can be incorporated well into programming. But my main beef with heavy programming and norms is that giving is actually what made me disengage with the community many years ago and I only re-engaged because of its renewed focus on careers/more of a feeling of movement. A bunch of people randomly coming together and donating their money isn’t as compelling when they lack coordination about who’s giving what and where. I don’t see a bunch of giving folks networking with other giving folks about where they’re donating or coordinated efforts on this. But I DO see career folks trying to actively figure out where the career bottlenecks are and funnel people into those positions. I suppose career building feels much more like a team sport and giving feels more like getting a bunch of people together who enjoy solitaire. Which is fine and which has a place!
But I think giving programming is fact dependent and makes more sense for different demographics and at different times than others. A city like New York or London probably has a lot of people who have careers they like and don’t want to switch but are interested in EA. The number of such people (along with how old most people in the city are) should drive giving programming. I agree that giving at unis is much trickier.
I also highly value EA becoming accessible to low-income folks, and as someone who was low-income, the giving programming at my uni group is what emphatically made me disengage with the community for a few years. I felt like the people were naive and insensitive to low-income realities or it just wasn’t a space meant for low-income people. I only came back because of longtermism. I don’t think this is something a training can solve. So main point: incorporation of giving is good but highly fact-dependent and downsides should be considered.
Thanks for this Bridges, and I’m sorry you had a negative experience with giving. It’s definitely a positive that EA has broader programming now and I agree that there is a real danger of alienating people who come from less affluent backgrounds. I’m really delighted that you’ve found a way back to EA now :-)
A couple of points: I’m not sure I agree that giving isn’t a team sport—Giving What We Can and One for the World both see a lot of engagement in our communities, from meet ups to webinars to socials.
I think our point is that it’s a shame to neglect giving entirely. As you say, it can often be part of the menu of EA without significant costs to other aspects; and while you were really inspired by longtermism and careers advice, thousands of people have presumably been inspired by Giving What We Can and One for the World when they’ve taken our pledges.
There seems to be good counter-evidence that talking to students about giving isn’t a good idea at all—it’s been done successfully in so many places for so long within EA and in so many other social movements. Tactics like future-dated donations, pledges that don’t start immediately or focussing on trivial amounts while you’re still studying can all help. But doing this sensitively is really important and that’s part of why we’re trying to offer training and resources!
Anyway, in summary, I’m really pleased you’re back in EA; and I hope we can mitigate these risks well going forward.
Thanks for this Mauricio. It’s good to have an alternative perspective added to this, which was written by quite convinced advocates for one way of thinking!
I think you make a good point that this is a theory that seems to align very closely with the reality of EA, rather than an absolutely established phenomenon. So, for example, we don’t have data in the EA survey that says ‘people say they would likely drop out if they weren’t donating’ or ‘we see higher rates of drop out amongst people who don’t donate versus those who do’. That’s not to say those statements aren’t plausibly true—it’s just the survey isn’t set up to capture them.
It seems unlikely, though, that it’s coincidental that the foremost and most longstanding members of EA have given throughout their engagement and often seem to increase their giving over time (cf. Julia, Will, Toby, everyone at Longview, ~everyone at GiveWell). This also aligns with our experience of talking to the EA community. Obviously anecdotal evidence is weaker than some sort of systematic evidence but if you have a theory that is plausibly true, aligns with common sense and then is supported by a lot individual cases, that seems enough to think this is ‘signal’ rather than coincidence.
To address some specific points:
-Careers advice may be more popular than programming about giving—it makes sense, as both parties want the thing on offer. It’s the opposite of asking for some sacrifice—you can receive careers advice purely out of self-interest. Equally, though, lots of students are passionate about social justice, making a difference etc. and can be attracted to EA precisely by talking about giving. Career change isn’t for everyone, especially when EA careers advice can focus on careers that need significant technical expertise, like biorisk or AI safety. Careers advice also has some hazier routes to impact in its theory of change than a lot of effective giving.
- I’d challenge the idea that the majority of students are charity sceptics. A quick Google suggests exactly the opposite Gen Z gives more and more widely than older generations. Gen Z and Millennials are seen as activist generations, so I’d be really surprised if the median Gen Z-er is a donation sceptic, and the data seems to undermine this idea reasonably firmly.
- I’m surprised a) that you haven’t seen the result of any donations and b) that you’re sceptical that is has shorted feedback loops than a career change. If you’re at university and alter your career plans, I’d guess you’d have to wait at least 2-3 years to see any impact from that? And plausibly way, way longer? If you donate $10 to AMF today, you’ll be able to see the bednet distribution you funded in a much shorter timescale. I can see a donation I made in November ’21 has already funded nets that are ready in the factory for distribution in the Congo. Maybe this changes depending on what you donate to?
- costly signalling is a widely-referenced theory (the Wikipedia pages on it are instructive), although in fairness it’s more broadly cited in relation to signalling to others rather than necessarily deepening your personal commitment (a costly signal is seen as more honest and therefore more powerful)
- Candidly, I think opportunity costs are frequently overstated. We do acknowledge this above and give examples of how giving can be incorporated into existing programming. However, we also think there’s a frequent fallacy in EA, where we make all decisions as if they are zero sum (e.g., to pick a particularly odd example, ‘we shouldn’t give blood because we could spend that time earning $x and giving it to an effective charity’, when of course almost everyone in EA can do both simultaneously). Often this choice isn’t real. Of course EA groups need to make some decisions about prioritisation; but are most EA groups genuinely so maxed out that they couldn’t weave giving into their existing programming or even run an extra session?
Overall, I think you do a good job of laying out possible drawbacks of this approach. I’m not convinced they add up to a really robust argument to neglect effective giving entirely, though. And I’d challenge you in return that maybe you’re understating the opportunity costs of only focussing on careers advice, while overstating some of these drawbacks.
Thanks for this!
Yup, agree that giving can be attracting. I’m not sure it’s equally attracting at universities though, based on what I mentioned earlier.
I agree it’s totally plausible that giving deepens involvement! Where I might be more hesitant is in whether this plausibility should make us confident. I don’t know if I can point to a single source on where my intuition here is coming from, but my impression is there’s many cases across social sciences (including RCTs on effective giving) where using plausibility, common sense, and anecdotes to make causal inferences will lead us to mistaken conclusions.
Maybe we can agree that groups should test multiple kinds of programming and then choose how much of various kinds of programming to have based on the results?
Agreed—I’m not sure I made claims about the majority of students. [Edit: looking back at my earlier comment, I see how that could have been inferred—I should have been clearer.] I also agree that this significantly limits the extent of the downside.
I think that’s it—the charities I donated to didn’t have that nice feature. Good to learn that some do!
I’m sympathetic to this—I suspect it’s often overstated but still significant. (I think the attentional costs are especially significant: taking your example about a presentation on AI safety, if the call to action switches from just careers to careers and donations, that’s a ~50% dilution of how much attention is being directed to careers.)
Maybe just the especially intense ones :)
Also agree here—my sense is they add up to an argument that should make us hesitate about giving being “a core part of pretty much any strategy for EA movement building.”
Thanks Mauricio—I think we are in roughly the same place here :-)
I especially like the idea of groups testing outreach and rebalancing on the results.
To be clear, I would expect most student groups to continue to prioritise non-giving outreach and I think that’s great—it’s likely impactful and it offers variety, and an entry point for low income students, which is super important.
Our concern is the number of groups doing no giving outreach at all. If every group did their existing programming, but added a giving session each semester (or a pledge drive), we’d be delighted!