Crossposting from the Effective Altruism community on Reddit. Thought it may be helpful to have a discussion here as well for those who don’t frequent r/EffectiveAltruism.
For those who are thinking about how they can leverage their donations towards this cause area, where should we be donating to?
Bail funds are getting the most media attention right now, with the Minnesota Freedom Fund receiving $20M. With that, I’m not sure if there is a funding need right now for bail funds, compared to other neglected organizations in the same cause area. I’m also not sure on how to compare effectiveness or tractability between organizations.
Note: I understand that there are more effective cause areas such as malaria or x-risk. However, many of my non-EA peers want to donate in this specific cause area and I feel like I could help them choose the most effective charity. I, too, would like to donate to this cause area, but still maintain my usual donations to EA charities.
It’s really disappointing to see this post repeatedly down-voted without any responses. When people approach the EA community and ask about the most effective way to deal with an issue they care about, surely there’s a better way to respond than “I think there are more pressing causes so I’m not even going to dignify your polite request with a polite response”.
In answer to the question, there’s not been a huge amount of EA research on this, mostly because, for several reasons, it tends to be more cost-effective to focus on the world’s poorest countries if you intend on helping people today. However:
The open philanthropy project has made grants focused on criminal justice reform, which seems highly relevant. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform
While I haven’t seen a CEA for https://www.joincampaignzero.org/, one of the founders, Samuel Sinyangwe, has been getting lots of positive attention from EAs for his data-given approach, and has recently become a 538 contributor.
I wanted to share this document which Chloe Cockburn, the person who runs strategy on criminal justice reform at Open Phil, posted this in response to donors asking for advice.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GGgEZ8ebFd6--C4wLeJV9XrX1OPPg40NL6F1QDo53Bs/edit
Thanks for sharing Campaign Zero! Reading about their organization, it feels similar or analogous to donating to an EA longtermist organization. It’s great that they are data-informed and backed by research on their strategic initiatives. Yet, as I feel with any longtermist organization (EA or not), I have a hard time donating money without knowing the amount of impact it could have. This is why I just donate to GiveWell and other global health charities right now.
I didn’t downvote it, but some commenters might have done because an almost identical question was asked a few days ago.
As a person still new to EA, it was disheartening to see the downvotes. You can see in my post history that I rely on this community to be educated and engaged on EA, including how I can apply it to my life.
After I saw the downvotes, it gave me the perception of exclusivity in this community. I’m glad I was made aware that there was a duplicate question, which I apologize for missing. Yet, I’m a little apprehensive now of posting anything that doesn’t seem to fit the bucket of EA cause areas.
The purpose of my post wasn’t to give more attention to a non-EA cause. I want to apply the principles and concepts of EA so that I and others can make an informed, confident decision on how our dollars can make the greatest amount of impact in this specific cause area.
If this community is only receptive and knowledgeable of EA cause areas, such that discussions around non-EA causes won’t provide meaningful value, then please tell me so that I can engage in a different community.
Just to point out, at the time of writing, that this question is now at 41 karma, which is pretty good. So whoever was downvoting it at the beginning appears to have been outvoted. :-)
As I said in my other comment, I think this is a good question, well-phrased and thoughtful, and I’d be happy to see more like it on the Forum. Thank you for contributing here.
I think that applying EA principles and concepts to different areas is really valuable, even if they’re areas that EA hasn’t focused on a lot up to this point. I’m glad you asked this question!
I was going to come and link to that other question, but if people are downvoting based on that without saying anything, that seems pretty bad/dumb to me. Easy enough to just leave a comment saying “this seems to be a duplicate, see this other question”, rather than silently (and unhelpfully) downvoting.
(I also think this question is better than the other one: the question is better defined, and the asker has done some initial homework and shows awareness of cause prioritisation concerns, which makes it easier to pitch the answer.)
Upvoted, I didn’t see that one, hopefully that’s the case!
I like Campaign Zero’s data-driven prioritization of solutions, but it’s not clear to me how they’d use marginal funds. I suspect this gap explains its absence from CEAs and Open Phil recommendation lists.
CEA has a recommendation list for criminal justice reform? I can’t seem to find it on their website.
Campaign Zero is getting a *lot* of criticism, e.g. https://twitter.com/PowerDignity/status/1268735286646726656
They do “sound good” because they’re paying attention to “data”, but personally I wouldn’t feel comfortable supporting them unless you had a very good reason to think that the criticism is not legitimate.
The tweet you linked to says that these 8 principles are already being used across the country and haven’t worked.
AFAIK that isn’t true—they aren’t being used uniformly.
Other than that, the tweet doesn’t have specific criticism—it just says the principles “won’t work”. Have you seen anything more specific?
The main substantive objection seems to be that it’s not demanding enough, especially compared to, for example, defunding all police departments. There’s also lots of ‘this state had some of these policies and still killed someone’ type objections. I don’t know enough about social science to be able to predict the effect of different people making demands of different strength. It’s a little sad to see Sam Sinyangwe be called an apologist/shill for the police though, when regardless of what your prediction of the impact is he’s pretty clearly someone who has dedicated his career to reducing rates of police violence.
Edit: there’s a reply from @SamSwey here, followed by a ton of personal attacks on him and what looks like one legitimate question about methodology. https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1269298269055856641
Yes, I think that’s a much better criticism—Campaign Zero works within the current policing framework, and we could potentially do better by rethinking public safety at a more fundamental level.
My position on this topic remains the same as in that the other similar question that came up recently: namely, that I suspect that the same “developing-world multiplier” applies to tackling racism (and discrimination more broadly) as to most other near-term cause areas, and one would probably be better off looking for opportunities there than focusing on very high-profile cases in the US.
But, if one is really fixed on spending in the developed world, I agree that OpenPhil’s criminal-justice-reform grantees are a good place to start.
I think there are two tacks to take here, depending on whether your goal is reducing racial disparities or addressing discrimination itself.
1. Because of the heavy focus on poverty in developing countries, donations to normal EA charities also serve to reduce international racial disparities. The development gap between Africa and the rest of the world is strongly tied to colonial policies designed to enrich European countries at the expense of majority-black countries.
2. If you want to focus on racial discrimination, I’d suggest charities aiming to provide help to refugees of genocides. In this case, I’d suggest donating to GiveDirectly’s refugee assistance programs, which aim to provide those fleeing racial, ethnic, and religious genocides with enough money to survive.
Has anyone seen a study on how much of the income gap is due to colonialism?
Colonialism and Modern Income—Islands as Natural Experiments
Many studies have been done on this in econometrics; very few of them are good.
Good answer. Helping refugees of ethnic cleansing is a good way to go here, I think.
I think we’re in such an early stage with limited access to data that my intuition is—make some experiments and monitor closely, plus look for ‘meta’ opportunities that multiply impact—giving to ActBlue itself to scale up is a bet that they will facilitate a lot more than the tens of millions of $ they have raised already, and is acknowledging that better opportunities may arise in the near future (but will still be funded through that platform)
In terms of personal, counterfactual donations in addition to my ‘normal’ EA donations this year, to facilitate a conversation about this issue, I have:
donated $50 to ActBlue, to support their operations and technical services. https://secure.actblue.com/donate/supportactblue
donated $50 to ActBlue’s 11 suggested orgs on their recent post “Support orgs fighting against racism and police brutality” https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ab_mn … these include: Black Lives Matter Global Network
Reclaim the Block
National Bail Out
Black Visions Collective
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
The National Police Accountability Project
Color of Change Education Fund
Unicorn Riot
Campaign Zero
Advancement Project
The Marshall Project
Edit: My intuition is that US criminal justice dysfunction is an undervalued global risk, as it contributes to political instability, but I would very much welcome more careful thought into why that may or may not be the case :)