Do you think it was a mistake (ex ante) for some folks to de-emphasize earning to give a few years back?
What sorts of field building efforts around earning to give are you more excited about? E.g., focusing on promising students versus trying to recruit high-net-worth individuals (aka rich people).
Which of your past donations do you feel best/worst about?
Which of your past donations do you feel best/worst about?
Looking over the list I feel most proud of my 2012-11-07 donation to 80k. I don’t feel bad about any of my donations, in the sense of thinking they were harmful or did less good than spending the money on myself, though I do think there were often options that would have done a lot more good. For example, I think the thing where I knew about and liked GiveWell in 2010 but continued donating to Oxfam (though earmarked for monitoring and evaluation) was worse than I should have been able to do. I also think my post-OpenPhil donations have been less effective in expectation than they would have been if I had been seriously leaning into my freedom as an independent and reasonably well-connected individual donor instead of donating via funds, but that also would have required a lot more investment of time and energy than I was willing to dedicate.
Do you think it was a mistake (ex ante) for some folks to de-emphasize earning to give a few years back?
How many years back? ;) There used to be a lot of clearly important work that was shockingly underfunded, and I think the early EA approach of encouraging earning to give as a good default option was reasonable. There clearly wasn’t the money to support most of us going into direct work. With Good Ventures / Open Phil this changed, however, and I think EAs were generally a bit slow to adjust to the new funding landscape. By the time Doing Good Better came out in 2015 (I’m guessing exacerbated by the long lead times of print) I think we would have ideally no longer been presenting effective giving as the core of EA. Then I think we overcorrected some pre-FTX, and even more during FTX (when I think we collectively really messed up on risk assessment). I’m glad to see the community post-FTX shifting back towards including earning to give as one of several core ways to be an EA and one that’s a good fit for a lot of people and a lot of life circumstances.
We should also keep in mind how it’s really hard to accurately “steer” a movement with as many people as EA. Even in a community where people care as much about detail, nuance, and getting things right as this one does, a lot of people will still mostly update on discussion of effective giving by becoming somewhat more positively or negatively inclined towards the approach. You can push EA, and any large thing, much more than you can target it. So a history of under- and over-correction is not surprising.
Still, talking publicly about where we think we should be, and thinking specifically about where we want to be and not just which direction we’d like to shift in, seems like it should be able to do a lot to help us not get top far from the right level of emphasis (both on the question of earning to give and all the other important questions).
Do you think it was a mistake (ex ante) for some folks to de-emphasize earning to give a few years back?
What sorts of field building efforts around earning to give are you more excited about? E.g., focusing on promising students versus trying to recruit high-net-worth individuals (aka rich people).
Which of your past donations do you feel best/worst about?
Looking over the list I feel most proud of my 2012-11-07 donation to 80k. I don’t feel bad about any of my donations, in the sense of thinking they were harmful or did less good than spending the money on myself, though I do think there were often options that would have done a lot more good. For example, I think the thing where I knew about and liked GiveWell in 2010 but continued donating to Oxfam (though earmarked for monitoring and evaluation) was worse than I should have been able to do. I also think my post-OpenPhil donations have been less effective in expectation than they would have been if I had been seriously leaning into my freedom as an independent and reasonably well-connected individual donor instead of donating via funds, but that also would have required a lot more investment of time and energy than I was willing to dedicate.
How many years back? ;) There used to be a lot of clearly important work that was shockingly underfunded, and I think the early EA approach of encouraging earning to give as a good default option was reasonable. There clearly wasn’t the money to support most of us going into direct work. With Good Ventures / Open Phil this changed, however, and I think EAs were generally a bit slow to adjust to the new funding landscape. By the time Doing Good Better came out in 2015 (I’m guessing exacerbated by the long lead times of print) I think we would have ideally no longer been presenting effective giving as the core of EA. Then I think we overcorrected some pre-FTX, and even more during FTX (when I think we collectively really messed up on risk assessment). I’m glad to see the community post-FTX shifting back towards including earning to give as one of several core ways to be an EA and one that’s a good fit for a lot of people and a lot of life circumstances.
We should also keep in mind how it’s really hard to accurately “steer” a movement with as many people as EA. Even in a community where people care as much about detail, nuance, and getting things right as this one does, a lot of people will still mostly update on discussion of effective giving by becoming somewhat more positively or negatively inclined towards the approach. You can push EA, and any large thing, much more than you can target it. So a history of under- and over-correction is not surprising.
Still, talking publicly about where we think we should be, and thinking specifically about where we want to be and not just which direction we’d like to shift in, seems like it should be able to do a lot to help us not get top far from the right level of emphasis (both on the question of earning to give and all the other important questions).