The amount of money employees at EA organisations can give is fairly small
Agreed. Is there any evidence employee donation is a significant problem, or that it will become one in the near future? If not, and given there is no obvious solution, I suggest focusing on higher priorities (e.g. VIP outreach).
Thanks to Max Dalton, Sam Deere, Will MacAskill, Michael Page, Stefan Shubert, Carl Shulman, Pablo Stafforini, Rob Wiblin, and Julia Wise for comments and contributions to the conversation.
I think too many (brain power x hours) have been expended here.
Sorry to be a downer, just trying to help optimize.
With a quick Fermi estimate from my cycle ride I think this might be worthwhile even on short-term impacts.
There are maybe 50 employees at EA orgs. Perhaps they plan to donate $200,000 in the next year. Suppose that a correct answer to this question adds +20% to the value of a donation (roughly the amount of the tax benefit, which people mostly weren’t claiming to be the biggest effect). Suppose further that this much-more-in-depth-consideration than previously existed has a net 5% chance of nudging people towards making the better decision, whichever that is. Then that would be worth ~~$2,000 even on a 1-year timescale. Which is plausibly worth a day.
Those numbers are close and messy enough I don’t feel happy supporting it just on short-term impact, though.
Many people won’t donate to their own org either way, and many of those who do won’t care about norms. This will probably include a large majority of donations.
I feel as though building a good culture is really quite important, and like this sort of specific proposal & discussion is how, bit by bit, one does that. It seems to me that the default for large groups of would-be collaborators is to waste almost all the available resource due basically to “insufficiently ethical/principled social fabric”.
(My thoughts here are perhaps redundant with Owen’s reply to your comment, but it seems important enough that I wanted to add a separate voice and take.)
Re: how much this matters (or how much is wasted without this), I like the examples in Eliezer’s article on lost purposes or in Scott Alexander’s review of house of god.
The larger EA gets, the easier it is for standard failure modes by effort becomes untethered from real progress, or some homegrown analog, to eat almost all our impact as well. And so the more necessary it is that we really seriously try to figure out what principles can keep our collective epistemology truth-tracking.
Agreed. Is there any evidence employee donation is a significant problem, or that it will become one in the near future? If not, and given there is no obvious solution, I suggest focusing on higher priorities (e.g. VIP outreach).
I think too many (brain power x hours) have been expended here.
Sorry to be a downer, just trying to help optimize.
“I think too many (brain power x hours) have been expended here.”
I agree that more thought went into this than was really called for, including by me. Law of triviality in action.
Evaluated just on the near-term impacts I’d agree with you (even if total time was, I guess, around a day, which is not huge).
The reason this seems more important to me is that it’s part of the community culture. Building a community with the right culture seems both:
easier to get done while everything is relatively small;
an important determinant of the long-term impact of effective altruism.
With a quick Fermi estimate from my cycle ride I think this might be worthwhile even on short-term impacts.
There are maybe 50 employees at EA orgs. Perhaps they plan to donate $200,000 in the next year. Suppose that a correct answer to this question adds +20% to the value of a donation (roughly the amount of the tax benefit, which people mostly weren’t claiming to be the biggest effect). Suppose further that this much-more-in-depth-consideration than previously existed has a net 5% chance of nudging people towards making the better decision, whichever that is. Then that would be worth ~~$2,000 even on a 1-year timescale. Which is plausibly worth a day.
Those numbers are close and messy enough I don’t feel happy supporting it just on short-term impact, though.
Many people won’t donate to their own org either way, and many of those who do won’t care about norms. This will probably include a large majority of donations.
This came out of my pleasure budget.
I feel as though building a good culture is really quite important, and like this sort of specific proposal & discussion is how, bit by bit, one does that. It seems to me that the default for large groups of would-be collaborators is to waste almost all the available resource due basically to “insufficiently ethical/principled social fabric”.
(My thoughts here are perhaps redundant with Owen’s reply to your comment, but it seems important enough that I wanted to add a separate voice and take.)
Re: how much this matters (or how much is wasted without this), I like the examples in Eliezer’s article on lost purposes or in Scott Alexander’s review of house of god.
The larger EA gets, the easier it is for standard failure modes by effort becomes untethered from real progress, or some homegrown analog, to eat almost all our impact as well. And so the more necessary it is that we really seriously try to figure out what principles can keep our collective epistemology truth-tracking.