I’m a huge fan of grassroots organising although its so hard to quantify the benefits of I’m not sure it falls in the realm of what effective altruism can easily get behind. Also grassroots organisation shouldn’t need very much money—I’ve been involved in the past and we didn’t need much!
I’m only a fan of leveraging existing orgs if they can really show they are achieving wat they say they are. How do we know current advocates are effective? I can’t see a reason reason for me why EA orgs shouldn’t be able to start up and work on this over time—I would take a few EA orgs failing at advocacy as some signal that it might not be a super cost effective approach.
I’m skeptical of the idea that there are magical orgs out there doing things that new orgs couldn’t replicate at all. Could you suggest some existing orgs that you think are very good that EA could support?
EA does support some too. One example that EA does support with stacks of cash in this space is the Center for Global Development. I’ve had one terrible interaction with them that lowered my confidence in whether they really are a good faith org and also their general competency, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing impactful stuff.
Great points Nick. Can I message you/are you open to moving this offline? I want to keep the conversation going and have a lot of thoughts but some I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet (not 100% convinced of my position) and I need to be sensitive given my job and relationships with other orgs in the space.
Thanks Dorothy those are good points.
I’m a huge fan of grassroots organising although its so hard to quantify the benefits of I’m not sure it falls in the realm of what effective altruism can easily get behind. Also grassroots organisation shouldn’t need very much money—I’ve been involved in the past and we didn’t need much!
I’m only a fan of leveraging existing orgs if they can really show they are achieving wat they say they are. How do we know current advocates are effective? I can’t see a reason reason for me why EA orgs shouldn’t be able to start up and work on this over time—I would take a few EA orgs failing at advocacy as some signal that it might not be a super cost effective approach.
I’m skeptical of the idea that there are magical orgs out there doing things that new orgs couldn’t replicate at all. Could you suggest some existing orgs that you think are very good that EA could support?
EA does support some too. One example that EA does support with stacks of cash in this space is the Center for Global Development. I’ve had one terrible interaction with them that lowered my confidence in whether they really are a good faith org and also their general competency, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing impactful stuff.
Great points Nick. Can I message you/are you open to moving this offline? I want to keep the conversation going and have a lot of thoughts but some I’m not comfortable sharing publicly yet (not 100% convinced of my position) and I need to be sensitive given my job and relationships with other orgs in the space.