It’s great that so many people are working on giving lots of people a positive initial impression of EA. But my sense is there’s a pretty big gap between “initial impression of EA” and “EA is a big part of my life” that isn’t being filled very well right now. Are there any plans to work on these later stages of the EA pipeline?
What’s the difference between Will and Peter’s books? Their titles are extremely similar, so it’s hard to tell...
Nitpick: are there any plans to fix the fact that effective-altruism.org and effectivealtruism.org are two different sites? I could see this being pretty confusing for a first impression.
How does funding this related to funding CEA or other CEA sub-projects? It seems like part of your budget is actually a part of CEA central’s expenses, so presumably donations are somewhat fungible between the two?
Does the claim “We are currently due to run out of funding next month” include the £62,500 donation? It seems like not, but you didn’t insert any caveats about that into your claim. At any rate, what’s the situation for marginal funds? What do you anticipate getting cut if you don’t meet your goal, and what would you do with funds over your budget (or will you just stop accepting donations)?
What do you see as the biggest risks and failure modes of EA Outreach?
I get the sense from people on this forum, including CEA itself, that spreading EA is about “making EA’s”, meaning creating more heroic individuals donating big to top charities or pursuing high-impact careers, or even just involved in the movement in some way such as hosting meet-ups. Those things are all terrific, but I see the potential for spreading EA (including EA Outreach’s 2015 program) more as an effectiveness revolution: millions of people donating a little more, or a little “better”, or thinking about impact more when choosing their careers, will benefit the world much more than a couple hundred more GWWC members or movement volunteers. So when you say there’s a gap between exposure to EA and having EA as a big part of one’s life, I don’t think that is the only proxy for success: isn’t it better for EA to be a tiny part of many peoples’ lives than a big part of the lives of a few? I’m supporting Will’s book marketing, not only to maximize sales but mainly to raise his profile so as to make EA more mainstream and hopefully encourage millions of people to increase their heart footprint just a little bit.
I find that donations/volunteering/career selection is generally self-serving and people don’t even try to be effective so just nudging society to think about impact in these areas I think is a low hanging fruit we can pursue right away.
What do you see as the biggest risks and failure modes of EA Outreach?
Some of the most salient failure modes for EA Outreach are in the individual sub-projects:
For Will and Peter’s books, the outside-view median outcome is that they don’t make a splash in the media and don’t sell very well. Unfortunately there are just so many books published each year (~1m per year) that the outside-view chances of ours being one of few that gain considerable attention and sell well is slim. Even when you account for the fact that we have a substantial advance and top-tier publisher, the outside view says that we’ll only sell a moderate number of books and will be unlikely to make more than the advance. Inside view says that we’ll do better than this because of the amount of resources going into the book, the fact that there is a movement behind the book, and because people seem pretty interested in EA-style questions at the moment. The reason we are doing this is not for the median case though, it’s for the upper tail in which we become a best-seller and EA becomes well known enough that media hosts feel the need to include it in their discussions of charity, philanthropy, and doing good. The outside-view chances of this happening are slim, and the inside-view chances are better but not huge, though we have been told by publishers, publicists, etc. that it is a real possibility. I will be working very hard over the coming year to give these books the best possible launches I can, but unfortunately the risk is still probably the biggest one that we are taking.
My most salient worry for EA Global is that it doesn’t sell tickets, people don’t come, and it makes a major loss. We are going to be marketing it hard, and part of the reason for moving to a global model is that it makes it easier for more people to come as they won’t have to travel as far.
My biggest worry for EffectiveAltruism.org is that it doesn’t get much traffic. There are now many popular sites that discuss EA, and though EA.org is ranked at no. 5 when I do an incognito search for ‘Effective Altruism’, my main worry is that it won’t get enough traffic. My other worry is that we will never actually finish building it as other higher-priority projects will take precedent, but I don’t see that as as much of a risk.
I suppose my worries can be put into two broad categories, either we fail to get enough attention for EA, or we get the attention and fail to convert it sufficiently into growth of the movement. I think both of these are very real possibilities that we are working every day to reduce the chances of.
For EffectiveAltruism.org, do you know the search volume for “effective altruism” or related queries? Do you have any sense of how much traffic you could possibly get (e.g., what quantitatively would count as “lots of traffic” vs. “not much traffic”)?
Google estimates that there are 720 searches a month for “effective altruism.” I expect that to increase over time, but I don’t expect search to be the biggest source of traffic initially. I’m expecting that link traffic from people who want a site to explain EA will be the biggest source of traffic initially.
I don’t have a number attached to my expectations about traffic numbers. But, since CEA has a number of web properties, we can benchmark effectivelatruism.org pretty easily by comparing our traffic profile to the traffic profile of other CEA sites. We can use this to figure out whether the site is succeeding or failing from a traffic standpoint.
However, I slightly disagree with Niel that low traffic is the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is that the site does become the de facto landing page for EA, but the site isn’t very good or doesn’t encourage people to want to get involved. You can get lots of traffic and still not have much of an impact.
I’m working to hedge against this by working with Andy Fallshaw who is an extremely talented designer and branding expert and by A/B testing a wide variety of aspects of the site.
For EA Global, I have a couple additional worries that I’d love your thoughts on:
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
Do you have any plans to deal with these? Sorry to ask so many questions, but I’m hoping they’ll be useful to other people as well!
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
I think the probability that some negative event happens increases as we add more different locations for events, but I think the total risk to the brand decreases. If something weird happened in 2014, it would mean that something went wrong at the only EA gathering of the year. If something weird happens at a single location this year, it’s more plausible to explain that it was an isolated incident than that it is representative of all of EA.
That said, I’m vetting people running the events carefully and focusing mostly on finding experienced event runners. I plan to exercise more extensive oversight for areas of managing the event that could damage the EA brand.
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
There’s no doubt that EA Global is an ambitious project and I agree that the size and scope of the plan creates an opportunity for failure. But, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that make me think this is manageable: 1) we’re planning to hire an event planner to help with coordination and logistics, freeing up more of my time to focus on strategy and marketing; 2) I’ve been consulting with Nevin and Cathleen regularly and am benefiting from their experience; 3) We’ve scaled down some aspects of the events themselves which will reduce the number of components that might go wrong.
Nitpick: are there any plans to fix the fact that effective-altruism.org and effectivealtruism.org are two different sites? I could see this being pretty confusing for a first impression.
I’ll be fixing the domain structure once effectivealtruism.org gets up and running. In addition to fixing this issue, the question of how to connect effectivealtruism.org and the forum will be part of what I investigate.
Does the claim “We are currently due to run out of funding next month” include the £62,500 donation? It seems like not, but you didn’t insert any caveats about that into your claim. At any rate, what’s the situation for marginal funds? What do you anticipate getting cut if you don’t meet your goal, and what would you do with funds over your budget (or will you just stop accepting donations)?
Unfortunately the £62,500 donation is only a ballpark figure at the moment and won’t be confirmed until late December or January. Sorry that I didn’t make this clearer.
The first thing that would be cut from the budget is an external publicist for Will’s book. We would have to rely on Penguin to do much of the publicity, and we would do as much as we had time for in-house as well. I would probably want to fundraise additional funds to hire a summer intern to help with marketing and pitching media outlets in this case.
You can see the full list of everything that we could fund if money was available in this spreadsheet (which uses this now-outdated documentation). The budget that we are using to fundraise includes only a small fraction of these opportunities, as they are the ones that we most wanted to fund.
At time of writing, we need an additional £15k on top of our current pledges to be able to fund our top priorities except Will’s publicist. Paying for Will’s publicist would require another ~£19k on top of that.
Two. What’s the difference between Will and Peter’s books? Their titles are extremely similar, so it’s hard to tell...
While the books are on a similar topic, they approach effective altruism from slightly different angles. For example:
Peter’s book is probably more focused on the altruism side of EA, while Will’s focuses more on the effectiveness side.
Peter’s book focuses slightly more on big giving and the good you can do with your money, whereas Will’s takes in a wider range of topics from career choice to consumerism.
Will’s book discusses a wider range of potential causes than Peter’s book (I think, I’d have to double check to be sure)
From your description, they sound quite similar. What’s the rationale for releasing so close to each other and splitting publicity efforts between the two of them? Are you at all worried that they will interfere with each other or compete for attention?
I agree they are relatively similar. We’ve been keeping the publishers up to date with the plans of the other authors and publishers that are publishing books on EA in 2015. Thus the publishers think that these dates are pretty optimal in terms of when we would want them all released: spaced out enough that each can get its own media coverage and attention, but close enough that people can write about the trend and broader movement of EA with so many books coming out around the same time. I am a little worried that they will compete for attention, which is part of the reason why I’m coordinating both Will and Peter’s marketing, so that they can collaborate where possible. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I’ve settled on thinking that each book trying to maximise its own success is actually going to be really quite close to optimal, so I’m going to be adopting a strategy that is not far from that. Essentially, the chances of any one promotional push putting a lot of media attention on EA is relatively small, and so we want as many rolls of the dice as possible.
Four. How does funding this related to funding CEA or other CEA sub-projects? It seems like part of your budget is actually a part of CEA central’s expenses, so presumably donations are somewhat fungible between the two?
The ‘Central Team’ within CEA can be thought of as providing services to the projects that it incubates, and so the projects split the costs of ‘Central’ CEA according to a splitting algorithm. Historically, unrestricted donations to CEA have been split following an algorithm between the different projects that it incubates. In 2015, the use of unrestricted donations is likely to change somewhat, and is likely to include some fraction going to the different projects within CEA, as well as some used to support the creation of new projects, and potentially some to be assigned discretionarily by the trustees. If you were to donate to CEA unrestricted in 2014, approximately 11% of your donation would have gone to EA Outreach, with the remainder going to the Global Priorities Project, 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can.
Great questions as always. I’m going to hand a couple of these over to Kerry Vaughan, but I’ll take a shot at answering most of them. Again, I’m afraid my answers are too long to fit into a single comment, so I’ll answer questions one-by-one.
It’s great that so many people are working on giving lots of people a positive initial impression of EA. But my sense is there’s a pretty big gap between “initial impression of EA” and “EA is a big part of my life” that isn’t being filled very well right now. Are there any plans to work on these later stages of the EA pipeline?
I agree that there is a need here. On p2 here I outline how our activities can be thought of as fitting into this pipeline. Some of them are earlier in this pipeline (making it easier for people to get up to speed on the ket ideas in EA at effectivealtruism.org), while others are later (the EA Fellows Programme). The main activities targeting the later stages of this pipeline are:
EA Global, which is designed to allow lots of people to meet face-to-face to make it easy for people to dive into the community.
EA Fellows Programme, which is intended to provide an opportunity for a handful of high-potential people who are interested in EA to make it a much bigger part of their life.
And finally EA Ventures which we hope will providing funding for more people to work full-time on EA projects.
In my experience becoming very engaged in EA often comes about as a result of a large amount of one-on-one interaction with people in the community, so we hope to build some tools into EffectiveAltruism.org to make this easier. I think that local chapters are likely to be a key part of how people become more involved, and I’m always interested to hear ways in which we might be able to help local chapters grow, so if you do have ideas let me know. I hear that you’re doing great work in this area already, so perhaps you have some suggestions?
Ultimately I think there is so much work to be done in the area you’ve mentioned that I would hope that there are people dedicated specifically to this aim in the future, and this is something that we are hoping to develop in CEA in time.
Have you written up anything about the 1:1 tools for EA.org anywhere?
WRT chapter suggestions, I’m only just figuring things out myself and I’m afraid I don’t have any magic bullets! I’ll let you know if I come up with any though :)
Have you written up anything about the 1:1 tools for EA.org anywhere?
Seconded. Also, what are the current ways in which proto-EAs can get one-on-one interaction, and what are the things that we can leverage to increase this?
These are more great questions Ben. Do you mind if I come back to you on them on Monday as I’m going to try and take today as a day off? Thanks in advance.
Some more questions:
It’s great that so many people are working on giving lots of people a positive initial impression of EA. But my sense is there’s a pretty big gap between “initial impression of EA” and “EA is a big part of my life” that isn’t being filled very well right now. Are there any plans to work on these later stages of the EA pipeline?
What’s the difference between Will and Peter’s books? Their titles are extremely similar, so it’s hard to tell...
Nitpick: are there any plans to fix the fact that effective-altruism.org and effectivealtruism.org are two different sites? I could see this being pretty confusing for a first impression.
How does funding this related to funding CEA or other CEA sub-projects? It seems like part of your budget is actually a part of CEA central’s expenses, so presumably donations are somewhat fungible between the two?
Does the claim “We are currently due to run out of funding next month” include the £62,500 donation? It seems like not, but you didn’t insert any caveats about that into your claim. At any rate, what’s the situation for marginal funds? What do you anticipate getting cut if you don’t meet your goal, and what would you do with funds over your budget (or will you just stop accepting donations)?
What do you see as the biggest risks and failure modes of EA Outreach?
Thanks!
Ben
I get the sense from people on this forum, including CEA itself, that spreading EA is about “making EA’s”, meaning creating more heroic individuals donating big to top charities or pursuing high-impact careers, or even just involved in the movement in some way such as hosting meet-ups. Those things are all terrific, but I see the potential for spreading EA (including EA Outreach’s 2015 program) more as an effectiveness revolution: millions of people donating a little more, or a little “better”, or thinking about impact more when choosing their careers, will benefit the world much more than a couple hundred more GWWC members or movement volunteers. So when you say there’s a gap between exposure to EA and having EA as a big part of one’s life, I don’t think that is the only proxy for success: isn’t it better for EA to be a tiny part of many peoples’ lives than a big part of the lives of a few? I’m supporting Will’s book marketing, not only to maximize sales but mainly to raise his profile so as to make EA more mainstream and hopefully encourage millions of people to increase their heart footprint just a little bit.
I find that donations/volunteering/career selection is generally self-serving and people don’t even try to be effective so just nudging society to think about impact in these areas I think is a low hanging fruit we can pursue right away.
Some of the most salient failure modes for EA Outreach are in the individual sub-projects:
For Will and Peter’s books, the outside-view median outcome is that they don’t make a splash in the media and don’t sell very well. Unfortunately there are just so many books published each year (~1m per year) that the outside-view chances of ours being one of few that gain considerable attention and sell well is slim. Even when you account for the fact that we have a substantial advance and top-tier publisher, the outside view says that we’ll only sell a moderate number of books and will be unlikely to make more than the advance. Inside view says that we’ll do better than this because of the amount of resources going into the book, the fact that there is a movement behind the book, and because people seem pretty interested in EA-style questions at the moment. The reason we are doing this is not for the median case though, it’s for the upper tail in which we become a best-seller and EA becomes well known enough that media hosts feel the need to include it in their discussions of charity, philanthropy, and doing good. The outside-view chances of this happening are slim, and the inside-view chances are better but not huge, though we have been told by publishers, publicists, etc. that it is a real possibility. I will be working very hard over the coming year to give these books the best possible launches I can, but unfortunately the risk is still probably the biggest one that we are taking.
My most salient worry for EA Global is that it doesn’t sell tickets, people don’t come, and it makes a major loss. We are going to be marketing it hard, and part of the reason for moving to a global model is that it makes it easier for more people to come as they won’t have to travel as far.
My biggest worry for EffectiveAltruism.org is that it doesn’t get much traffic. There are now many popular sites that discuss EA, and though EA.org is ranked at no. 5 when I do an incognito search for ‘Effective Altruism’, my main worry is that it won’t get enough traffic. My other worry is that we will never actually finish building it as other higher-priority projects will take precedent, but I don’t see that as as much of a risk.
I suppose my worries can be put into two broad categories, either we fail to get enough attention for EA, or we get the attention and fail to convert it sufficiently into growth of the movement. I think both of these are very real possibilities that we are working every day to reduce the chances of.
For EffectiveAltruism.org, do you know the search volume for “effective altruism” or related queries? Do you have any sense of how much traffic you could possibly get (e.g., what quantitatively would count as “lots of traffic” vs. “not much traffic”)?
Google estimates that there are 720 searches a month for “effective altruism.” I expect that to increase over time, but I don’t expect search to be the biggest source of traffic initially. I’m expecting that link traffic from people who want a site to explain EA will be the biggest source of traffic initially.
I don’t have a number attached to my expectations about traffic numbers. But, since CEA has a number of web properties, we can benchmark effectivelatruism.org pretty easily by comparing our traffic profile to the traffic profile of other CEA sites. We can use this to figure out whether the site is succeeding or failing from a traffic standpoint.
However, I slightly disagree with Niel that low traffic is the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is that the site does become the de facto landing page for EA, but the site isn’t very good or doesn’t encourage people to want to get involved. You can get lots of traffic and still not have much of an impact.
I’m working to hedge against this by working with Andy Fallshaw who is an extremely talented designer and branding expert and by A/B testing a wide variety of aspects of the site.
For EA Global, I have a couple additional worries that I’d love your thoughts on:
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
Do you have any plans to deal with these? Sorry to ask so many questions, but I’m hoping they’ll be useful to other people as well!
I think the probability that some negative event happens increases as we add more different locations for events, but I think the total risk to the brand decreases. If something weird happened in 2014, it would mean that something went wrong at the only EA gathering of the year. If something weird happens at a single location this year, it’s more plausible to explain that it was an isolated incident than that it is representative of all of EA.
That said, I’m vetting people running the events carefully and focusing mostly on finding experienced event runners. I plan to exercise more extensive oversight for areas of managing the event that could damage the EA brand.
There’s no doubt that EA Global is an ambitious project and I agree that the size and scope of the plan creates an opportunity for failure. But, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that make me think this is manageable: 1) we’re planning to hire an event planner to help with coordination and logistics, freeing up more of my time to focus on strategy and marketing; 2) I’ve been consulting with Nevin and Cathleen regularly and am benefiting from their experience; 3) We’ve scaled down some aspects of the events themselves which will reduce the number of components that might go wrong.
I’ll be fixing the domain structure once effectivealtruism.org gets up and running. In addition to fixing this issue, the question of how to connect effectivealtruism.org and the forum will be part of what I investigate.
Unfortunately the £62,500 donation is only a ballpark figure at the moment and won’t be confirmed until late December or January. Sorry that I didn’t make this clearer.
The first thing that would be cut from the budget is an external publicist for Will’s book. We would have to rely on Penguin to do much of the publicity, and we would do as much as we had time for in-house as well. I would probably want to fundraise additional funds to hire a summer intern to help with marketing and pitching media outlets in this case.
You can see the full list of everything that we could fund if money was available in this spreadsheet (which uses this now-outdated documentation). The budget that we are using to fundraise includes only a small fraction of these opportunities, as they are the ones that we most wanted to fund.
At time of writing, we need an additional £15k on top of our current pledges to be able to fund our top priorities except Will’s publicist. Paying for Will’s publicist would require another ~£19k on top of that.
While the books are on a similar topic, they approach effective altruism from slightly different angles. For example:
Peter’s book is probably more focused on the altruism side of EA, while Will’s focuses more on the effectiveness side.
Peter’s book focuses slightly more on big giving and the good you can do with your money, whereas Will’s takes in a wider range of topics from career choice to consumerism.
Will’s book discusses a wider range of potential causes than Peter’s book (I think, I’d have to double check to be sure)
From your description, they sound quite similar. What’s the rationale for releasing so close to each other and splitting publicity efforts between the two of them? Are you at all worried that they will interfere with each other or compete for attention?
I agree they are relatively similar. We’ve been keeping the publishers up to date with the plans of the other authors and publishers that are publishing books on EA in 2015. Thus the publishers think that these dates are pretty optimal in terms of when we would want them all released: spaced out enough that each can get its own media coverage and attention, but close enough that people can write about the trend and broader movement of EA with so many books coming out around the same time. I am a little worried that they will compete for attention, which is part of the reason why I’m coordinating both Will and Peter’s marketing, so that they can collaborate where possible. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I’ve settled on thinking that each book trying to maximise its own success is actually going to be really quite close to optimal, so I’m going to be adopting a strategy that is not far from that. Essentially, the chances of any one promotional push putting a lot of media attention on EA is relatively small, and so we want as many rolls of the dice as possible.
The ‘Central Team’ within CEA can be thought of as providing services to the projects that it incubates, and so the projects split the costs of ‘Central’ CEA according to a splitting algorithm. Historically, unrestricted donations to CEA have been split following an algorithm between the different projects that it incubates. In 2015, the use of unrestricted donations is likely to change somewhat, and is likely to include some fraction going to the different projects within CEA, as well as some used to support the creation of new projects, and potentially some to be assigned discretionarily by the trustees. If you were to donate to CEA unrestricted in 2014, approximately 11% of your donation would have gone to EA Outreach, with the remainder going to the Global Priorities Project, 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can.
Hi Ben,
Great questions as always. I’m going to hand a couple of these over to Kerry Vaughan, but I’ll take a shot at answering most of them. Again, I’m afraid my answers are too long to fit into a single comment, so I’ll answer questions one-by-one.
I agree that there is a need here. On p2 here I outline how our activities can be thought of as fitting into this pipeline. Some of them are earlier in this pipeline (making it easier for people to get up to speed on the ket ideas in EA at effectivealtruism.org), while others are later (the EA Fellows Programme). The main activities targeting the later stages of this pipeline are:
EA Global, which is designed to allow lots of people to meet face-to-face to make it easy for people to dive into the community.
EA Fellows Programme, which is intended to provide an opportunity for a handful of high-potential people who are interested in EA to make it a much bigger part of their life.
And finally EA Ventures which we hope will providing funding for more people to work full-time on EA projects.
In my experience becoming very engaged in EA often comes about as a result of a large amount of one-on-one interaction with people in the community, so we hope to build some tools into EffectiveAltruism.org to make this easier. I think that local chapters are likely to be a key part of how people become more involved, and I’m always interested to hear ways in which we might be able to help local chapters grow, so if you do have ideas let me know. I hear that you’re doing great work in this area already, so perhaps you have some suggestions?
Ultimately I think there is so much work to be done in the area you’ve mentioned that I would hope that there are people dedicated specifically to this aim in the future, and this is something that we are hoping to develop in CEA in time.
Thanks so much for answering in such detail!
Have you written up anything about the 1:1 tools for EA.org anywhere?
WRT chapter suggestions, I’m only just figuring things out myself and I’m afraid I don’t have any magic bullets! I’ll let you know if I come up with any though :)
Seconded. Also, what are the current ways in which proto-EAs can get one-on-one interaction, and what are the things that we can leverage to increase this?
These are more great questions Ben. Do you mind if I come back to you on them on Monday as I’m going to try and take today as a day off? Thanks in advance.
Sure, go ahead.