I guess you could align your proposals with European privacy laws, but it would never be truly private, especially in a small charity.
Your original claim was you prefer to donate to charities where you know that people take a low salary. The only way to know this is for this to be public.
It was not a claim but a statement of fact. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do. It’s just that when I hear a story like Markus’s, or when I have dinner with the management of Sea Shepherd Global and learn that they all sleep on volunteers’ couches while on an official mission because they wouldn’t want to use any donor money on a hotel room it inspires me, and I want to give. When I hear that a COO of the Centre for Effective Altruism earns $227,461, I may understand it intellectually, but it just doesn’t inspire me at all.
There will always be some information about salaries available. When charities have to hire people in many countries, they are required to state how much they will pay and people are always free to share how much they earn if they wish to do so. Information about donations seems to be more worthy of protection to some people. The view that donating publicly is in some way “unpure” because the people doing it are acting in their own interest, i.e. to look good is surprisingly common. I have heard this many times when people were talking about celebrities and what they donated.
It might also be an issue for Christians. Matthew 6:1–4 says:
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do…
I don’t hold these views, quite the contrary. I think one should talk about one’s own commitment in order to motivate others, and perhaps this simply isn’t an issue in EA charitys. I just wanted to mention it as something worth considering.
Yes, I agree about the inspiring vs non-inspiring feelings and how this has impact.
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody, but maybe that’s for another post haha
Thanks for taking the time to write these comments, really appreciate it!
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Let’s return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up “Atlantic Shepherd” as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherd’s behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherd’s cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!
I guess you could align your proposals with European privacy laws, but it would never be truly private, especially in a small charity.
It was not a claim but a statement of fact. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do. It’s just that when I hear a story like Markus’s, or when I have dinner with the management of Sea Shepherd Global and learn that they all sleep on volunteers’ couches while on an official mission because they wouldn’t want to use any donor money on a hotel room it inspires me, and I want to give. When I hear that a COO of the Centre for Effective Altruism earns $227,461, I may understand it intellectually, but it just doesn’t inspire me at all.
There will always be some information about salaries available. When charities have to hire people in many countries, they are required to state how much they will pay and people are always free to share how much they earn if they wish to do so. Information about donations seems to be more worthy of protection to some people. The view that donating publicly is in some way “unpure” because the people doing it are acting in their own interest, i.e. to look good is surprisingly common. I have heard this many times when people were talking about celebrities and what they donated.
It might also be an issue for Christians. Matthew 6:1–4 says:
I don’t hold these views, quite the contrary. I think one should talk about one’s own commitment in order to motivate others, and perhaps this simply isn’t an issue in EA charitys. I just wanted to mention it as something worth considering.
Yes, I agree about the inspiring vs non-inspiring feelings and how this has impact.
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody, but maybe that’s for another post haha
Thanks for taking the time to write these comments, really appreciate it!
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Let’s return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up “Atlantic Shepherd” as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherd’s behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherd’s cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
Agree on this 100%. I originally wanted to bake in that line of reasoning in this article but I felt it was already controversial enough as it is hahaha. This is another example of everybody claiming marginal impact adding up to 10x of the imapct we actually had.
Happy to write a post about this together at some point!