Yes I think the claim is that on the current margin and point in time movement building is under-resourced.
Of course this can’t hold forever but a) effective altruism is quite new b) it’s growing quite quickly c) most people still give to charities that help directly d) we have evidence from our past work that we are earning a good fundraising multiplier. (More on this: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/is/how_valuable_is_movement_growth/.)
If it were me and I were giving under £10,000, I would just find the best option wouldn’t split my donations. This also allows me to monitor what my donations are accomplishing more closely. However, I know many donors, even relatively small ones, do split and would be interested to hear their rationale.
Yes absolutely, the consideration would apply to anyone who had good reasons to think they would get many more people taking effective altruist actions.
However to my knowledge we are currently the group most focussed on movement building (though Global Priorities Project is mostly research so it doesn’t stand out there, and 80,000 Hours is something like 50⁄50).
Surprised to get downvotes on this. Is the thinking the GW is movement building through its excellent work, or I’m neglecting Leverage Research, or something else?
OK I’ll own up. I downvoted in a blip of initial irritation that you hadn’t answered my question, just talking more about CEA, making it look like your argument for funding movement-building might (to be direct) be primarily motivated by self-interest as one of GWWC’s salaried Directors. I’ve now retracted the downvote given I’ve clarified with this comment though it would still be good to see the argument applied to funding things other than further growing CEA.
Ah OK. I was trying to acknowledge that GWWC wasn’t unique in this regard and it would be totally understandable if someone bought the overall argument but then decided to give to another group doing similar work.
When I said ‘we’ I meant CEA as a whole, because as Ryan points out, we have a bunch of projects where the priority is movement building. Most other groups besides CS and CFAR have more of a research focus.
I would say that EA Outreach (by CEA), EA Ventures (by CEA), and Paul Christiano’s Certificates of Impact would be the main candidates other than GWWC.
Obviously I’m biased, but I think 80,000 Hours has one of the best track record of creating new members of the EA community, and we have scalable ways to continue doing that at the margin, so I think we should at least be a candidate for best EA movement building project. EAO and EAV might turn out to be even better, and there’s strong reasons in favor of them, but the evidence is much weaker so far.
Again this is just a list of CEA organizations and a pitch for continually growing funding. But I’ll go with that and ask you to expand on the track record: what are the best examples of someone trying to make the strongest case for and strongest case against it? When I’ve heard people make the case against, it’s that people counselled (at least in the northeast megalopolis and London) have been EA’s before.
Sorry, I was just responding to Ryan’s comment, not addressing your overall point.
You’re correct that some people we coach are already EAs, but the majority of coachees and especially the 25k monthly website readers either (i) know about EA but aren’t actively involved or especially well linked into the community (ii) don’t know much about EA. But many people we coach end up active in the community. There’s a clear mechanism for this: we make introductions, talk about EA with them, persuade them of the key ideas, and help them figure out how they can be more EA in their career.
I’d recommend reading through some of our last evaluation to see the types of career changes people made, many of which involve becoming “more EA”.
https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
Since hardly any recent graduates making career decisions already know about effective altruism, there’s huge room of expansion. And talking about career decisions is a great platform for discussing EA ideas, because it’s a very big decision but existing advice is so bad.
There’s also many people involved with effective altruism but who only donate income and don’t know how to apply effective altruism to their career. 80k provides motivation and information to people in this category, making the EA community more effective. Many of our past plan changers are in this category e.g. Peter Hurford.
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/member-stories/peter-hurford/
I think there’s a lot more that could be done to improve the career choices of existing EAs. Although our general frameworks are good, the next stage of our research is to investigate all the specific neglected paths EAs could follow e.g. policy careers, what to do within international development, various types of academic research and so on. This is becoming more and more pressing as earning to give looks less important on the margin.
Major arguments against:
You can always argue much of our movement building impact would have happened anyway, just later. That’s generally true, but it applies to every EA movement building organisation. Since 80k has been one of the main contributors to growing the community, 80k is causing a portion of the impact. Also speeding up growth is still highly valuable.
You may just think there’s some other project at the margin which offers much higher returns for getting new people involved, like investing in EA student groups.
And you could think it’s just very hard to improve an EAs career choices, so more research is also not helpful.
Looking at Charity Science, they do talk about spreading the word about evidence-based charities but reading between the lines they appear to be quite different from movement building/GWWC in that they focus on fundraising, with ‘spreading the word’ perhaps partly a more acceptable face to present to the fundraised-from. And I couldn’t quickly see any references to the effective altruism movement on their website, so I don’t think they’d be a good choice for someone following your argument for the absolute priority of movement-building.
If the problem is framed as ‘money isn’t going to effective charities’ then we look very similar.
But I agree that my impression (admitted from limited evidence) is that CS is more focused on moving money immediately relative to winning hearts and minds for the long term than GWWC or EAO.
I was just curious about the ratio and whether you had given thought to what the optimal level is, not asking for donation-splitting purposes. FWIW, I’ve heard the argument against splitting small donations. I do split them, but admit it’s probably not the best thing to do. I’m just indecisive and get fulfillment out of supporting both causes, so I’ve permitted myself this irrational behavior. My guess is there may be others like me, and maybe there are some who split donations because they think we should split our donations the way we would like overall donations to be split.
Hi zdgroff,
Yes I think the claim is that on the current margin and point in time movement building is under-resourced.
Of course this can’t hold forever but a) effective altruism is quite new b) it’s growing quite quickly c) most people still give to charities that help directly d) we have evidence from our past work that we are earning a good fundraising multiplier. (More on this: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/is/how_valuable_is_movement_growth/.)
If it were me and I were giving under £10,000, I would just find the best option wouldn’t split my donations. This also allows me to monitor what my donations are accomplishing more closely. However, I know many donors, even relatively small ones, do split and would be interested to hear their rationale.
Do you think this applies to anything or anyone besides CEA and the people involved in it?
Yes absolutely, the consideration would apply to anyone who had good reasons to think they would get many more people taking effective altruist actions.
However to my knowledge we are currently the group most focussed on movement building (though Global Priorities Project is mostly research so it doesn’t stand out there, and 80,000 Hours is something like 50⁄50).
Surprised to get downvotes on this. Is the thinking the GW is movement building through its excellent work, or I’m neglecting Leverage Research, or something else?
OK I’ll own up. I downvoted in a blip of initial irritation that you hadn’t answered my question, just talking more about CEA, making it look like your argument for funding movement-building might (to be direct) be primarily motivated by self-interest as one of GWWC’s salaried Directors. I’ve now retracted the downvote given I’ve clarified with this comment though it would still be good to see the argument applied to funding things other than further growing CEA.
Ah OK. I was trying to acknowledge that GWWC wasn’t unique in this regard and it would be totally understandable if someone bought the overall argument but then decided to give to another group doing similar work.
When I said ‘we’ I meant CEA as a whole, because as Ryan points out, we have a bunch of projects where the priority is movement building. Most other groups besides CS and CFAR have more of a research focus.
I would say that EA Outreach (by CEA), EA Ventures (by CEA), and Paul Christiano’s Certificates of Impact would be the main candidates other than GWWC.
Obviously I’m biased, but I think 80,000 Hours has one of the best track record of creating new members of the EA community, and we have scalable ways to continue doing that at the margin, so I think we should at least be a candidate for best EA movement building project. EAO and EAV might turn out to be even better, and there’s strong reasons in favor of them, but the evidence is much weaker so far.
Again this is just a list of CEA organizations and a pitch for continually growing funding. But I’ll go with that and ask you to expand on the track record: what are the best examples of someone trying to make the strongest case for and strongest case against it? When I’ve heard people make the case against, it’s that people counselled (at least in the northeast megalopolis and London) have been EA’s before.
Sorry, I was just responding to Ryan’s comment, not addressing your overall point.
You’re correct that some people we coach are already EAs, but the majority of coachees and especially the 25k monthly website readers either (i) know about EA but aren’t actively involved or especially well linked into the community (ii) don’t know much about EA. But many people we coach end up active in the community. There’s a clear mechanism for this: we make introductions, talk about EA with them, persuade them of the key ideas, and help them figure out how they can be more EA in their career. I’d recommend reading through some of our last evaluation to see the types of career changes people made, many of which involve becoming “more EA”. https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
Since hardly any recent graduates making career decisions already know about effective altruism, there’s huge room of expansion. And talking about career decisions is a great platform for discussing EA ideas, because it’s a very big decision but existing advice is so bad.
There’s also many people involved with effective altruism but who only donate income and don’t know how to apply effective altruism to their career. 80k provides motivation and information to people in this category, making the EA community more effective. Many of our past plan changers are in this category e.g. Peter Hurford. https://80000hours.org/career-guide/member-stories/peter-hurford/
One reflection of this is that we’ve catalysed the development of 8 new EA non-profits (5 of which have full-time staff) which likely wouldn’t have been created if 80k hadn’t existed. https://80000hours.org/2015/04/10-new-organisations-founded-due-to-80000-hours/
I think there’s a lot more that could be done to improve the career choices of existing EAs. Although our general frameworks are good, the next stage of our research is to investigate all the specific neglected paths EAs could follow e.g. policy careers, what to do within international development, various types of academic research and so on. This is becoming more and more pressing as earning to give looks less important on the margin.
Major arguments against:
You can always argue much of our movement building impact would have happened anyway, just later. That’s generally true, but it applies to every EA movement building organisation. Since 80k has been one of the main contributors to growing the community, 80k is causing a portion of the impact. Also speeding up growth is still highly valuable.
You may just think there’s some other project at the margin which offers much higher returns for getting new people involved, like investing in EA student groups.
And you could think it’s just very hard to improve an EAs career choices, so more research is also not helpful.
Disclosure: I work at 80,000 Hours.
Maybe Charity Science?
Ah of course, yes CS and GWWC are working on more or less the same problem (indeed we make grants to them for UK donors!).
Looking at Charity Science, they do talk about spreading the word about evidence-based charities but reading between the lines they appear to be quite different from movement building/GWWC in that they focus on fundraising, with ‘spreading the word’ perhaps partly a more acceptable face to present to the fundraised-from. And I couldn’t quickly see any references to the effective altruism movement on their website, so I don’t think they’d be a good choice for someone following your argument for the absolute priority of movement-building.
If the problem is framed as ‘money isn’t going to effective charities’ then we look very similar.
But I agree that my impression (admitted from limited evidence) is that CS is more focused on moving money immediately relative to winning hearts and minds for the long term than GWWC or EAO.
I was just curious about the ratio and whether you had given thought to what the optimal level is, not asking for donation-splitting purposes. FWIW, I’ve heard the argument against splitting small donations. I do split them, but admit it’s probably not the best thing to do. I’m just indecisive and get fulfillment out of supporting both causes, so I’ve permitted myself this irrational behavior. My guess is there may be others like me, and maybe there are some who split donations because they think we should split our donations the way we would like overall donations to be split.
Oh and sorry I missed part of the question—yes monthly is a great way to give. :)