There are two long term goals being pursued here by CEA, visible in the design of the site:
1. To increase donations to the EA funds from GWWC members by making the funds the “default” option” and thus increase the importance/power of CEA to guide donations through the funds. (The whole new site is setup to make the funds the default way to give, and to give prominence to the funds, other donation options or recording external donations are much less visible and hidden away in a way that seems deliberate)
2. To set defaults for donations through the site that nudge people towards the cause areas that CEA leadership largely favors and away from cause areas that GWWC was historically focused on. (By default—sliders on the new site allocate the majority of donations made from the pledge page to causes other than global poverty. And this resets as the default every time, with no option to change this or set persistent cause area preferences).
The site is designed with the interests of CEA and what it thinks is best in mind. The functionality for GWWC members is not the priority.
[Edited: I missed some corrections that Michelle made to my paragraph about the history of the Giving What We Can Trust. Corrected now.]
I spoke with Michelle Hutchinson (former executive director of Giving What We Can) about this. She writes, “When we first set up the GWWC Trust, we assumed it wouldn’t get much use (we set it up on an account designed for an annual turnover of £10k pa), and within a year it was getting up to £1mn. It turned out many GWWC members actually valued a low cost way of giving (in terms of decisions and of how easy it was to give) a bunch more than we expected. Making EA funds easy to use and prominent seems responding to that need.”
The Giving What We Can Trust was a separate legal entity to CEA and was legally restricted to only being able to direct funds within global poverty (since the Charities Commission prefers charities to have narrow focus areas and it wasn’t expected to get extremely wide take up). Given that it did seem to be widely used, and many members wanted to be able to donate to charities other than those tackling global poverty (particularly those joining after 2014 when the pledge became explicitly cause neutral) it became clear that it would be better to have a broader tool than the Giving What We Can Trust. EA Funds provides such a platform. I’d note that while CEA is the operator of EA Funds and does have final sign-off on grants for legal reasons, grant recommendations are made by each Fund’s respective management team, who are independent of CEA.
As to the breakdown of suggested donations, the default split I see on the EA Funds site is:
The default split is intended to provide an example that roughly reflects the donation patterns of both Giving What We Can members and the many other EAs who use the EA Funds. Of course users can adjust the sliders however they wish. You’re correct that the default does not reset based on users’ past donations.
Compare this split to the 2018 EA Survey analysis of EA’s responses to “this cause should be the top priority.”
If anything, the ways the EA Fund options are unrepresentative of users’ preferences are
in not having a fund for climate change, and
in under-promoting the Long-Term Future Fund and EA Meta Fund compared to how many EAs believe those areas should be the top priority.
To add to this, I re-analysed the EA Survey responses on cause areas, restricting to just Giving What We Can Members:
Obviously there’s a selection effect where the members who take the survey are more likely to be more involved with EA, but I think it’s still instructive that Giving What We Can members are a fairly broad church with respect to cause areas, and that it’s reasonable to offer different cause areas to them as a default setting on EA Funds.
Disclosure: I work at CEA, and am the person primarily responsible for both EA Funds and the technical implementation of the new Pledge Dashboard.
I don’t feel either of these reply’s address my points very well (as a member who signed the pledge prior to 2014).
As far as I can tell you accept the first point I made and don’t address it. Ok, me. I think the funds are fine you just haven’t done the work of showing they are better than other donation routes at all.
In regards to the second point you get very fixated on the default slider setting being representative of the most engaged members of the community. I don’t want yet more peer pressure to donate to what the most engaged members of think.(And the fact that you unilaterally changed the pledge still shouldn’t invalidate my reasons for signing it). But, even for post 2014 members it takes a lot of chutzpah to just set a default—at the very least even if you are recommending the EA funds start each bar at 0%. It is such a dark pattern when to donate to causes you by default get a recommendation
you didn’t choose then to find other choices you have to click a “back” arrow to a page you have never seen before, go past a statement saying we recommend these funds then manually unclick/click each choice then click forward again. It’s so telling when you do the sliders don’t start at some nudge level but at a level the user can choose!
It’s true that we try to provide a default option for giving, because so many users seem to find that helpful. (See Michelle’s comment above on the surprising-to-us amount of use the Giving What We Can Trust got.) When we did charity research and recommendations, those recommended charities were also a suggested default. As a project with the mission of inspiring giving to the world’s most effective organizations, we do think it’s appropriate to provide a recommendation or default, with the knowledge that members have pledged to donate to wherever they believe will most effectively help others. (I acknowledge that those of us who pledged before the Giving What We Can became cause-neutral pledged with a different wording that was then specific to global poverty.) We understand and expect that members will make their own choices about where to donate.
When I want to make a donation outside the EA Funds, I do so (for example at againstmalaria.com) and then report it on https://app.effectivealtruism.org/dashboard/pledge by clicking the “report a donation” button. This is the second of two buttons, and I agree that the “New EA Funds donation” button comes first and is more brightly colored, but I don’t think it’s any harder to select the “report a donation” button.
If I decide to donate using the EA Funds, I agree that the four funds are by far easier to donate to, and donating to other under organizations (under the “Choose Funds / Organizations” button as shown in the screenshot above) is more cumbersome. We want to provide this option for users who want to donate to multiple organizations in a single transaction, or who get a tax advantage by donating the Funds. But I agree that the setup of the EA Funds website is primarily designed around ease of donating to the four funds. If donating to individual organizations via the Funds is too cumbersome, I’d suggest donating to those organizations directly (as all members originally did).
As to the preset defaults on the sliders, I’m not sure of all the decisions that went into setting it up that way. My understanding of the intention is to demonstrate “You can move the sliders around and it will always add up to 100%” rather than trying to strongarm donors into donating in a way they don’t want to (although we did choose defaults that we thought would be broadly reflective of the values of the community). You’re right that currently allocations are not saved between subsequent donations, which seems like it would be an improvement to fix.
Again, we expect Giving What We Can members to make their donations based on their consciences and the basic parameters of the spirit of the Pledge. Thank you for explaining your view, but I think we might have a basic disagreement about whether it’s appropriate to suggest default options to members.
There are two long term goals being pursued here by CEA, visible in the design of the site:
1. To increase donations to the EA funds from GWWC members by making the funds the “default” option” and thus increase the importance/power of CEA to guide donations through the funds. (The whole new site is setup to make the funds the default way to give, and to give prominence to the funds, other donation options or recording external donations are much less visible and hidden away in a way that seems deliberate)
2. To set defaults for donations through the site that nudge people towards the cause areas that CEA leadership largely favors and away from cause areas that GWWC was historically focused on. (By default—sliders on the new site allocate the majority of donations made from the pledge page to causes other than global poverty. And this resets as the default every time, with no option to change this or set persistent cause area preferences).
The site is designed with the interests of CEA and what it thinks is best in mind. The functionality for GWWC members is not the priority.
[Edited: I missed some corrections that Michelle made to my paragraph about the history of the Giving What We Can Trust. Corrected now.]
I spoke with Michelle Hutchinson (former executive director of Giving What We Can) about this. She writes, “When we first set up the GWWC Trust, we assumed it wouldn’t get much use (we set it up on an account designed for an annual turnover of £10k pa), and within a year it was getting up to £1mn. It turned out many GWWC members actually valued a low cost way of giving (in terms of decisions and of how easy it was to give) a bunch more than we expected. Making EA funds easy to use and prominent seems responding to that need.”
The Giving What We Can Trust was a separate legal entity to CEA and was legally restricted to only being able to direct funds within global poverty (since the Charities Commission prefers charities to have narrow focus areas and it wasn’t expected to get extremely wide take up). Given that it did seem to be widely used, and many members wanted to be able to donate to charities other than those tackling global poverty (particularly those joining after 2014 when the pledge became explicitly cause neutral) it became clear that it would be better to have a broader tool than the Giving What We Can Trust. EA Funds provides such a platform. I’d note that while CEA is the operator of EA Funds and does have final sign-off on grants for legal reasons, grant recommendations are made by each Fund’s respective management team, who are independent of CEA.
As to the breakdown of suggested donations, the default split I see on the EA Funds site is:
The default split is intended to provide an example that roughly reflects the donation patterns of both Giving What We Can members and the many other EAs who use the EA Funds. Of course users can adjust the sliders however they wish. You’re correct that the default does not reset based on users’ past donations.
Compare this split to the 2018 EA Survey analysis of EA’s responses to “this cause should be the top priority.”
If anything, the ways the EA Fund options are unrepresentative of users’ preferences are
in not having a fund for climate change, and
in under-promoting the Long-Term Future Fund and EA Meta Fund compared to how many EAs believe those areas should be the top priority.
To add to this, I re-analysed the EA Survey responses on cause areas, restricting to just Giving What We Can Members:
Obviously there’s a selection effect where the members who take the survey are more likely to be more involved with EA, but I think it’s still instructive that Giving What We Can members are a fairly broad church with respect to cause areas, and that it’s reasonable to offer different cause areas to them as a default setting on EA Funds.
Disclosure: I work at CEA, and am the person primarily responsible for both EA Funds and the technical implementation of the new Pledge Dashboard.
I don’t feel either of these reply’s address my points very well (as a member who signed the pledge prior to 2014).
As far as I can tell you accept the first point I made and don’t address it. Ok, me. I think the funds are fine you just haven’t done the work of showing they are better than other donation routes at all.
In regards to the second point you get very fixated on the default slider setting being representative of the most engaged members of the community. I don’t want yet more peer pressure to donate to what the most engaged members of think.(And the fact that you unilaterally changed the pledge still shouldn’t invalidate my reasons for signing it). But, even for post 2014 members it takes a lot of chutzpah to just set a default—at the very least even if you are recommending the EA funds start each bar at 0%. It is such a dark pattern when to donate to causes you by default get a recommendation you didn’t choose then to find other choices you have to click a “back” arrow to a page you have never seen before, go past a statement saying we recommend these funds then manually unclick/click each choice then click forward again. It’s so telling when you do the sliders don’t start at some nudge level but at a level the user can choose!
Sorry, I’ll try again.
It’s true that we try to provide a default option for giving, because so many users seem to find that helpful. (See Michelle’s comment above on the surprising-to-us amount of use the Giving What We Can Trust got.) When we did charity research and recommendations, those recommended charities were also a suggested default. As a project with the mission of inspiring giving to the world’s most effective organizations, we do think it’s appropriate to provide a recommendation or default, with the knowledge that members have pledged to donate to wherever they believe will most effectively help others. (I acknowledge that those of us who pledged before the Giving What We Can became cause-neutral pledged with a different wording that was then specific to global poverty.) We understand and expect that members will make their own choices about where to donate.
When I want to make a donation outside the EA Funds, I do so (for example at againstmalaria.com) and then report it on https://app.effectivealtruism.org/dashboard/pledge by clicking the “report a donation” button. This is the second of two buttons, and I agree that the “New EA Funds donation” button comes first and is more brightly colored, but I don’t think it’s any harder to select the “report a donation” button.
If I decide to donate using the EA Funds, I agree that the four funds are by far easier to donate to, and donating to other under organizations (under the “Choose Funds / Organizations” button as shown in the screenshot above) is more cumbersome. We want to provide this option for users who want to donate to multiple organizations in a single transaction, or who get a tax advantage by donating the Funds. But I agree that the setup of the EA Funds website is primarily designed around ease of donating to the four funds. If donating to individual organizations via the Funds is too cumbersome, I’d suggest donating to those organizations directly (as all members originally did).
As to the preset defaults on the sliders, I’m not sure of all the decisions that went into setting it up that way. My understanding of the intention is to demonstrate “You can move the sliders around and it will always add up to 100%” rather than trying to strongarm donors into donating in a way they don’t want to (although we did choose defaults that we thought would be broadly reflective of the values of the community). You’re right that currently allocations are not saved between subsequent donations, which seems like it would be an improvement to fix.
Again, we expect Giving What We Can members to make their donations based on their consciences and the basic parameters of the spirit of the Pledge. Thank you for explaining your view, but I think we might have a basic disagreement about whether it’s appropriate to suggest default options to members.
If you’d like to talk more, you can always schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/julia-d-wise
Thanks, i do think we have a basic disagreement here about design patterns but i appreciate you taking the time to defend and explain your choices.