Non-English language effective altruism (including a list of venues)
The most up to date versions of the list here can be found on the Effective Altruism Hub’s links page, with a community-editable version cross-posted to the EA wiki.
Does anyone have thoughts or reports on non-English language effective altruism? Is it a promising area of outreach, and if so in what languages, and through what methods? In what countries and languages is it most active? (My impression is German, especially in Switzerland, and following that Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish. It’s interesting that north European and historically protestant countries are particularly strong; I believe these have especially strong ethoses of private charity, in particular the UK—think the Victorian culture of charity.)
A few things worth noting:
The book The Life You Can Save has been widely translated.
Matt Wright and I got a basic version of the Giving What We Can site translated into several languages.
Thanks to Pablo Stafforini, Spanish now has http://altruismoeficaz.net
The list and map of EA groups shows the spread of these; some are much larger or more active than others (filtering to come if I, or someone else, get the time).
Some have advocated ‘spray and pay’ EA marketing.
There is a .impact project page for non-English outreach.
Here’s a list of non-English language EA venues which I just compiled for the Effective Altruism Hub’s links page, and cross-posted this to the EA wiki. It currently consists entirely of the general EA Facebook groups for linguistic communities, but additions are welcome.
German EA group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1575844375976037/
Italian EA group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/795131383874787/
Hebrew EA group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/786744044734860/?ref=browser
Bulgarian EA group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1375044486151027/?ref=browser
Czech EA group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/329548610588797/?ref=browser
Dutch: https://www.facebook.com/groups/262932060523750/?ref=browser
French: https://www.facebook.com/groups/altruistes.efficaces/?ref=browser
Russian: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1568058766787596/?ref=browser
Indian languages: https://www.facebook.com/groups/415216661980478/
Spanish: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1605543996325148/
If you know anyone potentially interested in EA who speaks these languages, do point or invite them to these groups. To invite someone to a group, join it and then use the box at the top right of it.
According to World Giving Index (p. 11) the English-speaking countries have a much stronger tradition of private charity than Northern European countries such as Germany or the Scandinavian countries.
My guess is that in countries with a high tax ratio and a comprehensive welfare state, there is less private charity—partly because the citizens simply have less post-tax earnings, and partly because they think there is less need for it since their governments are better at solving social problems. For instance, Norway and Sweden give away a higher share of Gross National Income in development aid than any other country (more than 1 %).
At the same time, my own country, Sweden, is the most rationalist country in the world, according to World Values Survey. Also, Sweden has a very generous refugee politics and receives by far the most asylum seekers in the OECD, which indicates a high level of altruism. This means that Effective Altruism should have a huge potential in Sweden.
A hypothesis I have is that one reason why Effective Altruism hasn’t taken off in Sweden (besides the fact that EA generally is strongest in the English-speaking world) is the said comparatively weak tradition of charitable giving in Sweden. Therefore, I think it might be wise to emphasize other aspects of the EA movement when trying to sell it in Sweden. The same goes for other similar countries.
I recently wrote an introduction to the EA movement in Swedish on my blog and hope to be able to publish on the same topic in mainstream newspapers later on.
My gut feeling is that a strong tradition (in Sweden, at least) of aversion to the methodological individualism at the core of the EA movement is a major factor behind this.
Methodological individualism is hard (if not outright impossible) to reconcile with the historical materialism that is Karl Marx’s theory of history. The latter seems to be strongly held in many Scandinavian minds.
In short, I think many of the Swedes who care about alleviating poverty will think that the proper way to go about it is through changing the ownership of the means of production, not through increasing cost-effective philanthropy from the affluent.
Interesting stuff.
The UK gives an unusually high amount in government development aid too. And it does so quite effectively. It’s almost enough to make me patriotic.
I’d encourage you to link your intro from the EA wiki.
I’m skeptical of this as an explanation, for basically two reasons:
The anglo-saxon world is generally the most generous, and also has a relatively low level of social problems. Areas with many problems (ex-communist countries, south america, africa) are not particularly generous. source
Much charitable giving goes to things that don’t really address social problems anyway!
I don’t think this implication works either. Perhaps you could say admitting refugees is altruistic on a national scale, because the immigrants benefit but bring increased violent crime, especially rape, imposing a cost on the ‘giver’. But what we’re looking for is individual altruism, which we can’t really infer from collective altruism: my self-interest is not the same as our collective self-interest, and there is little reason to think it is in my self-interest to vote for our collective self interest. Additionally, if you thought that immigration was a net good thing for the receiving country, accepting immigrants becomes self-interested rather than altruistic on a national level.
These countries also have better education systems than the average European countries, see for instance here (I’m surprised Sweden is not in that global top20 but it’s probably close). Edit: Norway is 21, Sweden 24. My guess is that this is more relevant. In fact, I’d be hesitant to even bet on a correlation between a country’s tradition of charity and proneness to EA once you control for things like GDP. EAs tend to not be very influenced by tradition, plus quite a few EAs I know recount that they weren’t involved in traditional do-good-activities at all before they encountered EA. Maybe things change once EA becomes more mainstream, but especially in the early phase where EA is something novel, I would not expect there to be much of a correlation.
Good point. And North European countries are relatively rich, have a happy population, and a language related to English (English is relatively easy to learn). (warning: correlation, not necessarily causation).
I think the value of non-English EA groups is not their language, but mostly their location. In-person social support and discussion is not replaceable by any type of online communication even using the most modern technology.
It is worth noting that widely discussed EA actions and choices often have to be ‘translated’ to the job market and education system of the specific countries.
What do you think is the most important document to translate in terms of explaining basic ideas of the movement to people who speak other languages? I’m inclined to think it would be Effective Altruism Handbook. How much would it cost to pay a professional translator to translate a document like that into a language like Spanish? An EA organization could do it for one language to see the number of monthly views that the translation gets. Based on that, it could decide whether it would be worth translating the document into additional languages.
My partner is part of the Polish EA group. More content is forthcoming.
A comment from Pablo:
“For the last couple of months, I have been considering seriously the possibility of switching my energies to doing outreach in the Spanish-speaking world. Currently there is no organized Spanish-speaking EA community, and until I created them a couple of weeks ago, there were no Facebook EA groups or pages, no Wikipedia article about EA, and no EA websites of any kind. Yet Spanish is the second most widely spoken language measured by number of native speakers, and the third most widely spoken language measured by number of fluent speakers. Spanish-speaking EA meme spreading thus seems to be both a very uncrowded and a very important cause.
“However, this analysis may be too simplistic. In particular, I worry that English may have acquired such a dominant position in elite circles globally as to offset any advantages that non-English languages may appear to have when assessed strictly in terms of quantity of speakers. One may argue, for instance, that the group of people whose native language isn’t English will likely speak English as a second language if they are at all receptive to the EA meme. There are also considerations related to the link between the geographical region in which a language is spoken and the level of development of countries in that region: people in developing countries will (sadly) on average have lower incomes, lower levels of educational attainment, and in general a lower score on most metrics that correlate with power to change the world for the better.”
FB thread: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/823288501060842/
Good job guys!