Thanks for writing this! Your journey seems unusual and interesting in comparison to other narratives I’ve heard.
I’m especially interested in your experience with volunteering and activism. I read a lot on this forum about giving money to other organizations which help and not very much about how we can help people directly. I’d love to hear more about what you think the impact of your volunteer activities and professional work are and where you think good ones are available to others.
Theory of constraints is a good one to use to think about this. What’s the objective, and how much is money or people or ideas or skills or whatever a constraint? How do we overcome that constraint? We’re looking for opportunities where money is a constraint, and there seem to be such good opportunities here that its worth devoting time to capturing money to send it in their direction.
I’ll set out a response by trying to paint a picture of where my thinking is with activism/volunteering and professional efforts. Ruthie, please let me know which bits might be useful/new ground worthy of a separate article / further exploration with numbers and I’ll put more thought into it before writing another post after checking what Ben Todd thinks about this stuff.
I’m currently agnostic re: which is going to pay off in the most qualys—earning to give or trying to help solve really difficult massive problems like medical research that have really really big payoffs. Comes down to how much you can influence the probability of changing the outcomes through giving vs. acting and what the difference in the outcomes are. The probability thing is relatively easy with marginal giving, but particularly difficult with acting on big complex high stakes problems. I’m convinced that giving is more effective than easy problems that can be solved with simple non-skilled volunteering interventions that are not leveraged—although there’s an avenue of research around ripple effects and social proofing that I’d be interested in seeing the results of to better inform this opinion.
Response 1: activism
I would be reluctant to engage in activism unless there are a particular set of circumstances that are ameanable to it—a good local example is the closure of Didcot power station, a coal-fired powerstation at the furthest point from the sea. Activists simply climbed up the chimney, meaning it couldn’t be used. This was low cost for the activist but imposed very high financial costs on the energy provider. The question is whether closing a powerstation is a worthy goal—being effective seems to tend to be more about supporting creative endeavours like medical treatments rather than putting an end to destructive endeavours like burning coal/ending colonialism, and so is perhaps less ameanable to activism
Activism is a technology that is costly in terms of people’s time, will, career capital and safety but not money. The technology can do three things:
1). Impose financial and reputational costs to power-holders making or sticking by certain decisions. This is usually either done by exposing things they’ve done through the media, or encouraging people to withdraw the support they need (e.g. strike action), or directly obstructing them (e.g. lying in the road in front of a nuclear weapons facility). There is a more subtle and harder version of non-violent direct action (see Gene Sharp for analysis of activism in this sense) that aims to help recognise those in power that their actions are wrong and to change through public debate (cynically, this often involves encouraging people to die without fighting back to make the point) e.g. Ghandi, Mandela, MLK. This is rarely done and seems to require a huge personal skill and degree of control over the movement, but it is quite successful done when it is.
2).Educate / raise awareness and contribute to public debate (e.g. a mass die-in where a cyclist has been run over by a lorry driver to try and make the point that we as a society should drive more carefully in the presence of cyclists)
3). To inspire action and pick up people along the way, teach/indoctrinate, encourage, and enlist in the cause / set of causes tackled by that activist community (often linked to a leftist ideology of some type like left-libertarianism, socialism, anarchism, panafricanism, or democracy).
It often has methods of movement control including sub-culture and norms, and an in-out identity framework. More interesting are where the movements are radically pro-democracy, and some of these have developed fantastic consensus style decision making structures or cultures of democracy (ANC, climate camp etc.) that have to some extent protected against some of the dangers of these kinds of movements (e.g. inclusive and tolerant liberation movement in Eritrea > worst place in the world to be a journalist with widespread institutional discrimination under the same leader over a long time period—Afwerki)
Response 2: Volunteering
I don’t think this helps much compared to other avenues, at least what I tried- in terms of the volunteering I did (work with the homeless, mentoring kids, community building project), there are a few potential sources of value:
1 - personal leadership: you’re able to encourage people in a positive moral direction and occasionally help them think through big decisions about what they want to do with their lives. (mentoring kids is good with this—potentially massive payoff if you mentor the next Norman Borlaug at an early age—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug)
2 - some benefits through relationships or the product of your volunteering. Some examples
making people laugh (1 minute of laughter for 2 hours of volunteering)
3 - facilitating better interactions at a community level, increasing a few people’s social capital.
-improved relationships between the client and their support network or family (lumpy improvements that come from developing relationships over long time periods. Working with the homeless/people with addiction is good for this)
help the client come to terms with themselves, encourage them to walk a better path, and bring a sense of meaning back into their lives (again, very lumpy and unpredictable, opportunities arising through very hard work over a long time period with a small number of people)
-signposting to services that could save or drastically improve their lives, or make their conditions more bearable (homeless work is good for this)
Working to support an autistic child was particularly ineffective, except that there were marginal improvements in the lives of their family for short periods.
Response 3: professional opportunities
There is a lot of slack in the public and NGO sectors. Particularly for people with good mathematical / modelling / statistical / management / political / people / conceptual skills. By coming to work in these environments with an attitude of effectiveness, you will be able to spot vaste swathes of areas of opportunity to improve things. I don’t know if this holds true for places that are the most effective e.g. AmF / SCI—a 10% increase in their efficiency means a lot more than a 40% increase in a typical charities efficiency, so that would be where to try it. The public sector is interesting, as there are policy spaces that are ameanable to change, but its very hard to spot where they are from the outside—even if you’ve read around and researched the area, so you have to go and see for yourself inside an institution / working in a policy area, and find out where all the dead bodies are, what’s been tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t. The issue with this is that your ability to influence has a direct relationship to your length of tenure / seniority.
Thanks for writing this! Your journey seems unusual and interesting in comparison to other narratives I’ve heard.
I’m especially interested in your experience with volunteering and activism. I read a lot on this forum about giving money to other organizations which help and not very much about how we can help people directly. I’d love to hear more about what you think the impact of your volunteer activities and professional work are and where you think good ones are available to others.
Theory of constraints is a good one to use to think about this. What’s the objective, and how much is money or people or ideas or skills or whatever a constraint? How do we overcome that constraint? We’re looking for opportunities where money is a constraint, and there seem to be such good opportunities here that its worth devoting time to capturing money to send it in their direction.
I’ll set out a response by trying to paint a picture of where my thinking is with activism/volunteering and professional efforts. Ruthie, please let me know which bits might be useful/new ground worthy of a separate article / further exploration with numbers and I’ll put more thought into it before writing another post after checking what Ben Todd thinks about this stuff.
I’m currently agnostic re: which is going to pay off in the most qualys—earning to give or trying to help solve really difficult massive problems like medical research that have really really big payoffs. Comes down to how much you can influence the probability of changing the outcomes through giving vs. acting and what the difference in the outcomes are. The probability thing is relatively easy with marginal giving, but particularly difficult with acting on big complex high stakes problems. I’m convinced that giving is more effective than easy problems that can be solved with simple non-skilled volunteering interventions that are not leveraged—although there’s an avenue of research around ripple effects and social proofing that I’d be interested in seeing the results of to better inform this opinion.
Response 1: activism
I would be reluctant to engage in activism unless there are a particular set of circumstances that are ameanable to it—a good local example is the closure of Didcot power station, a coal-fired powerstation at the furthest point from the sea. Activists simply climbed up the chimney, meaning it couldn’t be used. This was low cost for the activist but imposed very high financial costs on the energy provider. The question is whether closing a powerstation is a worthy goal—being effective seems to tend to be more about supporting creative endeavours like medical treatments rather than putting an end to destructive endeavours like burning coal/ending colonialism, and so is perhaps less ameanable to activism
Activism is a technology that is costly in terms of people’s time, will, career capital and safety but not money. The technology can do three things: 1). Impose financial and reputational costs to power-holders making or sticking by certain decisions. This is usually either done by exposing things they’ve done through the media, or encouraging people to withdraw the support they need (e.g. strike action), or directly obstructing them (e.g. lying in the road in front of a nuclear weapons facility). There is a more subtle and harder version of non-violent direct action (see Gene Sharp for analysis of activism in this sense) that aims to help recognise those in power that their actions are wrong and to change through public debate (cynically, this often involves encouraging people to die without fighting back to make the point) e.g. Ghandi, Mandela, MLK. This is rarely done and seems to require a huge personal skill and degree of control over the movement, but it is quite successful done when it is. 2).Educate / raise awareness and contribute to public debate (e.g. a mass die-in where a cyclist has been run over by a lorry driver to try and make the point that we as a society should drive more carefully in the presence of cyclists) 3). To inspire action and pick up people along the way, teach/indoctrinate, encourage, and enlist in the cause / set of causes tackled by that activist community (often linked to a leftist ideology of some type like left-libertarianism, socialism, anarchism, panafricanism, or democracy).
It often has methods of movement control including sub-culture and norms, and an in-out identity framework. More interesting are where the movements are radically pro-democracy, and some of these have developed fantastic consensus style decision making structures or cultures of democracy (ANC, climate camp etc.) that have to some extent protected against some of the dangers of these kinds of movements (e.g. inclusive and tolerant liberation movement in Eritrea > worst place in the world to be a journalist with widespread institutional discrimination under the same leader over a long time period—Afwerki)
Response 2: Volunteering I don’t think this helps much compared to other avenues, at least what I tried- in terms of the volunteering I did (work with the homeless, mentoring kids, community building project), there are a few potential sources of value: 1 - personal leadership: you’re able to encourage people in a positive moral direction and occasionally help them think through big decisions about what they want to do with their lives. (mentoring kids is good with this—potentially massive payoff if you mentor the next Norman Borlaug at an early age—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) 2 - some benefits through relationships or the product of your volunteering. Some examples
making people laugh (1 minute of laughter for 2 hours of volunteering) 3 - facilitating better interactions at a community level, increasing a few people’s social capital. -improved relationships between the client and their support network or family (lumpy improvements that come from developing relationships over long time periods. Working with the homeless/people with addiction is good for this)
help the client come to terms with themselves, encourage them to walk a better path, and bring a sense of meaning back into their lives (again, very lumpy and unpredictable, opportunities arising through very hard work over a long time period with a small number of people) -signposting to services that could save or drastically improve their lives, or make their conditions more bearable (homeless work is good for this)
Working to support an autistic child was particularly ineffective, except that there were marginal improvements in the lives of their family for short periods.
Response 3: professional opportunities There is a lot of slack in the public and NGO sectors. Particularly for people with good mathematical / modelling / statistical / management / political / people / conceptual skills. By coming to work in these environments with an attitude of effectiveness, you will be able to spot vaste swathes of areas of opportunity to improve things. I don’t know if this holds true for places that are the most effective e.g. AmF / SCI—a 10% increase in their efficiency means a lot more than a 40% increase in a typical charities efficiency, so that would be where to try it. The public sector is interesting, as there are policy spaces that are ameanable to change, but its very hard to spot where they are from the outside—even if you’ve read around and researched the area, so you have to go and see for yourself inside an institution / working in a policy area, and find out where all the dead bodies are, what’s been tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t. The issue with this is that your ability to influence has a direct relationship to your length of tenure / seniority.