Totally in favour of exploring this sapce. I’ve been paying attention to the experience of EAs who are from or who have lived in South American countries over the last couple years, and there seem some promising points of inquiry. I’ve written down what I think about opportunities in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile below.
Argentina
Just pointing out that after I heard about how easy it is to acquire visas to work in Argentina, I’m far from the only one that thought this would be a natural candidate for a low-cost EA hub. I notice in the spreadsheet you mentioned a major disadvantage might be economic/political instability in Argentina. I know things tanked there in the late ’90s, and I don’t know how things are know. Definitely worth researching more to develop a model of how problematic it may or may not be over the course of several years. I’m guessing with Argentina EA could send a contingent of, say, a dozen EAs willing to try living there as expats for a couple years, letting us know how it goes and getting better ‘inside view’ data on how likely catastrophic disruption to their lifestyles seems, and then reporting back to us. I’m aware the whole point of an EA hub is to prior determine a great location for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of EAs to lay roots there for at least several years on end. However, the potential advantages of Argentina, presuming there isn’t a political/economic crisis there, seem to me to great to write off. So, I think it’d be worth trialing with an experiment amongst ourselves. Alternatively, EA could develop an action plan such that if things get hairy in Argentina we can move back to other countries quickly, such that we haven’t laid down roots or sunk costs in Argentina that make it hard to leave.
Brazil
Diego Caleiro, Joao Fabiano, and Leo Arruda are three guys I know who are or were highly involved in IEFHR (Instituto por Eticas, Futuro de Humanidae y Racionalidae; English: Institute for Ethics, Future of Humanity and Rationality) in Brazil. The fact there is an EA org in Brazil might be a good way to get a foot in the door. Diego Caleiro is himself an open-minded guy who is in favour of independent researchers in effective altruism receiving funding So, I think he’d be open to EAs being hired by IEFHR as employees, and then getting paid to do whatever work they would normally do. This might be a way for several dozen EAs to work out of Brazil. Of course, the money would need to be doanted to IEFHR for this to happen, which might be a minor technicality. I don’t know if donations to IEFHR from outside Brazil would be tax-deductible in the country of origin, so one could do a CBA of the transaction costs of donating to a Brazilian org instead of, say, an American or British EA org, plus the costs of moving and getting settled in Brazil for a given individual, minus the reduction in living costs. If the sign came out highly positive, it might be worth people moving to Brazil to work at IEFHR.
I don’t actually know how open IEFHR would be to this sort of arrangement. At most, I would think they would want concessions from other EA orgs or the EA community-at-large to plug their preferred causes, e.g., far-future ethics and FHI-style cause prioritization. Generally, I imagine they’re pretty open to free cooperation with the rest of EA.
The bottleneck here might just be the bureaucracy of Brazil. I know the folks who run the Charity Science Foundation of Canada (CSFC), the legal parent organization of EA orgs Charity Science (CS), Charity Entrepreneurship (separate project/org run by the founding team of CS)and .impact. It’s legally incorporated as a foundation, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill registered charity. The upshot is that having the legal status of ‘charitable *foundation’ as opposed to just any ‘charity’ is that certain advantages are granted. Some of these might be ease of hiring foreigners for your organization. For example, I’m aware that, combined, the three organizations headed under CSFC have helped acquire Canadian visas for, and hired, 6 foreigners (3 Brits, 3 Americans).
I know the status of ‘charitable foundation’ exists in the United States and the U.K. as well. I don’t know if Brazil has a similar set-up. If IEFHR doesn’t have an equivalent/comparable status of ‘charitable foundation’ in Brazil, it might be exceedingly difficult for them to get foreigner-EAs approved as employees, no matter how much money is moved through IEFHR. I honestly don’t know enough about civil services in Brazil to comment. I’ll ask Leo about this.
Anyway, if you, Eric, yourself, want to get more info on the potential of using IEFHR as a lever to make an EA hub in Brazil, I recommend talking to Joao. IIRC, he’s currently a fellow at FHI working with Anders Samberg. You should be able to meet in-person, or Skype, with him pretty easily.
Chile
Brienne Yudkowsky spent a winter in Chile. The rationale was more or less that anywhere she wanted to live in the U.S. was sufficiently temperate and cloudy there was too-high a chance she’d be hit by seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and she wouldn’t tolerate that another year, so she spent a few months in the tropics. I recall Eliezer once mused on FB, other things being equal, and the Bay Area not having comparative advantages for EA work, for everyone to migrate to a country like Chile to form a new EA/rationalist hub. I generally gather Brienne had a positive experience in Chile. I don’t know more, but you can ask her yourself.
Hello guys. I believe I can shine a light about the state of things in Brazil.
First, about Brazil in general, it is a big tropical country (200m) with sunlight the whole year, very hot at north, cold at south (but not to the point of snowing). We are in a politically unstable moment due to enormous corruption scandals and political dissatisfaction involving both the government and the opposing parties (check the news, it is a mess), but in IMHO this won’t lead to any sort of dictatorship nor utterly compromise the economy although we are facing a depression that might last for a decade. Exchange rates are very favorable to foreign money (1 US dollar = 3.5 Brazilian real). We speak Portuguese, though I believe most upper-class and upper middle class are able to speak English. Brazil is a developing country with poverty issues (specially at the north and north-east), bad public education and tens of thousands NGOs (most of them probably not very effective though). I can’t give you a picture of the IT sector but I think it is probably growing well. We have reasonably advanced academic research in many areas including biotech but the political climate is unfavorable at the moment (some scientists are even moving to other countries). I live in São Paulo, a huge city (12m) with mild climate (10-30°C )and Brazil’s main commercial center, we have a small but growing EA community (I’d say about 8 core members plus 15 others) and meet up monthly. We are currently studying charity evaluation to check how effective are social projects in Brazil. There are also EAs in Belo Horizonte (talk to Celso Vieira about it) but I don’t think there are regular meetups there or anywhere else.
From my limited observation I think US work culture is much more result, efficiency, accountability oriented than ours. I believe this translates also in less support for EA, since people are much more prone to an emotional approach to charity. Also we are more to the left in the political spectrum on average, and people are much more prone to appeal to state intervention and social programs to alleviate poverty, they are also more open to marxist ideas and have a weaker culture of philanthropy.
About IERFH.org (Instituto Ética, Racionalidade e Futuro da Humanidade, Institute for Ethics, Rationality and Future of Humanity—Evan please correct it), I’m currently a director and we are not currently officially registered (mainly for bureaucratic reasons, although we could easily do it if it was important). We are mainly focusing on promoting rationality and transhumanism for the moment since the Brazilian EA movement is growing by itself. But of course we would be willing to help and to promote support for any EA projects.
Totally in favour of exploring this sapce. I’ve been paying attention to the experience of EAs who are from or who have lived in South American countries over the last couple years, and there seem some promising points of inquiry. I’ve written down what I think about opportunities in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile below.
Just pointing out that after I heard about how easy it is to acquire visas to work in Argentina, I’m far from the only one that thought this would be a natural candidate for a low-cost EA hub. I notice in the spreadsheet you mentioned a major disadvantage might be economic/political instability in Argentina. I know things tanked there in the late ’90s, and I don’t know how things are know. Definitely worth researching more to develop a model of how problematic it may or may not be over the course of several years. I’m guessing with Argentina EA could send a contingent of, say, a dozen EAs willing to try living there as expats for a couple years, letting us know how it goes and getting better ‘inside view’ data on how likely catastrophic disruption to their lifestyles seems, and then reporting back to us. I’m aware the whole point of an EA hub is to prior determine a great location for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of EAs to lay roots there for at least several years on end. However, the potential advantages of Argentina, presuming there isn’t a political/economic crisis there, seem to me to great to write off. So, I think it’d be worth trialing with an experiment amongst ourselves. Alternatively, EA could develop an action plan such that if things get hairy in Argentina we can move back to other countries quickly, such that we haven’t laid down roots or sunk costs in Argentina that make it hard to leave.
Diego Caleiro, Joao Fabiano, and Leo Arruda are three guys I know who are or were highly involved in IEFHR (Instituto por Eticas, Futuro de Humanidae y Racionalidae; English: Institute for Ethics, Future of Humanity and Rationality) in Brazil. The fact there is an EA org in Brazil might be a good way to get a foot in the door. Diego Caleiro is himself an open-minded guy who is in favour of independent researchers in effective altruism receiving funding So, I think he’d be open to EAs being hired by IEFHR as employees, and then getting paid to do whatever work they would normally do. This might be a way for several dozen EAs to work out of Brazil. Of course, the money would need to be doanted to IEFHR for this to happen, which might be a minor technicality. I don’t know if donations to IEFHR from outside Brazil would be tax-deductible in the country of origin, so one could do a CBA of the transaction costs of donating to a Brazilian org instead of, say, an American or British EA org, plus the costs of moving and getting settled in Brazil for a given individual, minus the reduction in living costs. If the sign came out highly positive, it might be worth people moving to Brazil to work at IEFHR.
I don’t actually know how open IEFHR would be to this sort of arrangement. At most, I would think they would want concessions from other EA orgs or the EA community-at-large to plug their preferred causes, e.g., far-future ethics and FHI-style cause prioritization. Generally, I imagine they’re pretty open to free cooperation with the rest of EA.
The bottleneck here might just be the bureaucracy of Brazil. I know the folks who run the Charity Science Foundation of Canada (CSFC), the legal parent organization of EA orgs Charity Science (CS), Charity Entrepreneurship (separate project/org run by the founding team of CS)and .impact. It’s legally incorporated as a foundation, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill registered charity. The upshot is that having the legal status of ‘charitable *foundation’ as opposed to just any ‘charity’ is that certain advantages are granted. Some of these might be ease of hiring foreigners for your organization. For example, I’m aware that, combined, the three organizations headed under CSFC have helped acquire Canadian visas for, and hired, 6 foreigners (3 Brits, 3 Americans).
I know the status of ‘charitable foundation’ exists in the United States and the U.K. as well. I don’t know if Brazil has a similar set-up. If IEFHR doesn’t have an equivalent/comparable status of ‘charitable foundation’ in Brazil, it might be exceedingly difficult for them to get foreigner-EAs approved as employees, no matter how much money is moved through IEFHR. I honestly don’t know enough about civil services in Brazil to comment. I’ll ask Leo about this.
Anyway, if you, Eric, yourself, want to get more info on the potential of using IEFHR as a lever to make an EA hub in Brazil, I recommend talking to Joao. IIRC, he’s currently a fellow at FHI working with Anders Samberg. You should be able to meet in-person, or Skype, with him pretty easily.
Brienne Yudkowsky spent a winter in Chile. The rationale was more or less that anywhere she wanted to live in the U.S. was sufficiently temperate and cloudy there was too-high a chance she’d be hit by seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and she wouldn’t tolerate that another year, so she spent a few months in the tropics. I recall Eliezer once mused on FB, other things being equal, and the Bay Area not having comparative advantages for EA work, for everyone to migrate to a country like Chile to form a new EA/rationalist hub. I generally gather Brienne had a positive experience in Chile. I don’t know more, but you can ask her yourself.
Hello guys. I believe I can shine a light about the state of things in Brazil.
First, about Brazil in general, it is a big tropical country (200m) with sunlight the whole year, very hot at north, cold at south (but not to the point of snowing). We are in a politically unstable moment due to enormous corruption scandals and political dissatisfaction involving both the government and the opposing parties (check the news, it is a mess), but in IMHO this won’t lead to any sort of dictatorship nor utterly compromise the economy although we are facing a depression that might last for a decade. Exchange rates are very favorable to foreign money (1 US dollar = 3.5 Brazilian real). We speak Portuguese, though I believe most upper-class and upper middle class are able to speak English. Brazil is a developing country with poverty issues (specially at the north and north-east), bad public education and tens of thousands NGOs (most of them probably not very effective though). I can’t give you a picture of the IT sector but I think it is probably growing well. We have reasonably advanced academic research in many areas including biotech but the political climate is unfavorable at the moment (some scientists are even moving to other countries). I live in São Paulo, a huge city (12m) with mild climate (10-30°C )and Brazil’s main commercial center, we have a small but growing EA community (I’d say about 8 core members plus 15 others) and meet up monthly. We are currently studying charity evaluation to check how effective are social projects in Brazil. There are also EAs in Belo Horizonte (talk to Celso Vieira about it) but I don’t think there are regular meetups there or anywhere else.
From my limited observation I think US work culture is much more result, efficiency, accountability oriented than ours. I believe this translates also in less support for EA, since people are much more prone to an emotional approach to charity. Also we are more to the left in the political spectrum on average, and people are much more prone to appeal to state intervention and social programs to alleviate poverty, they are also more open to marxist ideas and have a weaker culture of philanthropy.
About IERFH.org (Instituto Ética, Racionalidade e Futuro da Humanidade, Institute for Ethics, Rationality and Future of Humanity—Evan please correct it), I’m currently a director and we are not currently officially registered (mainly for bureaucratic reasons, although we could easily do it if it was important). We are mainly focusing on promoting rationality and transhumanism for the moment since the Brazilian EA movement is growing by itself. But of course we would be willing to help and to promote support for any EA projects.
Have added links to this to the relevant column in the spreadsheet. Thanks for the leads!