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See also Concrete project lists and the additional suggestions in the comments there.

Entering China would be awesome. So many people with money and no one’s donating it. It ranks dead freaking last on the World Giving Index. Which in a way is a good thing… it means lots of room to grow!

China’s domestic charities are usually operated and funded by the government (basically part of the government). And starting this year, the government has basically taken control of foreign NGO’s in China.

Often, rich Chinese elect to donate to foreign NGOs because they are more credible. Besides, being government-controlled, charities in China are not known for being reputable, prompting billionaire Jack Ma to famously quip “It’s harder to donate money to Chinese charities than to earn it.” The China Foundation Center was created a few years ago to promote transparency in the nonprofit sector.

India is also a good target. Like China, no one there trusts charities. Probably because they’re all scams? But there is an organization called Credibility Alliance that accredits the more transparent ones. I’m a big fan of Transparency International India. They do so much on a shoestring in the single most important issue in the country (corruption), and are the most credible/​transparent.

I was a bit confused by some of these. Posting questions/​comments here in case others have the same thoughts:

Earning-to-give buy-out

You’re currently earning to give, because you think that your donations are doing more good than your direct work would. It might be that we think that it would be more valuable if you did direct work. If so we could donate a proportion of the amount that you were donating to wherever you were donating it, and you would move into work.

This made more sense to me after I realised that we should probably assume the person doesn’t think CEA is a top donation target. Otherwise they would have an empirical disagreement about whether they should be doing direct work, and it’s not clear how the offer helps resolve that (though it’s obviously worth discussing).

Anti-Debates /​ Shark Tank-style career choice discussions /​ Research working groups

These are all things that might be good, but it’s not obvious how funding would be a bottleneck. Might be worth saying something about that?

For those with a quantitative PhD, it could involve applying for the Google Brain Residency program or AI safety fellowship at ASI.

Similarly I’m confused what the funding is meant to do in these cases.

I’d be keen to see more people take ideas that we think we already know, but haven’t ever been put down in writing, and write them up in a thorough and even-handed way; for example, why existential risk from anthropogenic causes is greater than the existential risk from natural causes

I think you were using this as an example of the type of work, rather than a specific request, but some readers might not know that there’s a paper forthcoming on precisely this topic (if you mean something different from that paper, I’m interested to know what!).

Can you address the unanswered question in the announcement thread regarding EA Ventures?

Additionally, is the money already raised for this? That was the major shortcoming with the previous iteration.

I agree that growing EA in China will be important, given China’s increasing wealth, clout, confidence, and global influence. If EA fails to reach a critical mass in China, its global impact will be handicapped in 2 to 4 decades. But, as Austen Forrester mentioned in another comment, the charity sector may not be the best beachhead for a Chinese EA movement.

Some other options: First, I imagine China’s government would be motivated to thinking hard about X-risks, particularly in AI and bioweapons—and they’d have the decisiveness, centralized control, and resources to really make a difference. If they can build 20,000 miles of high-speed rail in just one decade, they could probably make substantial progress on any challenge that catches the Politburo’s attention. Also, they tend to take a much longer-term perspective than Western ‘democracies’, planning fairly far into the mid to late 21st century. And of course if they don’t take AI X-risk seriously, all other AI safety work elsewhere may prove futile.

Second, China is very concerned about ‘soft power’—global influence through its perceived magnanimity. This is likely to happen through government do-gooding rather than from private charitable donations. But gov’t do-gooding could be nudged into more utilitarian directions with some influence from EA insights—e.g. China eliminating tropical diseases in areas of Africa where it’s already a neocolonialist resource-extraction power, or reducing global poverty or improving governance in countries that could become thriving markets for its exports.

Third, lab meat & animal welfare: China’s government knows that a big source of subjective well-being for people, and a contributor to ‘social stability’, is meat consumption. They consume more than half of all pork globally, and have a ‘strategic pork reserve’: https://​​www.cnbc.com/​​id/​​100795405. But they plan to reduce meat consumption by 50% for climate change reasons: https://​​www.theguardian.com/​​world/​​2016/​​jun/​​20/​​chinas-meat-consumption-climate-change This probably creates a concern for the gov’t: people love their pork, but if they’re told to simply stop eating it in the service of reducing global warming, they will be unhappy. The solution could be lab-grown meat. If China invested heavily in that technology, they could have all the climate-change benefits of reduced livestock farming, but people wouldn’t be resentful and unhappy about having to eat less meat. So that seems like a no-brainer to get the Chinese gov’t interested in lab meat.

Fourth, with rising affluence, young Chinese middle-class people are likely to have the kind of moral/​existential/​meaning-of-life crises that hit the US baby boomers in the 1960s. They may be looking for something genuinely meaningful to do with their lives beyond workaholism & consumerism. I think 80k hours could prove very effective in filling this gap, if it developed materials suited to the Chinese cultural, economic, and educational context.

I am interested in the Anti-Debates topic, specifically how the format would work. Is there a good place for me to follow up on that? I’d be willing to work with or even help administer any relevant groups or online forum. Thanks.

This advertisement for a Faculty Ethics Bowl on investment in the far future made me think of the anti-debate type concept. It’s not exactly that, but they say: “But this won’t be your ordinary run-of-the-mill debate. Ethics Bowl is very different from traditional debate formats. The teams are docked for using rhetoric, spin, aggression, and clever rationalization. Instead, each team is judged on the basis of active listening, flexibility, collaboration, and analytical rigor—essential ingredients for a meaningful discussion on difficult topics.”

See https://​​news.ucsc.edu/​​2019/​​05/​​faculty-ethics-bowl.html

Have you considered combining the “GiveWell for impact investing” idea with the Effective Altruism Funds idea and create an EA impact investing biz within your charity? You could hire staff to find the best impact investing opportunities and create a few funds for different risk tolerances. Theoretically, it could pay for itself (or make serious money for CEA if successful enough) with a modest management fee. I’m not sure if charities are allowed to grant to businesses, but I know they can operate their own businesses as long as it’s related to their mission.

FYI, the subject of unification versus diversity is one the EoST community debates with great frequency and vigour: bio mimicry may suggest that diversity is nature’s way of helping us survive …

However, for unity of purpose, some useful umbrellas are: Global Abundance; Education; Health; Eco Sustainability …

I’m an EA London member, wondering how to contact William or just EA London on the subjects of new organisations and also anti debating …

Please do have a look at Ecology of Systems Thinking—EoST on Facebook—where I act as (unpaid) moderator. Much of the thinking William talks of is present, and several projects we are trying to initiate are emerging via a very early stage “network corporate” …

I recently listed thirty odd projects that could be useful, given we trial them to some extent, and I’m sure there are students who would be interested to explore the ideas a little further for interesting and hopefully relevant project work.

I’m also trying to use Teal principles wherever possible, and we seek to continue including members many reckon are on the autistic spectrum.

It’s not very effective, yet, but pretty altruistic. Needless to say we are working on ways to get more effective.

I agree on the writing being scattered. Task 1) is: get the writing on a given topic into a single place. That still leaves task 2) get all those collated writings into a single place.

On 2) it strikes me it would be good if CEA compiled a list of EA-relevant resources. An alternative would be someone be someone creating an edited collection of the best recent EA work on a range of topics. Or if we have an academic EA global, then treating that like a normal academic conference and publishing the presented papers.