Once the FTX debacle gets resolved, and the PR blowback dies down, it might be useful for EAs to try to nudge Bezos to broaden his cause areas—on the principle that tackling climate change may be moderately important in scope and severity, but is far from neglected, and seems rather intractable politically.
It would be great to see some of the Amazon money going to higher-impact cause areas.
Or maybe focus on broadening globally (rather than mainly focusing on US leaders/celebrities and US-focused interventions like this Seattle homeless shelter)
Of course there will be some political and consumer pressure to ‘give at home’ in the country they are based in etc. But that non-rationalist argument could be countered by other non/semi-rationalist arguments like ‘most products are manufactured outside the US’, and ‘raw materials come from the globe’, and ‘poor countries tend to suffer the most from climate change’.
I just want to highlight that Geoffrey’s comment is basically a truism within EA, yet somehow has 9 karma with 11 votes, and only 2 agreement karma with 7 votes at the time I’m coming across it. So a nontrivial fraction of EA Forum users voting on it disagreed with it, despite it essentially being a truism.
I didn’t vote in any way on the comment, but it’s plausible you could have different strategic choices. You could try to shift a large donor to cause areas outside of existing preferences to more effective ones (as is the EA “truism”) or you could try to discover and endorse the most effective charities within existing preferences. The latter seems to be discussed by Ozzie Gooen in this thread.
Perhaps disagree votes were along the lines that they did not think lobbying for different cause areas would work with Bezos.
Good points. Still, I feel like the phrase “it might be useful for EAs to try to nudge” is so qualified as to be hard for readers to disagree with offhand. It’s not like he said “it will definitely be useful for EAs to invest a lot of effort into trying to convince Bezos to grant to some drastically different causes.”
Unless someone spends a significant amount of time researching this question to be confident that trying to nudge Bezos to give in different cause areas is a bad idea, it seems hard to know if that’s a bad idea, and thus hard to “disagree-karma” a comment that merely suggests it might be useful.
Once the FTX debacle gets resolved, and the PR blowback dies down, it might be useful for EAs to try to nudge Bezos to broaden his cause areas—on the principle that tackling climate change may be moderately important in scope and severity, but is far from neglected, and seems rather intractable politically.
It would be great to see some of the Amazon money going to higher-impact cause areas.
Also, we might be able to help make spending more effective even within these areas.
Or maybe focus on broadening globally (rather than mainly focusing on US leaders/celebrities and US-focused interventions like this Seattle homeless shelter)
Of course there will be some political and consumer pressure to ‘give at home’ in the country they are based in etc. But that non-rationalist argument could be countered by other non/semi-rationalist arguments like ‘most products are manufactured outside the US’, and ‘raw materials come from the globe’, and ‘poor countries tend to suffer the most from climate change’.
I just want to highlight that Geoffrey’s comment is basically a truism within EA, yet somehow has 9 karma with 11 votes, and only 2 agreement karma with 7 votes at the time I’m coming across it. So a nontrivial fraction of EA Forum users voting on it disagreed with it, despite it essentially being a truism.
This seems unideal to me. It also seems to be happening more in my experience, which lead me to ask the question: Has karma/agreement voting behavior on the Forum changed?
I didn’t vote in any way on the comment, but it’s plausible you could have different strategic choices. You could try to shift a large donor to cause areas outside of existing preferences to more effective ones (as is the EA “truism”) or you could try to discover and endorse the most effective charities within existing preferences. The latter seems to be discussed by Ozzie Gooen in this thread.
Perhaps disagree votes were along the lines that they did not think lobbying for different cause areas would work with Bezos.
Good points. Still, I feel like the phrase “it might be useful for EAs to try to nudge” is so qualified as to be hard for readers to disagree with offhand. It’s not like he said “it will definitely be useful for EAs to invest a lot of effort into trying to convince Bezos to grant to some drastically different causes.”
Unless someone spends a significant amount of time researching this question to be confident that trying to nudge Bezos to give in different cause areas is a bad idea, it seems hard to know if that’s a bad idea, and thus hard to “disagree-karma” a comment that merely suggests it might be useful.
I think that might not even be necessary for some time tbh (see this comment)