The average American gives 2-3% of their earnings to charity, see what giving 1% can do!
It seems a bit strange to put a lot of effort into trying to get people to commit to a level of giving that is far lower than the average person would have anyway. With GWWC we were pushing or people to donate significantly more.
Hi guys—Jack here (Executive Director at OFTW). Sabrina makes some great points here. I would add as well that we need to be mindful of how much the average American is giving to effective charities. You’re right, @Larks, that persuading people to give 1% to effective charities would be odd, if the average person would give 3% to them—but, of course, the average American gives ~0% to effective charities! We have introduced some checkout questions to give us an indication of this ‘counterfactual’ argument (‘how much do you already give (if anything) to GiveWell’s charities?’) and also have some students at Yale researching typical giving trends for graduates to give us a proxy control group.
Thanks for writing this! I and an EA community builder I know found it interesting and helpful.
I’m pleased you have a ‘counterarguments’ section, though I think there are some counterarguments missing:
OFTW groups may crowd out GWWC groups. You mention the anchoring effect on 1%, but there’s also the danger of anchoring on a particular cause area. OFTW is about ending extreme poverty, whereas GWWC is about improving the lives of others (much broader)
OFTW groups may crowd out EA groups. If there’s a OFTW group at a university, the EA group may have to compete, even if the groups are officially collaborating. In any case, they groups will be competing for attention of the altruistically motivated people at the university
Because OFTW isn’t cause neutral, it might not be a great introduction to EA. For some people, having lots of exposure to OFTW might even make them less receptive to EA, because of anchoring on a specific cause. As you say “Since it is a cause-specific organization working to alleviate extreme global poverty, that essentially erases EA’s central work of evaluating which causes are the most important.” I agree with you that trying to impartially work out which cause is best to work on is core to EA
-OFTW outreach could be so broad and shallow that it doesn’t actually select that strongly for future dedicated EAs. In a comment below, Jack says “OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling)”. Of course, people who take that pledge will be more likely to become dedicated EAs than the average student, but there are many other ways to select at that level
Hi Alex—these are very good points and largely correct, I think—thanks for contributing them. I’ve added some thoughts and mitigations below:
Yes, we definitely do anchor around poverty. I think this can be good ‘scaffolding’ to come into the movement; but sometimes it will anchor people there. It is worth noting, though, that global health and poverty is consistently the most popular cause area in the EA survey, so there are clearly other factors anchoring to this cause area—it’s hard to say how much OFTW counterfactually increases this effect (and whether it counterfactually stops people from progressing beyond global health and poverty). In terms of mitigation for competing with GWWC—we are in close touch with them and both sides are working hard to foster collaboration and avoid competition.
On point 2, our experience so far is that OFTW and EA groups actually coexist very well. I think (without any systematic evidence) some of this may because a lot of EA groups don’t prioritise donations, preferring to focus on things like career advice, and so OFTW chapters can sort of ‘own’ the donation space; sometimes, though, they just find a way to work alongside each other. I’m not sure it follows that we have to ‘compete for altruistically motivated people’ - in fact, I don’t really see any reason why someone couldn’t take the OFTW pledge and then carry on engaging with EA uninterrupted—but I agree that we could compete on this front. A lot seems to depend on OFTW’s approach/message/ask. Maybe a virtue of OFTW is that we really only need people’s attention for a short period to get them to take one action—so we aren’t competing for their sustained attention, in a way that would crowd out EA programming. Indeed, we can actually be a funnel to get them to pay attention to this content—see for example our recent webinar with Toby Ord on x-risk, which attracted ~200 people, many of whom came from OFTW chapters.
Yes, fair. I’d just bear in mind, though, how many EAs were introduced via global health and poverty (again, see the EA survey for how many people came in via poverty-focussed writing from Peter Singer or Will MacAskill) and did ultimately develop/broaden/change their thinking, so again I’m not sure how much counterfactual anchoring there is from OFTW.
I haven’t watched this yet but will shortly—from your brief precis above, this criticism looks like it might apply equally to any pledge/donation org that support health and poverty causes (GWWC, Founder’s Pledge, GiveWell, EA Funds etc.).
This is absolutely true—I actually think it’s a strength of OFTW, as it happens. The reason I don’t worry overly about anchoring people at 1%/distracting from other cause areas is that I actually think most OFTW pledgers were never good candidates to be super engaged with EA in the first place—but those that are end up getting into EA anyway, and we can be a useful first point of contact to make that happen. To be fully transparent, this is basically all from anecdata, but I have met very, very few OFTW pledgers who I (subjectively) think were ever likely to be a GWWC pledger/dedicate their career to AI research. In a perfect world, we would hoover up all the ‘well I might give 1% but I really wouldn’t give 10%’ crowd and not stop any of the ‘I might give 10%/change my career’ crowd. One project to support this is to give more GWWC and other EA content to our members, so that those who were predisposed to give 10% end up doing it anyway (which has happened for a subset of OFTW members in the past, certainly).
This is a really interesting topic, so thanks for writing this post! Some thoughts:
You’ve basically identified 2 outcomes of an OFTW group:
The direct impact of the donations
Helping to grow EA groups
I think the first point is not that controversial. I think there’s value in OFTW chapters existing where otherwise they wouldn’t have, even in the absence of EA groups—for example, if someone is convinced by OFTW argumetns but not EA ones. I think OFTW is independent of the EA movement in a way that mitigates this risk—but I’m pretty uncertain about this, and it would be interesting to see data on it.
I think the second outcome is more difficult to do. You have some discussion of ways to mitigate this risk, namely:
OFTW chapter leaders should be knowledgeable about EA and/or direct students to EAs who can offer a stronger introduction to the movement. Given recent discussions regarding the importance of first impressions in EA, OFTW chapters need to be careful about how they portray EA and effective giving. We want to avoid spreading common misconceptions about EA like “EA’s main focus is ending global poverty” or “EA doesn’t care about social justice and systemic change.”
However, even if the founder of the OFTW chapter are knowledgeable EAs, it may be that their successors are not. I don’t see how this process might be controlled in a predictable way. So this means that perhaps a few years after the OFTW chapter is started, the relationship between the EA group & the OFTW one are not as strong.
This could increase the risk of misleading first impressions. For example, the meme that EA is largely focused on ETG is spread more, which appears to have taken a good amount of time to correct, and the meme is still around today. There may be a risk that such memes are brought back which would turn some people off EA.
Questions that might resolve some of the above:
How many OFTW chapters exist alongside EA groups? What is their relationship like—how closely do they collaborate?
If there are many OFTW chapters without EA groups, we might want to consider what the impression that people at these universities have of EA, and how accurate it is.
What are current OFTW organisers’ knowledge of EA and engagement with the EA community?
I think it would be preferable to have OFTW organisers who are familiar with EA arguments & frameworks, because they might be more likely to think about the trade-offs between the two groups.
~12 - this includes some where the EA group explicitly runs the OFTW content, and some where the two just peacefully coexist. Collaboration is broadly positive but not consistent in method or depth.
Hard to say—I would guess that around 1⁄3 know about nothing except effective giving, 1⁄3 know a bit about EA but are mainly focussed on effective giving and 1⁄3 are very knowledgeable about EA/fully committed EAs themselves.
To pick up two of your risks above:
OFTW chapters are certainly vulnerable to changes in leadership, but this point would seem to apply just as strongly to EA groups on campuses, I think? So I’m not sure that we should expect leadership turnover to have any more or less of a negative effect on OFTW-EA relations that it does on EA-student relations.
In fairness, we don’t teach people those memes, or ever reference them in any of our materials or training (at least not in any of the materials or training that I have reviewed/contributed to). OFTW never mentions ETG and in general we don’t really make claims about what EA cares about or focusses on. You helped us with this page, I recall, which is probably the best summary of how we talk about EA—and it reads to me as very neutral in its phrasing: https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/
Thanks for the information Jack! To clarify my points a little:
OFTW chapters are certainly vulnerable to changes in leadership, but this point would seem to apply just as strongly to EA groups on campuses, I think? So I’m not sure that we should expect leadership turnover to have any more or less of a negative effect on OFTW-EA relations that it does on EA-student relations.
Agreed that EA student groups (and most student groups) are vulnerable to this. I think my prior here is that EA groups would be more likely to to collaborate/work with the OFTW group because there are more obvious reasons to (the benefits Sabrina mentioned in the most)
However it’s very possible (and maybe even fairly likely) that and smaller EA groups perhaps shrinks or stops existing due to leadership handover reasons, while the OFTW group doesn’t. I don’t think this would be a very bad outcome, as I mentioned above I think
In fairness, we don’t teach people those memes, or ever reference them in any of our materials or training (at least not in any of the materials or training that I have reviewed/contributed to). OFTW never mentions ETG and in general we don’t really make claims about what EA cares about or focusses on.
I think I was unclear earlier, and I should have added more nuance. I don’t think this is a direct risk, or that OFTW materials imply this, but rather that these are the associations people will make to EA if that’s the only perspective they see or know that most about. I think this is probably more true if OFTW chapters become very prevalent across US universities, much more so than EA chapters.
Here are some rough thoughts or questions of mine for you or for others in the OFTW team:
Is there any data already for what % of OFTW pledgers follow through on their pledges?
Is One For The World thinking of creating a page like Giving What We Can’s that contains the number of pledgers, their names, and the month/year they pledged? I think this could be a good growth hack—people might want the social incentive to pledge and also put their name on the list. The page could also include what chapter each pledger is from.
How can people “resign” from their OFTW pledges if they wanted to? Would they just do it without saying so? I ask this because some people who first make an OFTW pledge might then change their cause prioritization to animal welfare or longtermism (i.e. if they get more engaged in EA), and they may want to stop donating to global health charities.
Is OFTW thinking of expanding to a 1% pledge that is not cause-specific, or one that is for animal welfare or longtermist non-profits in the future? If not, is there anyone interested in creating these types of pledges in the future (whether as a new organization or under GWWC)? Personally I find the GWWC 10% pledge hard to commit to currently, which is why I haven’t taken it. I would be more willing to pledge 1% to effective charities that is not cause-specific. If OFTW had a pledge that wasn’t cause-specific, I would likely take it!
Hi Brian—Jack here (ED at OFTW). Thanks for your thoughtful questions and it looks like Sabrina ha answered them really well :-)
Some quick additions:
as Sabrina says, activation is moderate (~2/3). However, our models suggest that we would still provide decent ROI at even 50% activation rates. One advantage that we have is that we process all our donations ourselves and so actually know our activation and retention rates, where a lot of pledge orgs have to estimate them. My reading of our data is that most orgs are extremely optimistic in their assumptions around this.
definitely open to this and some individual chapters have done it already. It’s on the roadmap!
this is where processing our donations is so helpful—we see in real time how donors behave, and so know if people stop their donations. We do ask people who cancel if they have changed cause area but we only get the usual response rates to cancellation surveys (~1%)
we do not currently plan to expand our cause areas, for few reasons. First, and for transparency, GiveWell is one of our main funders and that influences this decision. Second, our founders were very focussed on global health and poverty and so I would want their input before any change. But third, and most importantly—OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling). When you are recruiting people with this level of engagement, message clarity is essential. Using global health and poverty, which is both the most popular EA cause area and the simplest ‘sell’ to someone who isn’t part of EA yet, makes a lot of sense to me in this context. All that being said, this may well evolve over time!
It might be useful context to some of the comments below to highlight this page on our resource for our volunteers, which encapsulates for me how we talk about EA within OFTW (and how we signpost people to find out more): https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/ (props to Vaidehi for helping us revise this and make it better this summer)
It seems a bit strange to put a lot of effort into trying to get people to commit to a level of giving that is far lower than the average person would have anyway. With GWWC we were pushing or people to donate significantly more.
Hi guys—Jack here (Executive Director at OFTW). Sabrina makes some great points here. I would add as well that we need to be mindful of how much the average American is giving to effective charities. You’re right, @Larks, that persuading people to give 1% to effective charities would be odd, if the average person would give 3% to them—but, of course, the average American gives ~0% to effective charities! We have introduced some checkout questions to give us an indication of this ‘counterfactual’ argument (‘how much do you already give (if anything) to GiveWell’s charities?’) and also have some students at Yale researching typical giving trends for graduates to give us a proxy control group.
Thanks for writing this! I and an EA community builder I know found it interesting and helpful.
I’m pleased you have a ‘counterarguments’ section, though I think there are some counterarguments missing:
OFTW groups may crowd out GWWC groups. You mention the anchoring effect on 1%, but there’s also the danger of anchoring on a particular cause area. OFTW is about ending extreme poverty, whereas GWWC is about improving the lives of others (much broader)
OFTW groups may crowd out EA groups. If there’s a OFTW group at a university, the EA group may have to compete, even if the groups are officially collaborating. In any case, they groups will be competing for attention of the altruistically motivated people at the university
Because OFTW isn’t cause neutral, it might not be a great introduction to EA. For some people, having lots of exposure to OFTW might even make them less receptive to EA, because of anchoring on a specific cause. As you say “Since it is a cause-specific organization working to alleviate extreme global poverty, that essentially erases EA’s central work of evaluating which causes are the most important.” I agree with you that trying to impartially work out which cause is best to work on is core to EA
OFTW’s direct effects (donations to end extreme poverty) may not be as uncontroversially good as they seem. See this talk by Hilary Greaves from the Student Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fySZIYi2goY&ab_channel=CentreforEffectiveAltruism
-OFTW outreach could be so broad and shallow that it doesn’t actually select that strongly for future dedicated EAs. In a comment below, Jack says “OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling)”. Of course, people who take that pledge will be more likely to become dedicated EAs than the average student, but there are many other ways to select at that level
Hi Alex—these are very good points and largely correct, I think—thanks for contributing them. I’ve added some thoughts and mitigations below:
Yes, we definitely do anchor around poverty. I think this can be good ‘scaffolding’ to come into the movement; but sometimes it will anchor people there. It is worth noting, though, that global health and poverty is consistently the most popular cause area in the EA survey, so there are clearly other factors anchoring to this cause area—it’s hard to say how much OFTW counterfactually increases this effect (and whether it counterfactually stops people from progressing beyond global health and poverty). In terms of mitigation for competing with GWWC—we are in close touch with them and both sides are working hard to foster collaboration and avoid competition.
On point 2, our experience so far is that OFTW and EA groups actually coexist very well. I think (without any systematic evidence) some of this may because a lot of EA groups don’t prioritise donations, preferring to focus on things like career advice, and so OFTW chapters can sort of ‘own’ the donation space; sometimes, though, they just find a way to work alongside each other. I’m not sure it follows that we have to ‘compete for altruistically motivated people’ - in fact, I don’t really see any reason why someone couldn’t take the OFTW pledge and then carry on engaging with EA uninterrupted—but I agree that we could compete on this front. A lot seems to depend on OFTW’s approach/message/ask. Maybe a virtue of OFTW is that we really only need people’s attention for a short period to get them to take one action—so we aren’t competing for their sustained attention, in a way that would crowd out EA programming. Indeed, we can actually be a funnel to get them to pay attention to this content—see for example our recent webinar with Toby Ord on x-risk, which attracted ~200 people, many of whom came from OFTW chapters.
Yes, fair. I’d just bear in mind, though, how many EAs were introduced via global health and poverty (again, see the EA survey for how many people came in via poverty-focussed writing from Peter Singer or Will MacAskill) and did ultimately develop/broaden/change their thinking, so again I’m not sure how much counterfactual anchoring there is from OFTW.
I haven’t watched this yet but will shortly—from your brief precis above, this criticism looks like it might apply equally to any pledge/donation org that support health and poverty causes (GWWC, Founder’s Pledge, GiveWell, EA Funds etc.).
This is absolutely true—I actually think it’s a strength of OFTW, as it happens. The reason I don’t worry overly about anchoring people at 1%/distracting from other cause areas is that I actually think most OFTW pledgers were never good candidates to be super engaged with EA in the first place—but those that are end up getting into EA anyway, and we can be a useful first point of contact to make that happen. To be fully transparent, this is basically all from anecdata, but I have met very, very few OFTW pledgers who I (subjectively) think were ever likely to be a GWWC pledger/dedicate their career to AI research. In a perfect world, we would hoover up all the ‘well I might give 1% but I really wouldn’t give 10%’ crowd and not stop any of the ‘I might give 10%/change my career’ crowd. One project to support this is to give more GWWC and other EA content to our members, so that those who were predisposed to give 10% end up doing it anyway (which has happened for a subset of OFTW members in the past, certainly).
This is a really interesting topic, so thanks for writing this post! Some thoughts:
You’ve basically identified 2 outcomes of an OFTW group:
The direct impact of the donations
Helping to grow EA groups
I think the first point is not that controversial. I think there’s value in OFTW chapters existing where otherwise they wouldn’t have, even in the absence of EA groups—for example, if someone is convinced by OFTW argumetns but not EA ones. I think OFTW is independent of the EA movement in a way that mitigates this risk—but I’m pretty uncertain about this, and it would be interesting to see data on it.
I think the second outcome is more difficult to do. You have some discussion of ways to mitigate this risk, namely:
However, even if the founder of the OFTW chapter are knowledgeable EAs, it may be that their successors are not. I don’t see how this process might be controlled in a predictable way. So this means that perhaps a few years after the OFTW chapter is started, the relationship between the EA group & the OFTW one are not as strong.
This could increase the risk of misleading first impressions. For example, the meme that EA is largely focused on ETG is spread more, which appears to have taken a good amount of time to correct, and the meme is still around today. There may be a risk that such memes are brought back which would turn some people off EA.
Questions that might resolve some of the above:
How many OFTW chapters exist alongside EA groups? What is their relationship like—how closely do they collaborate?
If there are many OFTW chapters without EA groups, we might want to consider what the impression that people at these universities have of EA, and how accurate it is.
What are current OFTW organisers’ knowledge of EA and engagement with the EA community?
I think it would be preferable to have OFTW organisers who are familiar with EA arguments & frameworks, because they might be more likely to think about the trade-offs between the two groups.
Hey Vaidehi—I hope you’re well :-)
Just on the factual questions:
~12 - this includes some where the EA group explicitly runs the OFTW content, and some where the two just peacefully coexist. Collaboration is broadly positive but not consistent in method or depth.
Hard to say—I would guess that around 1⁄3 know about nothing except effective giving, 1⁄3 know a bit about EA but are mainly focussed on effective giving and 1⁄3 are very knowledgeable about EA/fully committed EAs themselves.
To pick up two of your risks above:
OFTW chapters are certainly vulnerable to changes in leadership, but this point would seem to apply just as strongly to EA groups on campuses, I think? So I’m not sure that we should expect leadership turnover to have any more or less of a negative effect on OFTW-EA relations that it does on EA-student relations.
In fairness, we don’t teach people those memes, or ever reference them in any of our materials or training (at least not in any of the materials or training that I have reviewed/contributed to). OFTW never mentions ETG and in general we don’t really make claims about what EA cares about or focusses on. You helped us with this page, I recall, which is probably the best summary of how we talk about EA—and it reads to me as very neutral in its phrasing: https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/
Thanks for the information Jack! To clarify my points a little:
Agreed that EA student groups (and most student groups) are vulnerable to this. I think my prior here is that EA groups would be more likely to to collaborate/work with the OFTW group because there are more obvious reasons to (the benefits Sabrina mentioned in the most)
However it’s very possible (and maybe even fairly likely) that and smaller EA groups perhaps shrinks or stops existing due to leadership handover reasons, while the OFTW group doesn’t. I don’t think this would be a very bad outcome, as I mentioned above I think
I think I was unclear earlier, and I should have added more nuance. I don’t think this is a direct risk, or that OFTW materials imply this, but rather that these are the associations people will make to EA if that’s the only perspective they see or know that most about. I think this is probably more true if OFTW chapters become very prevalent across US universities, much more so than EA chapters.
Thanks for writing this!
Here are some rough thoughts or questions of mine for you or for others in the OFTW team:
Is there any data already for what % of OFTW pledgers follow through on their pledges?
Is One For The World thinking of creating a page like Giving What We Can’s that contains the number of pledgers, their names, and the month/year they pledged? I think this could be a good growth hack—people might want the social incentive to pledge and also put their name on the list. The page could also include what chapter each pledger is from.
How can people “resign” from their OFTW pledges if they wanted to? Would they just do it without saying so? I ask this because some people who first make an OFTW pledge might then change their cause prioritization to animal welfare or longtermism (i.e. if they get more engaged in EA), and they may want to stop donating to global health charities.
Is OFTW thinking of expanding to a 1% pledge that is not cause-specific, or one that is for animal welfare or longtermist non-profits in the future? If not, is there anyone interested in creating these types of pledges in the future (whether as a new organization or under GWWC)? Personally I find the GWWC 10% pledge hard to commit to currently, which is why I haven’t taken it. I would be more willing to pledge 1% to effective charities that is not cause-specific. If OFTW had a pledge that wasn’t cause-specific, I would likely take it!
On 4, GWWC has the Try Giving pledge:
Hi Brian—Jack here (ED at OFTW). Thanks for your thoughtful questions and it looks like Sabrina ha answered them really well :-)
Some quick additions:
as Sabrina says, activation is moderate (~2/3). However, our models suggest that we would still provide decent ROI at even 50% activation rates. One advantage that we have is that we process all our donations ourselves and so actually know our activation and retention rates, where a lot of pledge orgs have to estimate them. My reading of our data is that most orgs are extremely optimistic in their assumptions around this.
definitely open to this and some individual chapters have done it already. It’s on the roadmap!
this is where processing our donations is so helpful—we see in real time how donors behave, and so know if people stop their donations. We do ask people who cancel if they have changed cause area but we only get the usual response rates to cancellation surveys (~1%)
we do not currently plan to expand our cause areas, for few reasons. First, and for transparency, GiveWell is one of our main funders and that influences this decision. Second, our founders were very focussed on global health and poverty and so I would want their input before any change. But third, and most importantly—OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling). When you are recruiting people with this level of engagement, message clarity is essential. Using global health and poverty, which is both the most popular EA cause area and the simplest ‘sell’ to someone who isn’t part of EA yet, makes a lot of sense to me in this context. All that being said, this may well evolve over time!
It might be useful context to some of the comments below to highlight this page on our resource for our volunteers, which encapsulates for me how we talk about EA within OFTW (and how we signpost people to find out more): https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/ (props to Vaidehi for helping us revise this and make it better this summer)