My experience is that when people use words like effective altruism, innovation or measurable, it is often just buzz words.
Lets assume you want to get water to villages
And lets say you notice that wells cost about $2500.
Is your altruism effective enough to notice who is building them for $2200?
Have you measured the return on impact well enough to know that $100 is the cost of the measurement, that it mostly collects meaningless numbers, and you could dig 5% more wells if you eliminated that?
Have you looked hard enough to notice that $100 is added to the cost per well, for writing different grant proposals to three different organizations, making videos of 3 minutes, 4 minutes and 5 minutes, if you are a funder have you considered a standardized application with other funders ?
Is it effective enough to notice that you are preferring those organizations who already have enough education to prepare a grant proposal; enough savings to fly to the conference where the donors hang out; and who speak good English;
Have you noticed that as many as half the wells, or solar panels or toilets sit there broken waiting for the next donor.
Are you measuring the right thing, would you notice if those $2000 wells fail in 5 years while $2500 wells might fail in 10 ?
Are you innovative enough to figure out that if you got the village to invest $1000, not only could you support twice as many villages but the village would be more likely to maintain it and use it, if they had skin in the game. Are you flexible enough to create a social enterprise rather than a charity, and to fund its overheads rather than expecting it to make a profit?
Are you effective enough to notice that you could be 10x more effective if instead of selling wells to villages, you focused resources of finding and supporting local entrepreneurs to build their own businesses doing so ?
Those wells are still going to fail, and instead of a plaque listing a donor in New York, would it be more effective if there someone local to complain to? So are you effective enough to realize that training local mechanics is part of the investment cost in the local entrepreneur ? Or maybe even training the mechanic to sell the wells ?
Is your thinking long term enough to finance the purchase of a machine that brings the well cost down from $2000 to $1500, even if it costs two or three years to pay back the cost of that machine (and therefore, its purchase couldn’t be funded locally at interest rates of 25-30% per year, even assuming the purchaser had land to put up as collateral)
Are you innovative enough to invest in someone developing a cheaper machine, or one that reduces the cost even further, or are you demanding certainty and measurability too much to consider them anything that pays off at scale, but in the long term.
Are you innovative enough to support the organizations that mentor and support those inventors and engineers, after all with the amount of leverage they generate, it is almost impossible to measure how much they impact the space.
And most importantly, in this context, is EA effective enough to really critique its own effectiveness ?
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About me: I’m a serial social entrepreneur; My first project was APC.org in the late 80′s, now an NGO active in about 74 countries. My last company was Lumeter which was responsible for technology that resulted in lights & cellphone charging (at least) for 80,000 households before it was merged into Mobisol; these days I’m focused on mentoring innovators with scalable solutions for world problems (e.g. the SDGs); for example I’m on the board of foliawater.com, an affordable scalable solution for access to clean water.
I’ve known about EA for a long time, but I’m not aware of the current state of EA, because as someone interested in scalable “altruistic” solutions it hasn’t been “effective” for me to spend time engaging. I came to this conclusion because the limited contacts I had with EA showed a disturbing lack of ability to see the big picture such as described above, and an obsession with “measurement” which pretty much ruled out anything innovative and scalable.
An EA member invited me to post this, which I’d sent them privately, I’m glad to see some introspection at EA so happy to share it in the hope it improves thinking about EA’s own effectiveness.
How effective is your Altruism?
My experience is that when people use words like effective altruism, innovation or measurable, it is often just buzz words.
Lets assume you want to get water to villages
And lets say you notice that wells cost about $2500.
Is your altruism effective enough to notice who is building them for $2200?
Have you measured the return on impact well enough to know that $100 is the cost of the measurement, that it mostly collects meaningless numbers, and you could dig 5% more wells if you eliminated that?
Have you looked hard enough to notice that $100 is added to the cost per well, for writing different grant proposals to three different organizations, making videos of 3 minutes, 4 minutes and 5 minutes, if you are a funder have you considered a standardized application with other funders ?
Is it effective enough to notice that you are preferring those organizations who already have enough education to prepare a grant proposal; enough savings to fly to the conference where the donors hang out; and who speak good English;
Have you noticed that as many as half the wells, or solar panels or toilets sit there broken waiting for the next donor.
Are you measuring the right thing, would you notice if those $2000 wells fail in 5 years while $2500 wells might fail in 10 ?
Are you innovative enough to figure out that if you got the village to invest $1000, not only could you support twice as many villages but the village would be more likely to maintain it and use it, if they had skin in the game. Are you flexible enough to create a social enterprise rather than a charity, and to fund its overheads rather than expecting it to make a profit?
Are you effective enough to notice that you could be 10x more effective if instead of selling wells to villages, you focused resources of finding and supporting local entrepreneurs to build their own businesses doing so ?
Those wells are still going to fail, and instead of a plaque listing a donor in New York, would it be more effective if there someone local to complain to? So are you effective enough to realize that training local mechanics is part of the investment cost in the local entrepreneur ? Or maybe even training the mechanic to sell the wells ?
Is your thinking long term enough to finance the purchase of a machine that brings the well cost down from $2000 to $1500, even if it costs two or three years to pay back the cost of that machine (and therefore, its purchase couldn’t be funded locally at interest rates of 25-30% per year, even assuming the purchaser had land to put up as collateral)
Are you innovative enough to invest in someone developing a cheaper machine, or one that reduces the cost even further, or are you demanding certainty and measurability too much to consider them anything that pays off at scale, but in the long term.
Are you innovative enough to support the organizations that mentor and support those inventors and engineers, after all with the amount of leverage they generate, it is almost impossible to measure how much they impact the space.
And most importantly, in this context, is EA effective enough to really critique its own effectiveness ?
---
About me: I’m a serial social entrepreneur; My first project was APC.org in the late 80′s, now an NGO active in about 74 countries. My last company was Lumeter which was responsible for technology that resulted in lights & cellphone charging (at least) for 80,000 households before it was merged into Mobisol; these days I’m focused on mentoring innovators with scalable solutions for world problems (e.g. the SDGs); for example I’m on the board of foliawater.com, an affordable scalable solution for access to clean water.
I’ve known about EA for a long time, but I’m not aware of the current state of EA, because as someone interested in scalable “altruistic” solutions it hasn’t been “effective” for me to spend time engaging. I came to this conclusion because the limited contacts I had with EA showed a disturbing lack of ability to see the big picture such as described above, and an obsession with “measurement” which pretty much ruled out anything innovative and scalable.
An EA member invited me to post this, which I’d sent them privately, I’m glad to see some introspection at EA so happy to share it in the hope it improves thinking about EA’s own effectiveness.