Community Organiser for EA UK
Organiser for EA Finance
I have a list of stories that I had on a google doc that may contain some relevant ones.
Origin Stories
Britney Budiman writing about her early explorations of effective altruism
deluks917 on why they focus on effective altruism
Vaidehi Agarwalla sharing her outlook on discovering EA
José Oliveira on doing the most good as an artist
Origin Stories − 2018
Origins − 2015
Rachel Elizabeth Marley − 2015
Tom Stocker − 2015
Haseeb Qureshi − 2015
Gregory Lewis − 2015
Michelle Hutchinson − 2015
Peter Hurford − 2015
Nate Soares − 2014
Jonah Sinick −2013
Career Choices
Stijn Bruers − 2019
Ben Kuhn − 2014
David Perry − 2014
Ben West − 2014
Jess Whittlestone on doing a PhD − 2013
Rahela with ‘How I went from working in the fashion industry to animal advocacy’
Yufeng Tao with a career story ‘why I decided to leave corporate for now’
Aline Fernicka on how she went from being a GiveDirectly recipient to one of their field officers
Julia Wise with a snapshot of her career choices ten years ago
Denise Melchin writing about her mistakes on the path to having a more impactful career
Jobs
GiveDirectly Field Officer, Ann Chukulu −2019
Mistakes
Michael Plant—a failed startup − 2018
Lehua—stopping a non profit as it may be negative
A story of how someone missed their biggest career opportunity so far
Donating Stories
Giving Cheerfully—Julia Wise
Zoe Savitsky on giving
Where I am donating this year, 2018 -Sam Hilton
Putting effective altruism into effect, 2016 - Sophia Cheng
What I gave in 2018 - Rachel Elizabeth Marley
Profiles in giving—Jenny Jacobs
GWWC Member profile, 2019 - Insa Maennel
GWWC Member profile, 2019 - Jo Duyvestyn
The privilege of earning to give, 2015 - Jeff Kaufman
Events
Alastair Fraser-Urquhart on burning out at EA Global
Motivation and Challenges of EA
Emotional challenges of altruism
Michelle Hutchinson on why she finds longtermism hard and what keeps her motivated
Alan Taylor with ‘A Duty to Look After Yourself’
Michelle Hutchinson with a collection of motivating stories she has heard whilst working at 80,000 Hours
Jess Whittlestone on why we should be more supportively sceptical
Nicole Ross on being in a cycle of desperation, inadequacy and burn out
C Tilli with a personal reflection on how the experience of EA is similar to religious faith in that it provides a sense of purpose and belonging, but can be difficult to maintain a sense of self-worth
Other
Dorothea—a literary character interested in “effective altruism” in the 1870s
Why donate a kidney to a stranger—Elaine Perlman
I thought that was more to do with being a country that allowed them to operate at all rather than tax reasons.
I might have missed this but can you say how many people took the survey, and how many people filled out the FTX section?
Why not just use Glassdoor?
There was this response by Hadyn Belfield to the longtermism article a few months ago.
I also don’t think that William MacAskill has to be the person that responds to each criticism if there are others better placed to respond.
The Panorama episode briefly mentioned EA. Peter Singer spoke for a couple of minutes and EA was mainly viewed as charity that would be missing out on money. There seemed to be a lot more interest on the internal discussions within FTX, crypto drama, the politicians, celebrities etc.
Maybe Panorama is an outlier but potentially EA is not that interesting to most people or seemingly too complicated to explain if you only have an hour.
I remember a couple of people doing something slightly similar to this.
Dan Artus wrote a dissertation in 2018 - “An ethnographic exploration of ethics,
empathy and data practises within the London Effective Altruist community”
Nick Philips wrote a thesis about the EA movement in 2015 -”Rational Faith: A Study of the Effective Altruism Movement ”
Looking at the grants database for 2023, there seems to be only 24 projects listed there for a total of ~$204k, which is less than 10% of the money said to be granted in 2023.
Including the 2022 Q4-2 tag, there are now 54 projects with grants totalling $1,170,000 (although this does include some of the examples above). I don’t know how many of these grants are included with the total sum given in the original post.
The ten largest grants were:-
$126k − 12-month part-time salary for 2 organisers, equipment and other expenses, to expand EA community building in Hong Kong
$114k − 8-month programme helping ambitious graduates to launch EU policy careers focused on emerging tech
$86k—Further develop the fast growing Dutch platform for effective giving until April 2023
$63k—Grant renewal of “A Happier World”: Salary and funding to continue producing video content
$62k − 12 months month salary for EA for Jews’ Managing Director
$57k—Yearly salary for weekly written summaries of the top EA and LW forum posts, and a human-narrated podcast for the former
$50k − 6 month salary and minor project expenses for career exploration, focused on biosecurity projects
$50k − 6 months of funding to scale our robo-advisor app for charitable giving
$50k—To grow the readership of a Substack on forecasting enough to fund it with reader donations while keeping content free
$45k − 1 year of 2.5 FTE salary split across 5 people to do community building work for EA Philippines + student chapters
It would be easier, and with much quicker returns, to create more ways for people who are already on the edge of EA to be more connected to others interested in EA.
There are maybe a few hundred people working in EA bubbles, but there are probably thousands of people who have been following along with EA for 3+ years who would be very happy to share their knowledge or get more involved with EA directly.
I don’t have a complete list, but here are quite a few of the organisations that I subscribe to for updates.
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
Center for Security and Emerging Technology
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter from OPP
Devex International Development
Wellcome Trust (also improving institutions)
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation
Innovations for Poverty Action
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
Overseas Development Institute
Development Media International
Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy
Centre for Excellence in Development and Learning
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Effective Altruism Newsletter (by CEA, EA Hub and Rethink Charity)
The Center for Effective Philanthropy
Matt’s Thoughts In Between—Founder of Entrepeneur First
The right framing can make a big difference.
Also I see lots of positive comments from people who have done the Intro EA virtual program or who have read Doing Good Better.
It may also be a difference between how YouTube comments are quite positive these days and Twitter still has incentives for negative comments.
I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, a few days before GiveWell announced they were looking into a wider range of interventions.
The EA fund for global development seems to be the easiest way to get funding towards this area. I suspect that most donors involved in EA would be happy to fund interventions with less hard evidence if given the choice.
One reason why there may be a lack of conversation in this area is that there are many organisations and 10,000+ experts in international development and ways to engage that don’t involve EA. Whereas in factory farming and emerging technology risks there are fewer places for people to go to discuss these causes and so discussion happens in EA spaces (until causes get big enough to create their own networks).
I think just writing a post can lead to some of the changes you want to see.
One example being the “It’s really really hard to get hired by an EA organisation”. Having that exist and be spread amongst people was able to start changing expectations that people had.
I also think even if most people already agree, there are some people haven’t thought about the subject of this post and may change their behaviour after having read it. I have seen a few examples of this on Twitter and in person before.
I would go further and say that more people are interested in specific areas like AI safety and biosecurity than the general framing of x-risks. Especially senior professionals that have worked in AI/bio careers.
There is value for some people to be working on x-risk prioritisation but that would be a much smaller subset than the eventual sizes of the cause specific fields.
You mention this in your counterarguments but I think that it should be emphasised more.
In the UK there are people who’ve heard about it on the radio, podcasts and some articles in the media.
It could be that both are true, as EA grows and professionalises, it is able to put more organised resources to areas that EA as a whole is less concerned about.
It might have increased recently, but even in 2015, one survey found 44% of the American public would consider AI an existential threat. It’s now 55%.
I think this is a really good comment and probably should be it’s own post.
A minor point, I would say that giving to the Against Malaria Foundation may not on it’s own be systemic change, but if enough people keep on giving to charities that are evaluated on their impact, it could change individual giving as a system, as charities respond to these new incentives.
When I started community building I would see the 20 people who turned up most regularly or had regular conversations with and I would focus on how I could help them improve their impact, often in relatively small ways.
Over time I realised that some of the people that were potentially having the biggest impact weren’t turning up to events regularly, maybe we just had one conversation in four years, but they were able to shift into more impactful careers. Partially because there were many more people who I had 1 chat with than there were people I had 5 chats with, but also the people who are more experienced/busy with work have less time to keep on turning up to EA social events, and they often already had social communities they were a part of.
It also would be surprising/suspicious if the actions that make members the happiest also happened to be the best solution for allocating talent to problems.
That doesn’t seem to match with EA being a front cover story last year, and being shown in a positive light.