I find some of the comments posted here a bit unhelpful from a communications point of view. Frankly they read like prepared/PR statements.(lots of “excited” people who also happen to be employed/connected to CEA ) It would be helpful if people could clarify if they are posting in a professional or personal capacity going forward.
AlasdairGives
Karma: 714
My basic takeaway from all of this is not who is right/wrong so much as that EA professional organisations should act more like professional organisations. While it may be temporarily less enjoyable I would expect overall the organisations with things like HR professionals, safeguarding policies, regular working hours, offices in normal cities and work/life boundaries to be significantly more effective contributors to EA
I’m less interested in “debating whether a person in a villa in a tropical paradise got a vegan burger delivered fast enough” or “whether it’s appropriate for your boss to ask you to pick up their ADHD medication from a Mexican pharmacy” or “if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary”? Than in interrogating whether EA wouldn’t be better off with more “boring” organisations led by adults with significant professional experience managing others, where the big company drama is the quality of coffee machine in the office canteen.
Apologies for the mistake!
I think this post fails on three really important metrics: 1)the EA forum is a highly selective non-representative sample. Its not at all legitimate to suggest the views of people 2)the EA forum is a forum for discussion; it is not a way to
I think this is exciting—what I would like to see at this stage is a board or advisory group with members both with predominately EA and predominately Muslim views who can review your activities and give you advice from both perspectives. I’m sure you’ve considered that but it seems like the missing bit in terms of feedback and development at the moment.
It would be a longer piece of work to engage with the model here, intuitively I find the estimate surprising
However I’d just say that the fact you’ve undertaken this process at all is valuable, and I think both the campaign and model will be good proto-examples for the future of how EA has tried to engage with policy change work.
I thought this was a really interesting post, thanks! Did you have a full time job while working on your pilot project? If so I’d be interested to know how you navigated your time and any tips you have on that
This is a good article. I don’t think the point on farm animal welfare can possibly be correct though. There are many animal welfare charities and organisations (as well as many commercial players) that while they don’t focus on farm animals exclusively or with the same mindset, surely dominate the “farm animal welfare” space.
I’d also be interested in this!
I just mean this could have been two posts—one about the paper and one about the experience of publishing the paper. Both would be very valuable.
I think it is disappointing that so many comments are focusing on arguing with the paper rather than discussing the challenges outlined in the post. From a very quick reading I don’t find any of the comments here unreasonable but I do find them to be talking about a different topic. It would be better if we could separate out the discussion of “red teaming” EA from the discussion of this particular paper
Good post Sanjay, though I think a better title would be “Why SoGive is not yet updating charity ratings after malaria vaccine news” though.
I don’t disagree with any of the points you’ve made—and there are certainly large uncertainties around this, but there is at least a significant possibility that when some uncertainties are resolved this could displace nets in terms of cost-effectiveness. So its certainly a very promising development and even if we don’t change our immediate funding priorities, we need to think about how they might change in the future.
I think this is potentially very significant news—i’m hoping to write a more detailed post once I’ve looked into it more but a previous 35% effective vaccine was found to be only marginally less cost effective than LLIN nets in preventing malaria spread—a 75% effective (and cheap!) vaccine has at least the potential to shoot to the top of our list of most effective global health and poverty interventions, to the extent that we may want to think about pooling EA funds towards the project (perhaps creating a special EA malaria vaccination fund)
US citizenship is extremely valuable and your career opportunities at this stage are likely to be far more valuable to you in future earnings expectations than a few additional percentage points on investments.
In terms of investing, my understanding is that you are best off investing in the US and that there are US investment options open to you (Charles Schwab I believe often comes up as a broker in this area) rather than in the UK.
Finally the mystery of how CEEALAR got named is solved :D
Minor typo—The DOI for Evaluating use cases for human challenge trials in accelerating SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development. Clinical Infectious Diseases has a trailing e in the url which causes the link to fail
I’ve vaguely thought about this but I’m not a significant enough donor that I’m going to register in people’s calculations, and if I’m donating primarily through third party funds then I’m already quite disconnected. (I.e my money isn’t arriving at the charity in December/Feb in any case). I think I prefer the “end of the year” feeling and communal discussions like this to improve my donation habits.
I attended the “Other Place” but my serious answer is the same for Oxford. Research online which colleges are richest (and most prestigious) and apply there unless you have a strong reason to prefer another college. The richest colleges have more grants, funding and opportunities available to students—you can save thousands of pounds and get access to opportunities just not available elsewhere. (For example I found out early on that my peers at another Cambridge college received a grant for books 3x larger each term than my college did—which in turn was more than another gave all year) - likely the additional additive networking opportunities are equally as valuable. Connections to well known EA’s within faculty are probably overrated, unless you can be sure of a close connection to a faculty member for several years (as what Cambridge would call a Director of Studies) you won’t gain a significant advantage and you can pursue the interests outside of your formal study program.
I plan to give 10% of my income (as per my Giving What We Can Pledge). I’d previously gotten into a rather weird Feb donation cycle so I’m looking to shift this year back to December. My primary cause area is global poverty and development.
I expect the majority (~75%) of my donation to be to a mixture the Givewell Maximum impact fund or the EA Funds Global Health and Development Fund. I’ve found the EA funds process to be somewhat lacking in transparency but generally I have been pleased with the donations made. I’d consider donations to the Founders Pledge Health and Development fund which appears a promising new entrant in this area however there does not appear to be a tax efficient (gift aidable) way to donate to this fund at present from the UK. I’m undecided on the split between these two so at the moment it will probably be 50⁄50.
For the remainder of my donation I intend to support promising smaller EA Charities. In the past I have donated to the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund but I’m less convinced that this is a good use of funds and more concerned than in the past that my donations shape towards those aspects of EA I want to encourage and away from those aspects I don’t align with. I intend to donate to Charity Entrepreneurship which I have been impressed by as an incubator and I intend to investigate the Global Health charities incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship and do some additional research in December to look at this area. (At least some of my donation will go to the Lead Exposure Elimination project).
In addition I plan to make nominal donations to all Givewell’s Top Charities and standout charities (as well as a number of non-EA charities) directly so that I am registered on their supporter databases. One downside about giving through EA funds is that you are somewhat disconnected from the charities themselves and I’d like to be “on their radar” and getting email updates about their work.
I think one thing about this cause area that is particularly interesting is that it has (to my eyes) strong marketing potential in the developed world. That is to say, because large numbers of people have experience using spectacles, the benefits are a very “easy sell” and there are also clear engagement touchpoints (Opticians, annual workplace eyetests etc) For example, you could easily imagine a partnership with an optician to “buy one pair, donate one pair” on new glasses sold. So i’m particularly interested in the are as potentially an area where an EA organisation could primarily engage or work with non-effective altruist donors. (Eg. even if at the margin, we felt that this was less effective than e.g malaria nets if the intervention is still highly effective and the counterfactual dollar would otherwise not have been donated at all it would be a very positive intervention).