I think the right way is to weight each argument by its robustness and the significance of the conclusions i.e.: If you have a strong argument that an action, A, would be very bad, then you shouldn’t do A. If you have a speculative argument that A would be very bad, then you probably shouldn’t do A. If you have a speculative argument that A would be a little bit bad, then that doesn’t mean much.
Benjamin_Todd
Show me the harm
Case study: designing a new organisation that might be more effective than GiveWell’s top recommendation
An epistemology for effective altruism?
Thanks, I’ll adapt the page to point this out.
My impression is that the methodology doesn’t significantly differ from GiveWell, but we might apply it with a different emphasis. It seems like GiveWell puts a bit less weight on speculative arguments and a bit more weight on common sense within their clusters. However, these differences are pretty small on the scale of things, and are hard to disentangle from having come across different evidence rather than having different methodology.
I think you could use this methodology to focus your questions too. Start from something very broad like “what’s a good life”, then use the methodology to work out what the key sub-questions are within that question; and so on. My aim wasn’t, however, to give a full account of rational inquiry, starting from zero.
I also don’t see there being an especial neglect for second-order goods. Experts and common sense generally think these things are good, so they’ll come up in your assessment, even if you can’t further analyse them or quantify them.
It seems like quite a few people have downvoted this post. I’d be curious to know why to avoid posting something similar next time.
I agree. The think there’s a strong argument that you can go into Big Law and still achieve a lot of good; but it’s pretty unclear whether an equally talented and altruistic person would do more good earning to give than going into public interest law. Also, as Alasdair points out below, personal fit is going to be a big consideration.
Ah I didn’t know you could see the % by hovering over that icon. I must have misremembered how many upvotes it had before.
The problem with most of these ideas is that they seem to require plenty of competent management, and until you can find the people to run them, they’re going to be hard to pull off.
If we’re going to be spending far more money in the next few years, we’re going to need to significantly increase the number of capable EA entrepreneurs.
One way to spend a lot of money that would also help to develop more EA entrepreneurs would be to set up a fund to provide seed funding to new EA projects (plus connections, prestige etc.). A couple of hundred thousand dollars allocated with the promise of more to come, and with clear criteria for awards, sends a clear message: (i) there’s money in this for competent entrepreneurs (ii) you can safely build your career here and commit to it for the long-term. This would help to attract talent to the community, which will allow us to spend much more in the coming years.
I’m not sure I fully see the upsides of this idea. What are the reasons you’d expect it to be able to absorb a large amount of money at a high return? Having some token awards as a way to give recognition to people seems useful, but after that you’re basically just transferring money between EAs. What are the advantages of that as opposed to trying to fund specific projects or giving it to GiveWell?
(I didn’t downvote!)
I agree it has large room for more funding, but I’m still not sure why you’d expect the average returns to be that high. Why do you expect individual EAs to be a highly capital constrained in a way that can’t be addressed by (i) founding a new organisation (ii) other existing mechanisms (student loans, friends + family, app academy’s learn now pay later model, doing a part-time job on the side)?
It seems like there could be a few good cases e.g. you know an EA who you think is really awesome, they want to do something that doesn’t fit into an org (e.g. teach themselves marketing) and they’re having to waste a lot of time earning money, and you can free them up by giving them 10-20k. But after that, the benefits seem modest. (though perhaps still worth doing).
$10-$100k is a lot. For context, 80k’s cost per historical significant plan change is a couple of thousand dollars.
Perhaps you could tilt it more towards being a high-prestige fellowship style thing, and then hopefully (i) alter incentives (ii) give career capital to the most promising young EAs. This will require good branding though, and more effort selecting applications.
I completely agree with this. This is why we put so much emphasis on our general framework and how to choose process. Finding options that do well according to the framework is what ultimately matters; not the specific career path you’re in.
Ah ok, I had ‘specific career options’ in mind, but then I see the examples don’t give the right impression. I’ll change this.
I’m not particularly familiar with the positive impact of the Thiel Fellowship. If your argument is “the Thiel Fellowship was very effective, therefore, setting up an EA equivalent could be a good idea” that makes sense, though I wouldn’t be able to personally get behind it without more detail on the results of the Thiel Fellowship and/or theoretical reasons to expect it to yield good returns.
It also seems like there’s more track record for a fund tilted more towards being a seed accelerator / angel investor for new projects, so we should do that first.
We’re looking for stories of EA career decisions
This may be just me, but it would be handy to be able to input in markdown as well as html. It seems pretty common to have editors that accept both.
I’ve read it, but would be happy to cross-post.
Agree. At 80,000 Hours Oxford we’ve had good success with “do you want to make a difference with your career?”, then explaining our best talk of the term (and that we have lots of good talks coming up) and/or explaining what 80k does in a couple of sentences (“does research to help you work out in which career you make the most difference..” etc.)