I’m the co-founder of EA Philippines and a community building grantee of the Centre for Effective Altruism. I was formerly a Senior Product Designer at First Circle, a FinTech company in Manila. You can reach out to me at brian@effectivealtruism.ph or add me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianctan/.
BrianTan
Karma: 1,782
I think the current title of the sequence is fine and probably better than the rest of the alternatives you put!
Welcome Marta! :)
Would you be able to share around what % of the 85 non-desk-rejected applications that you got were applications that were within your request for proposals?
I’d like to get a sense of what the current base rate of acceptance is in applying for a grant for a project that’s within your preferred proposal areas.
This article by SoGive might be relevant.
Also, the No More Pandemics group created by SoGive’s co-founder Sanjay Joshi might still be recruiting for volunteers, if you or others want to get involved there!
Thanks for writing this up Gabby! Could you expound more on your rationale for the following:
“We found it best to not share the list we generated publicly. Instead, we use it to share specific tips with people in our community.”
Anyway, if you’re unwilling to share these publicly, I’d still love to see the 3 lists you generated, if you’re willing to share them privately with me. This is since EA Philippines would like to create similar lists. I may also have some rough thoughts on the opportunities on your lists, and what might be missing. Thanks!
No problem!
This article by Stijn Bruers called “Clean technology innovation as the most cost-effective climate action” states this:
“Funding research and development of clean technologies, in particular clean protein and clean energy, is probably the most cost-effective method to avoid dangerous climate change.”
I think Stijn is arguing that funding clean protein is similar in cost-effectiveness to top Founders Pledge charities that work on clean technology. The article doesn’t talk about Giving Green’s recommended charities, but GG’s recommended charity Clean Air Task Force is also recommended by Founders Pledge.
My guess is that donating to clean meat charities like New Harvest or The Good Food Institute could be as good as donating to Clean Air Task Force or other recommended Founders Pledge charities. And it’s likely better than the other GG-recommended charities like The Sunrise Movement, Tradewater, Climeworks, and BURN, since some of these recommendations have gotten criticism here.
Yes, I think mice are a potential area of animal welfare improvement. Charity Entrepreneurship wrote a report on an intervention for campaigning to ban the sale and use of glue traps, but they concluded it’s not as cost-effective as donating to or working for existing top animal welfare charities:
“Ultimately, we do not recommend banning the sale and use of glue traps as a way to improve welfare. Based on our research, this intervention does not look promising when considering counterfactuals due to the small amount of suffering prevented by averting a glue trap death. This is mostly because the alternative methods of pest control that would be most commonly used after a ban on glue traps appear to be rodenticides and snap traps, and death from rodenticides seems worse than from a glue trap.
Although when compared to a glue trap death, a snap trap death looks better than a rodenticide death looks worse, the average amount of suffering averted is dragged down by this likelihood of replacement. Based on this and on our analysis of the cǒfounder counterfactuals, we do not recommend this charity get started this year. However, we think that it might be worth trying to convince an existing organization to do this intervention themselves.Also, their report also has a section on why snap traps are better than live traps or glue traps:
“Animal protection organizations ̈such as the RSPCA advocate for the use of snap traps over live traps and glue traps, and many pest control organizations also recommend using snap traps over glue traps.”
I think quite a few titles from this ranked list of all EA-relevant documentaries, movies, and TV series I’ve watched might be interesting to you! :)
Yeah estimates are probably better than nothing. Maybe making the caveat/uncertainties about the data more easily seen, i.e. as asterisks beside some numbers on the fellowship data table, rather than as a footnote might help. But yeah it’s a minor thing!
Thanks so much for publishing this report Yi-Yang! I am really glad there is now one report written up properly on the EA Forum about an EA group’s local priorities research.
I haven’t been able to write a proper report yet for EA Philippines’s local priorities research, but I hope to do that within the next few weeks or months. (If anyone is interested in reading about our work on this though, I wrote a bit about this in our 2020 annual report).
Your research process is more structured than ours, and I like the idea of independent research and aggregating people’s ratings, which we aren’t doing (or haven’t done yet).
I think it would be a lot better though if you had “problem profiles” like 80,000 Hours’s for those causes you listed, especially the top 2-4 causes. Maybe that’s something to work on next, as something you can use to convince more Malaysians why those causes should be worked on. This is what we’re doing at EA Philippines, and it also helps you easily give people resources they can read if they’re interested to learn more about that cause area.
Or if not making full problem profiles, putting a few sentences or bullets about the scale and neglectedness of each of the causes would help. For example, you could put the number of farmed land animals and farmed aquatic animals in Malaysia slaughtered/produced every year, or the estimated % of Malaysians with a mental health disorder. You could also try putting a few sentences or bullets about tractability, but that’s a lot harder to talk about or research about.
About your actual cause area rankings, my comments are:
I think 6 out of the top 8 causes you put make a lot of sense for why they’re there. The 2 that I think are very questionable though are financial literacy and improving diversity and inclusion. I don’t see why these two could be in the top 8 causes for Malaysia. Maybe one of you could make the case for why these two causes are very impactful to work on, especially compared to other alternatives I list below?
I’ve listed three causes notably not in your top 8 that I think have a strong case for being there. I’d be curious to hear if you considered them (and what their scores were if you considered them):
Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness in Malaysia—If AI risks are there, I think this should be on the list too. I think any sufficiently large or rich country could probably do better work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
Improving institutional decision making in Malaysia—I assume that helping top institutions, especially the government, make better decisions is going to be very impactful in most countries around the world. Even just recruiting better talent into government, or finding ways to improve the government, are probably big in expected impact.
Health and development in the poorest areas of Malaysia—if family planning is on your list, why isn’t this on the list too? Cost-effective and evidence-based GiveWell interventions like cash transfers, deworming, vitamin a supplementation, and community health interventions might still be important and very cost-effective to do for the poorest areas of Malaysia.
I think 2 other causes that you could consider looking into, but might not make it to your top 8, are the following. I’d be curious to hear if you considered these causes:
Climate change
COVID-19 response in Malaysia (this relates to biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and also improving institutional decision making, but is more short-term and specifically about COVID).
You might be interested to read this new post by the same author then. Though I think it’s still not super concrete on how exactly to do the research, or how to do a proper literature review on a cause area , or how to weigh cause areas against each other https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ufqMq6ngfR4QLgrPH/ea-malaysia-cause-prioritisation-report-2021
On #1 and 2: Got it! I guess CEA should be more cautious (i.e. by putting significant caveats or not reporting the data yet) then about reporting participant data for non-EA Virtual Programs participants, since you collect data at the end of fellowships, and the data are just guesses before then.
On #3-5: Great!
Thanks for sharing your thinking!
I generally agree with the following statements you said:
“It’s good for EA-branded content to be fairly balanced on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that every individual project has to be balanced.”
“If EA Global had a theme like “economic growth” for one conference and 1⁄3 of the talks were about that, I think that could be pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t representative of community members’ priorities as a whole.
“Sometimes, I send out an edition of the EA Newsletter that is mostly development-focused, or AI-focused, because there happened to be a lot of good links about that topic that month. I think the newsletter would be worse if I felt compelled to have at least one article about every major cause area every month.”
Moreover, I know that a collection of old podcast episodes from 80K isn’t likely to dominate the world’s perception of what EA is. But I think it would benefit 80K and EA more broadly if they just included 1 or 2 episodes about near-termism. I think I and others would be more interested to share their collection to people as an intro to EA if there were 1 or 2 episodes about GH&D and animal welfare. Not having any makes me know that I’ll only share this to people interested in longtermism.
Anyway, I guess 80K’s decision to add one episode on near-termism is evidence that they think that neartermist interventions do merit some discussion within an “intro to EA” collection. And maybe they sense that more people would be more supportive of 80K and this collection if they did this.
Got it! You listed only 16 universities though, but you mentioned you’re referring to 19 groups. Do some universities have more than one group (i.e. Harvard and Harvard Law?)
I think this post should be on the Forum and doesn’t feel too much like marketing/propaganda to me. I wouldn’t have known about this article if not for WAI posting about it.
I guess if we start getting way too many (i.e. more than 4 a day across different orgs?) of these positive self-posts by organizations on the forum, we should start getting concerned, but I don’t think we’re close to that point yet.
Got it, thanks! If they could be compiled and put on the EA Hub Resources, such as on this page, that would probably be the best place to compile them?
On Fellowship Data:
If a fellowship starts in Feb but ends in April, does that count toward Q1 data or Q2 data?
Regarding the number of participants for fellowships, I’m not sure how that data is collected, but maybe Marie Buhl reached out directly privately to fellowship organizers to collect this data. Anyway, there’s a good chance that data for EA Philippines’s chapters aren’t accurately included in Q1 data.
For example, 2 of our student chapters in EA Philippines, EA UP Diliman and EA Blue, are both running intro fellowships since Feb and March respectively. They have a combined 67 participants (36 and 31 respectively), though a few have already dropped out or are not set to graduate. I assume both universities are non-focus universities. So if our participant data is part of your Q1 data set, then that means 29% of fellows (67/230) from non-focus universities are from our universities. I think that’s too high, so my assumption would be most or all of their fellows are not yet in the data set.Related to #2, I think it would be useful to have a public Google Sheet with rows for which groups are running fellowships, and columns for what country and university they’re from, when they’ve started, when they will end, how many participants, and how many graduates (if data exists on that already). I assume most fellowship organizers would be okay with this data being public. I think having this public Google Sheet can let us easily know which groups are and aren’t on the list yet. I think it’s also good for others to know which universities/cities have fellowships—maybe they can recommend friends from those universities/cities to join those fellowships.
I think it would be good to include data for both participants and graduates. Would be interesting to know what the avg. drop-off rate is for these fellowships.
Also, a separate Google Sheet that lists which groups are going to run fellowships or reading groups in the next 1-3 months (and whether they accept people virtually or not) could also help people interested to know what fellowships or reading groups are coming up. But I think this is less important to do than the other things I suggested or mentioned above.
This update and CEA’s plans for 2021 mention the term “highly-ranked university groups” and “focus universities” a lot. Could you clarify what you mean by one or both of those terms? (i.e. are you looking at the top 40 universities globally based on a specific website)? Thanks!
Thanks for this report! Two minor questions:
What do you call the type of graph shown below, and what do you use to make these graphs? They’re quite cool.
2. Is the graph above possible to make via Google Sheets or some easy-to-use platform? Thanks!