Do you think that some of the people who would have been attracted to effective philanthropy in the past now just join effective altruism?
I’ve had a loose interest in institutional philanthropy for a while (I knew of your work at Createquity while it was on-going!) and while I think EP has been influential, I just didn’t find the work from CEP and similar places as intellectually engaging as what EA puts out (or as important overall).
Thank you for the comment and for the formatting tip- really appreciated it!
Sounds cool!
I think EAs are a tiny number of people, and spend only a tiny fraction of their income on drop shipping.
In the abstract if you ask me, where I want the money to go, I would say charity. But when I shop online I really only care about price, reviews, and delivery speed.
Afaic, drop shippers don’t really develop brand names or brand loyalty.
Hi Brad,
First of all, I’m happy to hear you’re actually trying out this idea in a concrete way. I hope it works!
Have you looked at Newman’s Own? It’s the most famous example of this idea in the United States.
Re drop shipping: I get that it’s attractive because it has low start up costs, but I’m skeptical of this choice. I think drop shippers are basically a commodity business and I doubt people would choose a drop shipper on the basis of charity alignment. I would guess the best places to do this type of product would be in fashion (TOMS) or luxury good more broadly, where people can use their purchases to signal their altruism.
Good luck!
I think this is a cute idea and could go viral. A best case scenario would be something where your challenge goes viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge or becomes traditional like giving $$$ to the Salvation Army at Christmas.
Are you involved with a charity that you would want to use this for?
No, because it’s possible you observe blue tile or red tile.
You observe things (alive) or don’t observe things (not alive.)
In the first situation, the observer knows multiple facts about the world could be observed. Not so in the second case.
In the tile case, the observers on average will be correct. Some will get too many heads, some few. But the observers on average will be correct. You won’t know whether you should adjust your personal estimate.
In the anthropic case, the observers on average will zero apocalypses no matter how common apocalypses are.
Imagine if in the tile case, everyone who was about to get more heads than average was killed by an assassin and the assassin told you what they were doing. Then when you did the experiment and lived, you would know your estimate was biased.
Hi Toby,
Can’t we imagine 100 people doing that experiment. People will get different results- some more heads than they “should” and some fewer heads than they “should.” But the sample means will cluster around the real rate of heads. So any observer won’t know if their result has too many heads or too few. So they go with their naive estimate.
With apocalypses, you know by definition you’re one of the observers that wasn’t wiped out. So I do think this reasoning works. If I’m wrong or my explanation makes no sense, please let me know!
Hey Ryan,
I think I agree with the religious comparison- they do seem similar to me and I liked that part of your post. I just think failed apocalyptic predictions don’t give that much evidence that we can discount future apocalyptic predictions.
Religious apocalypses are maybe a little different because I think (but don’t know) that most people who predict the end of the world via God are claiming that all possible worlds end, not just predicting an event that will normally occur.
I mostly think anthropic reasoning is good (but there is a voice in my head telling me I’m crazy whenever I try to apply it).
I agree on the value of the documentary. I honestly wish I had that skill set, I think it could be a really big deal.
Fascinating. Have any public health departments tried snake extirpation in certain areas? (Or is that an obviously flawed approach?)
Project looks really cool. I appreciate you sharing this. I hope this project continues to grow.
I really want to know what FTX ended up funding since the rejected grants I know of looked really promising to me.
I think more people being exposed to GiveWell would be good. Richer audiences with disposable incomes (CNBC/Bloomberg watchers?) I think would be a good target audience.
I do agree that not every part of EA would benefit from general awareness- debates on moral realism, competing theories of utilitarianism and so forth.
More so, the absence of EA on TV just surprised me. I didn’t walk around with a clear estimate of how many mentions in my head, but I thought GiveWell would be more prominent for sure.
Maybe I could get a more precise rate. The 50% assumption is close to the average success rate over the last 20 years.
There weren’t sufficiently similar ballot initiatives, IMO, to make me want to use a more specific reference class.