Community Organiser for EA UK
Organiser for EA Finance
DavidNash
Karma: 4,586
Nigeria’s Missing 50 Million People
I’m not sure having a “bigger EA tent” leads to more funding/interest, if anything, people may be less likely to fund/support/be interested in a group that supports many different areas rather than the cause they mainly care about. At least it seems like cause specific orgs get much more funding than multi-cause/EA orgs.
I think this is outside the scope of the book, the example of Operation Desert Storm wasn’t that the general was trying to do the most good, but was given an objective by people higher up (who maybe made mistakes with their own strategic thinking).
I’m not even sure the book would suggest you ignore these externalities if that was the goal you were aiming for, it’s about providing a framework and some tools to help come up with better strategies.
Book Summary: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
There is a post here that looks into this question. (Although almost 10 years ago).
”There are some good reasons for why large donors would want to not give too much money to a charity at once:1 - Avoiding excessive reserves: Because of the opportunity costs (other charities could use money productively sooner), it is undesirable to have a charity having excessive reserves. Ideally, they would be promised a steady stream of funding if they meet specific targets over many years in order for them to be able to plan ahead.
2 - Risk diversification: Funds should be distributed to several high impact organisations in order to diversify the risk of one of them not performing well.
3 - Incentivizing others to join the cause area:
a—Countries: By restricting funding to a particular country, one incentivizes the country to invest in very effective health interventions themselves and use their (often very limited) domestic resources to close the funding gap between donations and the full cost of delivering effective health interventions. Poorer, low-income countries (such as Ethiopia) are less able to do this than low-to-middle income countries (such as India).
b—Charities: By restricting funding to charities, they’re being kept on their toes, so that they do not rely on a particular foundation or big grant giver exclusively and apply for other grants. For instance, in the past, the Gates foundation has heavily funded the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. However, Gates later discontinued SCI’s funding not because of too little effectiveness, but because, since their effectiveness had been established, other funders would more readily fund them.
c—Other donors: By restricting funding to particular charities, other donors are incentivized to also invest in the effective charities. For instance, the Against Malaria foundation has a broader appeal to small private donors than more high-expected-value interventions. Thus, even though theoretically, the Gates foundation, which is the largest private foundation in the world with an endowment of US$42.9 billion[4], could buy every person in Africa a bednet every two years (population of Africa (1 Billion) * Cost of Bednet (5 Dollars) = 5 Billion dollars) that would rapidly deplete their limited resources and then they could not spend their money on other very effective causes. They might reason that (small) more risk-averse donors (who want to be certain that their money will have an impact) will close the funding gap of very effective and established interventions and that they can instead spend more money on riskier, high expected value areas.
4 - Technological Innovation: New technological innovations—such as a very effective malaria vaccine—might be discovered, and these might be more cost-effective.
5 - High risk, high reward project:
For these reasons, one needs to come up with short-term room for more funding estimates.Crucially, many room-for-more-funding numbers do not include scale-up and seem to be an estimate of how much money the charities can use to fund projects in the short-term (i.e. in the next couple of years). In other words, these estimates do not take into account potential mid-term scale-up of their interventions into other countries or into more projects (see for instance[5],[6]). For instance, Givewell reports that AMF’s room for more funding in the next year is $25 Million, which translates to roughly 5 million bednets. Because AMF has reported to be constricted in terms of funding in the short-term, they had not been actively reaching out to other countries to discuss new net programs in the beginning of 2015[7]. AMF also has more leverage with regards to national malaria control programs agreeing to implement their strict and rigid monitoring and evaluation process, when they agree to give governments millions as opposed to thousands of bednets[8].
Because these room for more funding estimates do not include scale up, the Gates foundation cannot simply close the funding gap for bednets.”
Also if there was a way of automating this work, I’d be interested in chatting about that.
You may find other sources from the links I include in these newsletters.
I think people can be heavily involved in something without having to take the identity of that thing. For example, if someone worked 15 years at Google, they wouldn’t have to describe themselves as a ‘googler’ even if the P&C team calls everyone a googler with a shared Google identity.
What’s your reasoning?
Self identification makes most sense to me.
For example “at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as “effective altruists”. ”
I’m assuming the posts and comments were both (separately) indexed to 1 at the start of the graph.
They have hosted 1-3 EA UK events a month and a few more adjacent events over the last few years.
I agree that it’s inaccurate to say that it’s only people at top universities who are likely to have outsized influence, but that’s not what I said.
Maybe you’re combining the idea that there is too much spending on top universities with the idea that the spending could be spread out amongst more of them rather than spent on non university movement building.
For movement building strategy, it will depend on whether you think a mass movement achieves your goals better than specific fields. For example in animal welfare, it makes sense for GFI to target entrepreneurs and tissue engineers whereas vegan advocacy is aimed more at students and a wider audience.
I don’t know how the cost benefit calculation works out but retreats have different costs than conferences (including some overnight accommodation) and less tangible costs associated with using a different venue for each event.
I would also assume there are quite a few more events that aren’t listed online.
Choosing which universities to focus on and how you run a uni group are two different questions.
Why do you think that it’s inaccurate that people at top universities are more likely to go on to have outsized influence?
It’s not that it is elitist in the sense that they value top university students more, it’s elitist in that they want people who are more likely to go on to have outsized influence/money to give more of that away to others.
It doesn’t make as much sense to ask poorer students to give away more of their income, or shift their career away from one that maximises their own and their families welfare for the benefit of others.
I think there is more value in separating out AI vs bio vs nuclear vs meta GCR than having posts/events marketed as GCR but be mainly on one topic. Both from the perspective of the minor causes and the main cause which would get more relevant attention.
Also the strategy/marketing of those causes will often be different and so it doesn’t make as much sense to lump them together unless it is about GCR prioritisation or cross cause support.
One category that you didn’t include are people that agree with the ideas and take action, but don’t want to or are too busy to attend lots of EA meetups.
Yeah, I don’t know if that dynamic exists but it would be interesting if we could see what the forum looks like if you just count votes from different locations.
I have heard anecdotally that there is the opposite problem in Uganda and Burkina Faso.
In Burkina Faso the issue was that GDP per capita numbers were calculated from industrial output divided by population estimates so in order to look good, local government had an incentive to underestimate population so they seemed richer.