Community Organiser for EA UK
Organiser for EA Finance
DavidNash
Karma: 4,734
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.
Could also be the Bay Area/UK voting dynamic.
For UK, data from CAF.
”The proportion of donations going to overseas aid and disaster relief (7% -£931m) halved from a high in 2022 (14%)”
State of Global Development & EA (2024)
Over time it was getting less engagement, and I felt that the content made more sense as a substack/newsletter than a forum post—it’s not the kind of post that leads to discussions.
It’s also not a new thing—The Elitist Philanthropy of So-Called Effective Altruism—from 2013.
I’m not sure you have to do anything with it, generally groups that suggests money/influence should be shifted from A to B will get a negative response from the people it may affect or people who disagree with that direction of change. I tend to find energy spent on ideological EA critics is less valuable than good faith critics/people who are just looking for resources to help themselves to more good.
Depending on what you are aiming to achieve with that section of the website, you don’t have to have notable figures, you could include people who are most relevant (or not include individuals at all).
For example Magnify Mentoring has people who have benefited from their mentoring programs. EA Philippines have photos of their local community. EA for Christians have stories from members on their community tab and no profiles of people on their intro page.
Thanks for the shout-out akash, I appreciate it.
With engagement, there might be less comments/likes on substack but it generally gets 1.2k-1.5k views per month compared to the forum which was around 200-400 views per month.
Could the main difference be that TBP is a simple process change with reduced costs, while EA-style giving would fundamentally alter grant evaluation requiring more overhead from the funder.
I also think EA would involve extra costs to existing grantees, they will have to provide more evidence of their effectiveness or lose out to orgs that have those systems in place.
Separately I think it will be very hard to get existing foundations to shift to use more EA frameworks unless their main donors become interested in it. There is probably more to be gained by finding and helping the UHNW people/orgs that are inclined towards EA already.
There is a post about this (although it was written in 2015).
There are some good reasons for why large donors would want to not give too much money to a charity at once:
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.
Risk diversification: Funds should be distributed to several high impact organisations in order to diversify the risk of one of them not performing well.
Incentivizing others to join the cause area:
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).
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.
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.
Technological Innovation: New technological innovations—such as a very effective malaria vaccine—might be discovered, and these might be more cost-effective.
High risk, high reward project:
CGD has a different take on this type of migration.
”Between the start of 2021 and 2022, the number of Nigerian-born nurses joining the UK nursing register more than quadrupled, an increase of 2,325. Becker’s human capital theory would suggest that this increase in the potential wages earned by Nigerian-trained nurses should lead to an increase in Nigerians choosing to train as nurses. So what happened? Between late 2021 and 2022, the number of successful national nursing exam candidates increased by 2,982—that is, more than enough to replace those who had left for the UK.”
″To fully realise these benefits, Nigeria would need to embrace emigration, realising that nurses are likely going to leave anyway and doing everything they can to reap the benefits. Yet, they appear to be doing the opposite. New guidelines announced on 7 February 2024 state that nurses must work for two and half years before being allowed to work overseas, a move nurses contest. This policy is far from optimal; restrictions on emigration are inefficient, inequitable, and unethical. Indeed, Ghana had a similar scheme, but ended up scrapping it because they were unable to employ all of their nurse trainees at home.”
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”. ”