I’m working on impact markets – markets to trade nonexcludable goods. (My profile.)
I have a conversation menu and a Calendly for you to pick from!
If you’re also interested in less directly optimific things – such as climbing around and on top of boulders or amateurish musings on psychology – then you may enjoy some of the posts I don’t cross-post from my blog, Impartial Priorities.
Pronouns: Ideally she or they. I also still go by Denis and Telofy in various venues.
Thanks, that’s a great info graphic! I’d need something more generic, intervention agnostic, though, because we’ll be fund-raising for LLINs. Maybe something will come of that design collective.
Some of the tips I received when I first asked for comments on this introduction in the Facebook group have inspired me to start working on another version of this text with almost the same content but a heavy focus only on the new opportunities effective altruism opens for all of us. I’ll first publish it on my blog when it’s done.
I can’t embed the video playlist. I think it’s a default setting of TinyMCE to strip iframes.
Yes, happened to me too. I thought it would save a version as private draft.
I’ve just written a business plan for a payroll giving and matching gifts SaaS provider that specializes in highly effective giving. I can send you a copy if you like, but I attached my full CV to it, so I don’t want to publish it in its current form.
The idea is to replicate the established model of such a SaaS provider but to convince companies to only match employee donations to highly effective charities to incentivize effective giving. Additionally, the management of the clients of such a provider will be in a perfect position to convey the idea of EA to their employees, so my idea was to add an EA outreach consulting service to the portfolio of the hypothetical SaaS provider.
CSR can take the form of shared value, risk management, corporate philanthropy, and possibly some mixed forms. Such a SaaS provider could add little benefit for the company if it already runs a shared value scheme, but in the other cases, especially in the last, an EA matching gifts scheme would add value to CSR that focuses on such goals as attracting talent or improving public perception. Especially since a common criticism leveled against CSR is that it is often self-serving and hence unfocused and nontransparent about its impact, such a program would enable a company to distinguish itself from other companies that engage in CSR.
My current plan is not to start such a SaaS provider, or not as a first option, but rather to first reach out to the existing providers of such software worldwide and ask whether they would be ready to use their position and leverage to approach their existing corporate clients and promote the same scheme themselves. With the help of AMF, I’ve compiled a list of ten more or less large providers. If this is close to what Charity Science would be interested in pursuing, then I’d be delighted to collaborate with you!
Especially the number 6 is hard (for me). I have colleagues who are completely content with their explicit opinion that suffering becomes irrelevant if it’s sufficiently far away from them spatially. One of them admits that he might be wrong but no longer wants to adapt his world view to new evidence. It’s a situation where I see no other way than number 6. But whenever I saw them I was reminded of all the suffering they disregard, in graphic detail. It became hard to concentrate on anything they said at work. What helped me was what Peter Singer writes in The Life You Can Save:
The question really amounts to asking: Is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: No. The others have, by refusing to help with the rescue, made themselves irrelevant. They might as well be so many rocks.
If I imagine them as talking rocks, I can cope.
Yes, thank you! I’ve mostly concentrated on the second aspect since it’s directly related to cost-effectiveness and very persuasive for me, but the first and third also complement it well.
I should print and hang an EA or AMF poster in the office; I just haven’t found any good ones yet. Or I can print Charity Science’s recent info graphic.
First I’d like to comment on “this may be hypocritical or otherwise dubious.” To me hypocrisy doesn’t seem morally relevant in itself. In outreach of course others are going to use this factor as a quick-and-dirty heuristic for assessing the feasibility of your proposed way of life, but if you donate to Animal Equality to turn others into vegetarians, they never get to know you.
I’ve recommended to people who didn’t want to become vegetarians that they compensate the harm by donating to a top ACE charity. ACE estimates that a vegetarian saves about 35–144 animals from lives as farmed animals per year, so around 90 maybe, for the sake of simplicity. It also estimates that the top charities save somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 animals from such life-long torture for $1,000, so $.1 to $1 per animal. Since ACE’s estimates are very rough, as ACE details itself, the interventions will usually become more expensive they are successful, and I’m not sure if suffering as a result of egg consumption is already included, I have advised donations in the area of $100 per year to one of the top charities. My trust in such cost-effectiveness estimates is such that I would rather err even higher.
Counterfactually speaking, there is also the harm in not influencing some of your peers to consume less meat, which you have to offset, so significantly more than a $100 donation is probably called for.
Hypocrisy aside (again), I find it intuitive that when a product is very cheap/cost-effective, like animal welfare, we should buy as much as possible of it instead of producing it ourselves. In fact the low price makes it an extremely attractive buy at the moment, which might soon change as more people become vegetarian. (This seems to be related to moral trade and our spiffy new impact certificates.)
On the other hand, this trade-off doesn’t apply to me—and probably not to many others either—as I’ve found vegetarianism to be just about zero effort and probably negative cost from the start. I’ve recently started supplementing creatine, but it’s €11 for €500 g, so at 5 g per day, it’s 11 cents per day. I would guess that this is still offset by my savings due to my not buying expensive meat.
Moreover there is something like the paradox of voting at work here where a tremendous advantage for everyone (democracy or animal welfare) is only achievable when a majority of people do something that to each of them in isolation would not seem cost-effective. Animal welfare may have a greater elasticity than democracy, but seeing how many people in my culture find it inappropriate to eat dogs or even consenting humans, there is probably some critical mass that only needs to be reached in order to establish vegetarianism as the norm. The cost-effectiveness of this factor is probably hard to estimate, like with scientific research.
I’m eliding a number more very convincing arguments for vegetarianism because they were already explained in other comments.
That sounds like a neat idea! Could you also post the newsletters here? My news-reading methodology relies on feeds (Atom and RSS), so it’s easier for me to follow the feed of this board, but I don’t want to miss anything you write in the newsletters either.
I’m also running a newsletter with Mailchimp, and emails with the two-column layout reliably got spam-filtered by Gmail, just in case you were considering it.
Some aspects of this broader post (mostly model #5) might also be a commentary on some recent posts on “dressing well.” Those seem to apply when you go leafleting in some very diverse locale or hold a presentation where you hardly know the audience, but usually you know where you leaflet and you know some things about your audience, and then specific forms of global weirdness may actually make you fit in with that specific group, build rapport, signal high status, etc.
At a company where I worked software developer I once, on a whim, wore a single-breasted suit jacket over my turtleneck, all black. It was totally weird and drew confused looks. My colleagues thought I was going somewhere after work where that apparel would’ve been appropriate. In another locale, all the high-status people wore too-large, faded, and holey pullovers (and other such pieces) probably to signal that what they value in their apparel are its thermal properties and not the social ones (ironically).
My take-away from that was that if I engage in in-person outreach efforts, I’d have to dress in various very different ways according to the audience—and that seems to be in line with the usual leafleting tips.
However I don’t often engage in such outreach. It’s more common that I’m among friends and would like to influence them. Among my friends, unconscious processes will likely already have influenced my own preferences in such a way that they fit the social dynamics of the group.
Then there’s also the aspect that my friends value some degree of anti-inductivity, contrarianism, and meta-contrarianism of various levels, so weirdness itself can be high-status even group-locally when it seems sensible or at least not less sensible than the social default.
Alrighty, I’m officially psyched about this, and I have a few more questions.
Owen wrote that the collaborative nature of charities would bar you from buying impact certificates for donations, but that this could be avoided if the charity writes them for donors, and you agreed. Since AMF converts donation into nets 1:1 unless you specifically make an unrestricted donation, I could probably just ask Rob to write a certificate for me over the full amount of the donation, right?
I believe that AMF has significant long-term impact, but you may disagree on the exact degree of significance, so a certificate over a $1,000 donation to AMF might not be priced at exactly $1,000 in the end (ignoring inflation), right? Is there going to be a precedent for such prices of donation impact certificates or should I submit one?
GiveDirectly is currently using 9% for administrative expenses and all that. If I make a $100 donation to them, should I ask for a certificate over the full amount or $91? I don’t want to rip them off impact-wise, but those 9% might be more valuable than any other 9 pp. of my donation.
What proof would you like to see that someone at GiveDirectly actually wrote that impact certificate for me?
I’d use AMF or GiveDirectly for this benchmark, but I’m also thinking about obtaining a certificate from Animal Equality that I’d be hesitant to sell to you for fear of influencing future prices of animal charity donations downward but that I would like to gift to carnivore friends in fractions that I hope offset a month of meat consumption. Is someone already doing this?
What would have to happen for impact certificates to become interesting for the mainstream investor? Would it be enough for a few major funders like Good Ventures, the Gates Foundation, a government, vel sim. announce that they will continually buy certificates for a fixed yearly budget? When will I be able to trade impact certificates at Wall Street?
Also, who is really going to own the impact you buy? Is it going to be owned by some sort of unincorporated voluntary association by the name of “The impact purchase” or by the funders in proportion to the funding they contributed?
Okay, thanks! Seems I have nine days left. That should be plenty to submit an offer over a benchmark donation certificate. (Update: done.) I think GD is probably the simpler baseline for this.
I hope the fact of it being a benchmark for this system (greater impact) won’t affect the usefulness of the benchmark (lower impact)? Those considerations cancel each other out impact-wise, right? This is getting curiouser and curiouser.
You had a few scenarios in your first post that sounded like they would be interesting for mainstream investors, like funding research in return for a share of the certificate. That sounds like something VCs might do.
Thankies! The Tumblr RSS feed should do the trick. They don’t have Atom unfortunately. I hope the voting works well on that board, because one in ten posts or so is going to be a bit off topic.
Using the feedback from Reddit would be valuable (and a form of reinforcement learning), but given how much other stuff I have to do, it’s unlikely to materialize. I’m happy to accept pull requests though. :‑3
:‑D
If there were 813 EAs in total, that also puts those who prioritize animal rights at 36.4%. Here’s the breakdown:
Poverty: 71.22%; Metacharity: 51.91%; Rationality: 50.55%; Prioritization: 42.44%; AI Risk: 40.84%; Environmentalism: 38.99%; X-Risk: 37.02%; Animals: 36.41%; Politics: 35.79%; Far Future: 28.66%;
I don’t remember the exact phrasing of the question, but because of the flexibility you note, I would find it easy to answer something like “In what cause areas have you supported or are you planning to support interventions this year?” than “In what cause areas do you support interventions?”
The overlap between the answers is not a great problem for me as respondent, since I can select several, but some of the options will become less meaningful if some people perceive the hypernym relationships differently. Maybe these answers can be instrumented via monetary donations or direct work for charities in the areas. (I hope I’m using that word right. ^^) That strategy will probably become more promising once Open Phil has put out concrete recommendations.
That’s also almost my experience, but for me “learning while working on a problem independently” applies in all phases about equally. I haven’t tried “learning while collaborating with people” at novice level, but it’s well possible that it’s useful.
It seems likely that some EAs have fallen prey to the streetlight effect, but I don’t see anything of the sort in the general EA population, and rather a slight bias in the opposite direction, but that may be my own risk aversion. What might look like the streetlight effect is that unproven high risk–high return interventions are countless, and only very few of them will be cost-effective at all, and an even tinier portion will have superior cost-effectiveness, so that when it comes to donating as opposed to research, (1) EAs don’t know which of countless high risk–high return interventions to support and so “make do” with streetlight ones, and (2) the capital they do invest into their favorite high risk–high return interventions is spread thinly in the statistics because there is little consensus about them. But that only holds in regard to donating, not prioritization research or EA startup ideas.
I put “make do” in quotation marks because I actually put a lot of hope into the flow-through effects of deworming, bed nets, cash transfers, etc. for empowering the poor.
Thanks! I’ll add a note about the LW oversampling.
Update: There are a lot of people with a quantitative background in the movement (well, people like me), so they’ll probably have more fun studying interventions that are more cleanly quantifiable. But I think GiveWell, ACE, et al. do a good job of warning against exaggerated faith in individual cost-effectiveness estimates and probably don’t fall prey to it themselves.
Animal Charity Evaluators has/have found that leafleting is a highly effective form of antispeciesist activism. I want to use it generally for effective altruism too. Several times a year I’m at conventions with lots of people who are receptive to the ideas behind EA, and I would like to put some well-designed flyers into their hands.
That’s the problem—“well-designed” is. My skills kind of end at “tidy,” and I haven’t been able to find anything of the sort online. So it would be great if a gifted EA designer could create some freely licensed flyers as SVG with the basic tenets of EA and some entry points for further research, all for anyone to print and distribute.
I could then just apply some minor edits for a specific convention theme to build greater rapport with the con goers and have it printed.