EA Meta for 8 years!
COO of Ambitious Impact (previously Charity Entrepreneurship).
Co-Founder of High Impact Professionals. We enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in donating their time, skills and resources effectively.
Ex-CTO and MD of Germany for Founders Pledge. Big on promoting Effective Giving.
Originally from New York, living in Berlin.
Thanks for the feedback—I can see that.
Thanks Mathias—very happy you posted this in this state and would encourage you and others to do more of this!
Thanks for this and for your grants database. I didn’t know about it and it is very useful.
I’d be curious if you or anyone else reading this has more concrete ideas about how to improve the ‘superstructure’ as you call it.
Yeah I think that is a good point although I don’t know if I’d say ‘significant differences’ – the effect size here seems really small and also I’d expect since they don’t control for income etc and just take the mean that potential gains in e.g. well-off moms are more than canceled out by worse-off moms who have a hard time making ends me, and I’d guess that EAs are in general more in the well-off category, although of course not exclusively.
Just anecdata-wise I don’t know many moms in my bubble who’d say they were worse off—it could be that they are and social desirability bias is at play or it could be that like in these papers they are and the effect size is just so small they don’t really feel it, I don’t know.
Knowing you Jacintha, curious what you would say in your own N=1 case but would understand if you didn’t want to post it on the forum!
Thanks Zoe—It is a good point as I think men’s and women’s views could differ here quite a bit.
My general take on my partner (can’t prioritize asking right now, but it is a good prompt for another post in the series!) having discussed these things over time is she is way more satisfied with life in general than she was before kids. I think she’d endorse the productivity and leadership upgrades, but prob feels the sting of working fewer hours more.
It is worth noting the post is mostly about how this affects EAs, which she is not, so I might be a tighter reference class here, although I have met a lot of families and they do seem to have different takes by gender, so maybe she is the right reference class. I don’t know! If you have specific questions I’d be happy to answer offline.
Thanks Mitchell, I appreciate the feedback.
Thank you for your support Uhitha! I hope you enjoy it. Please do let me know what you think.
Thanks David! No current plans but will talk to the publisher about it.
Very interesting @Kirsten—thank you for the tips. I’ll have my publicist follow up with those leads.
I am a dad myself and have on my list to make posts on my Substack about insights from having kids and impact. I give advice to EAs about many things, but I’ve notice my takes on parenting lead to really long conversations and follow up in a way that makes me think it could be valuable to the community.
I’d be very surprised if the downside of the initiative were significant in any way, but it seems like the upside potential is quite high, so I’ve included it in all of my social media.
If you perceive any sort of downside from it, you can always remove it again.
@Federico Speziali and I both originally looked into support for this cohort of folks, but I ultimately got more pessimistic on it for two reasons:
There were fewer people doing E2G than I thought.
Those who were doing E2G were giving less than I thought.
I came to the view that those E2Gers giving significant amounts (100K+ let’s say) were an order of magnitude lower than I’d hoped (maybe 50 instead of 500) and also that they were already known to the community for the most part and already pretty much maximizing their impact.
There could be room for an org that tries to bring more folks like this into the fold, but I am a bit pessimistic that it would be successful, as many EAs purport to do E2G and give smallish sums, and if card-carrying EAs who are saying they do E2G aren’t doing that much on average, I don’t think those unfamiliar with EA would likely convert to high-giving E2Gers. They might learn about EA and then E2G and then take it up, and we already have a pipeline for that.
I should say I wouldn’t want to dissuade others from working on this as despite what I said I think this is underexplored on the margin and could bear fruit with some cheap experiments, but I think it is important to relay my true take here as well, even if it is a bit negative.
Should also note that GWWC is looking into this a bit so they might have a take they want to add.
What areas would you like to see EAs dedicate more of their human capital to?
What is EA getting the most wrong?
My hot take is that vegan alternatives generally just don’t get to scale where the marginal unit cost is low.
It is a really good point and with many projects you really have to wonder if they are above the bar. Indeed you have to take that very seriously, because the dollars you get are often very counterfactual (e.g. they’d go to Against Malaria Foundation instead). Ideally you’d get a market signal by charging customers and using their willingness to pay to understand if your service is valuable. But I’ve seen time and time again that orgs don’t pay for things that are clearly +EV for them.
I like bounties and advanced market commitments and hadn’t thought of bringing them meta—thank you for that!