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.
Yeah I think that is a good point although I donāt know if Iād say āsignificant differencesā ā the effect size here seems really small and also Iād expect since they donāt 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 Iād guess that EAs are in general more in the well-off category, although of course not exclusively.
Just anecdata-wise I donāt know many moms in my bubble whoād say they were worse offāit 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 donāt really feel it, I donāt know.
Knowing you Jacintha, curious what you would say in your own N=1 case but would understand if you didnāt want to post it on the forum!
Thanks ZoeāIt is a good point as I think menās and womenās views could differ here quite a bit.
My general take on my partner (canāt 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 sheād 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 donāt know! If you have specific questions Iād 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 @Kirstenāthank you for the tips. Iāll 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 Iāve 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.
Iād 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 Iāve 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+ letās say) were an order of magnitude lower than Iād 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 arenāt doing that much on average, I donāt 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 wouldnāt 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 donāt get to scale where the marginal unit cost is low.
Wow, amazing work!
Thanks for the great work as usual. This is a very good snapshot of where people are at.
I would love to see an analysis that normalizes for meta funds flowing into causes areas. In @Joel Tanās recent Meta Funding Landscape post, he states that OP grants 72% of total meta funds and that the lionās share goes to longtermism.
From his post:
And although the EA Infrastructure fund supports multiple cause areas, if you scroll through the recent grants you might be surprised at the percentage going to LT.
Funders should, of course, prioritize the cause areas they want, but I hope to make it clear to people that when a vast majority of funding goes to prop up one area, it should be no surprise that that area has lots of adherents that advocate it.
Normalizing some of this data for meta-funding received would show that, among other things, GH&D is on top DESPITE a significant LT funding advantage.
Hey Hauke, really interesting and importantāthanks!
A quick note:
The next $1k/ācap increase in a country at $10k/ācap is worth only 1/ā10th as much as in a country with $100k/ācap, because, the utility gained from increasing consumption from $1k to $10k is much greater than the utility gained from increasing consumption from $11k to $20k, even though the absolute dollar amounts are the same.
The claim in the part I bolded should be reversed, no? E.g. Increasing $1K where GDP/ācap is $100K is worth 1/ā10th as much...etc.
I think one of the major problems I see in EA as a whole is a fairly loose definition of āimpactā.
I find the statement is more precise if you put ālongtermismā where āEAā is. Is that your sense as well?
I continue to be impressed by the Effektiv Spenden team. Well done everyone!
Thanks for this and for your grants database. I didnāt know about it and it is very useful.
Iād be curious if you or anyone else reading this has more concrete ideas about how to improve the āsuperstructureā as you call it.