Thanks :) I plan to do so as soon as I have the karma
Elizabeth
Karma: 4,383
Map of Open Spaces in Effective Altruism
Thanks Sean. If someone was interested in volunteering and didn’t want to bug you, what should they do? Subscribe to your newsletter? E-mail to get on a list for future volunteers? I’ll update the blog post accordingly.
Fixed in original post.
What’s your timeline on that? web programming is in my medium-term goals.
Not to my knowledge. This might be a good thing to suggest to .impact
Say someone has decided they want to work on a problem directly, rather than earn to give. How do you suggest they find projects?
Personally I’m especially interested in cause prioritization, psychology, health and education, which are a lot thinner on the ground than anti-poverty work.
From the title I expected “should we steer companies towards giving to highly effective charities”, to which the answer is obviously yes. X risk and animal suffering may be too controversial for them, but bed nets are not. This seems more like “Should EA seek publicity via corporate engagement”, which seems like a very different question.
For anyone who doesn’t want to read the whole thing + comments: It’s on average pretty effective( $50-$1667 to a GW charity) but the marginal effectiveness is pretty questionable. They throw out very little usable blood and sometimes have to use old blood, which is bad and would indicate that more blood is useful on the margins. But the best research indicates that the cost of recruiting additional donors is small relative to the price hospitals pay for blood, which suggests they don’t think they need more blood that badly. The complicating factor is whether paying for blood changes the quality of the product or the long term availability/blood banks fear of same.
Almost all of the numbers have large confidence intervals because the data just isn’t very good.
This is a real important distinction I had never thought of.
It seems like this would depend a lot on how you define EA. If you mean “people who attend EA Global” or even “people who read EA forums”, that’s probably a larger percentage who should do direct work than “people whose choices we hope will be influenced by EA philosophy”.
I’m finding this to be a really big question: do you think you could define what you mean by Effective Altruist?
It is also substantially easier to ask friends and family to donate to your fundraiser when they know you donated to theirs
This seems like an extremely important point, especially if the friend is likely to donate more than you did or donates the same amount but has some chance of being converted in the process.
Or you could just donate based on solid principles and not deny your own ability to make decisions?
That is great if that works for you. I think it’s important to recognize that humans aren’t moist robots, and if the path to getting a particular person to donate more to AMF is for them to give to the Make A Wish For Dying Kittens fund, then idonating to MAWFDK is the effective choice.
So there’s not an analogous situation to help other people understand this from an animal advocate’s perspective, but to put it mildly, when other people eat animals at EA events, it feels as if some people at that event gathered in a circle and began writing hate articles against the Centre for Effective Altruism or cutting up malaria nets that the Against Malaria Foundation was planning to distribute. It feels like a slap in the face to our work, and worse, like a dismissal of the plight of the billions of suffering farmed animals
I agree with your conclusion, and co-lead an EA group that puts it into practice. But I’m incredibly uncomfortable with framing this as “because it upsets people” rather than “because it’s the right thing to do.” My group lost at least one member because the concept of QALYs was profoundly upsetting to them- should we stop using QALYs to prevent that? Where is the line?
Practical arguments:
I once spent 30 minutes debating EA recruitment techniques with someone and we spent the entire time talking past each other. Two days later these terms came out and we realized he was talking softcore and I was talking hardcore. Having those terms available would have made it a much more productive discussion because the techniques and best targets are completely different.
The advice is different. 80k hours’ advice for EA global participants is almost opposite its public advice (e.g. flipping the emphasis on direct work vs. donating). I advise people on the street to give to AMF, my statistician father to donate to GiveWell, “softcore” EAs to OPP, and “hardcore” to donate to metacharities, unproven new ideas, or to nudge charities to be more effective.
At a certain point of income and what someone’s time produces for the world, donating to even the most effective charity is net negative to the world, because freeing up their time or brain has more impact. Having a socially acceptable way to mark that and reverse the pressure to donate seems really useful.
These aren’t 100% correlated- by definition the people who shouldn’t donate shouldn’t donate to metacharities. And we need better words. But I think the concept is useful enough to keep.
Proposal: kill the TSA. It makes people miserable, eats time, reduces travel, and take people to accept government intrusion. It’s relatively low hanging fruit because the baptists part of the baptist and bootlegger coalition (anti-terrorism) is so weak and the bootleggers so cartoonishly evil. It is a matter of financial competition with the TSA union and equipment manufacturers, neither of which has that much money.
Benefits of success include the object level ones, building up lobbying expertise for something harder, and a visible reversal of the reduction of liberty inside the US.
I’m working on expanding this idea into a full post; what I have now is a fine tumblr post but not nearly polished enough for EA forum. Would you be willing to take a look and give comments? A lot of what I want to do is talk about what decisions need what information, and you’re in a good position to know that.
This is what I was trying to get at with http://acesounderglass.com/2015/05/11/map-of-open-spaces-in-effective-altruism/ . I don’t think the number of unsolved problems is at all well publicized.