Thanks for the response. You’re right, the relevant question isn’t keeping GWWC going but is if there are promising new growth opportunities that the extra funding will pay for, which you say there are this year. There’s also some neatness to GWWC being able to support/grow its staff with 10% of the total yearly donations of the people who pledge 10% via it. I haven’t thought whether that’s the appropriate model, but it provides a way to pace growth rather than keeping going until you’ve matched their total donations.
Ervin
Karma: 127
It’s worth reassuring people that even if the full goal isn’t met it isn’t a disaster—there isn’t a funding gap for keeping GWWC itself going, which could presumably be done quite cheaply. I know there’s a perception that this fundraising round has been a struggle, and there’s been a lot of scepticism about it (e.g. (here)[https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/882996591756699/]). But that isn’t that damning: it was bound to happen at some point at which GWWC asked for more money to fund more paid employees, rather than keeping going until GWWC got as much money as the people who’ve signed it’s pledge are giving.
It could be useful to mention that sort of thing on future AMAs
Ah, I meant would he still be answering questions that got asked later.
Nick Cooney’s book is fantastic, even better than Singer’s. (Far from being animal focused, it doesn’t mention animal rights much at all.)
Now that MIRI is focused on math research (a good move) and not on outreach
Any links on this?
What path did MIRI’s staff take there? How many came from other charities?
Will you still be answering questions now, or in future?
I got into a conversation with ‘Telofy’ about his post about dissociation being a necessary or helpful approach for some Effective Altruists, and he suggested that it might be useful to use the survey find out how many people have the problem he described there or find his solution useful.
It may be useful to find out how many people have this problem or find this solution useful. Does anyone share or not share it?
Is this post missing part of it?
You can ‘retract’ which crosses it out, signalling ‘don’t bother reading’.
I now think this was a huge underestimate.
I’d estimate a thousand, about.
Seems like another uncharitable implicit argument against the EAs known for favouring robustness (GiveWell, the Vancouverites, people skeptical about leafleting and metacharities and xrisk on those grounds). I’ve heard experts say the most important parts of asteroid detection are fully funded. If they weren’t people would generally accept funding them as a priority.
Tagging is a killer feature of Facebook.
Also, it would be worth trying to work out what about a career in the arts they think is required for their happiness and seeing whether you could find higher impact alternatives that provided this.
Depending on what you mean by the arts I suspect that would be very likely to be low impact. That would suggest trying to convince them to change course though I think that’s not likely to be successful, meaning it would be best to focus on other people.
Have you considered doing something that could go viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge? The potential upside from that would make it worth a shot for the effective altruist community.
I’ve been looking for EA projects to fund—what’s your budget for this year, and is it funded?