I think this is a great idea and personally I think it’s relevant enough for the forum
freedomandutility
[Question] Has anyone done any work on how donating to lab grown meat research (https://new-harvest.org/) might compare to Giving Green’s recommendations for fighting climate change?
[Question] Are global pandemics going to be more likely or less likely over the next 100 years?
Should someone start a grassroots campaign for USA to recognise the State of Palestine?
I didn’t downvote this comment, but
a) This may have not been your intention, but even in context, the “white supremacy” claim in the e-book does read as your claim
b) I don’t think “poorer countries should transfer their wealth to richer countries” supports “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources”. The richest countries include many countries that aren’t majority white such as Singapore, Qatar, UAE, Taiwan etc, so I don’t think the ‘overwhelmingly’ criterion is met here.
c) I’m of the opinion that people should refrain from ever using terms “in a legal scholarly sense”; instead they should either use the term in its usual sense or create a new term with a more specific definition.
That being said, I think a charitable reading of your e-book makes it seem like you are describing certain conclusions of longetermism as supporting ‘white supremacy’, and that you are using the term in a ‘legal scholarly sense’ and defining it as “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources”. I don’t know if you have made this claim elsewhere but it did not seem like your e-book claims that “longtermists are white supremacists”.
I think this is a brilliant idea! I’d like to recommend a video on how the news tends to focus on novel and infrequent problems, and how this systematically misses some of the worst problems which are happening far more frequently, which messes with our ideas of what the worst problems are.
Great! I’d also recommend reaching out to leaders of university EA groups who might be able to share the videos on social media
Thank you for writing this!
One question I have for you:
How do you think a UK parliamentary assistant role compares to a role doing policy work at an NGO working at a more international level / in a less affluent country?
Yes it is, thank you!
Thanks for your posts about ESG!
One thing I’m unclear on is “To judge whether ESG investing is actually having an impact, we need to look at scenarios where there is a tension between ESG factors and profitability factors.”
In my view, given that businesses / investors aren’t perfect at profit maximisation, it seems like situations where ESG increases profits compared to no ESG should still be thought of as part of ESG’s impact.
I’m going to a more detailed post on this when I have time, but I think we should be more stringent in thinking of EA’s priority cause areas as problems with cost-effective interventions that are easier to find, and other areas as problems with cost-effective interventions that are harder to find.
I think some people might have downvoted on the basis of “the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t seem like it should be a priority EA cause area” (which I’d agree with), rather than “this intervention doesn’t seem cost-effective”.
- 21 Jul 2021 22:54 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on EA cause areas are just areas where great interventions should be easier to find by (
EA cause areas are just areas where great interventions should be easier to find
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve added an attempt at this to the post
So in both of the examples provided, EAs would be funding / carrying out interventions that improve the effectiveness of other work, and it is this other work that would improve well-being / preserve lives in expectation.
Because I suspect that these interventions would be relatively cheap, and because this other work would already have lots of resources behind it, I think these interventions would slightly improve the effectiveness with which a large amount of resources are spent, to the extent that the interventions could compare with GW top charities in terms of expected value.
Yep exactly that!
I think the interventions would be very specific to the domain. I mentioned an intervention to direct pro-Palestinian activism towards a tangible goal, and with redirecting western anti-racism work towards international genocide prevention, this could possibly be done by getting western anti-racism organisations to partner with similar organisations in countries with greater risk of genocides, which could lead to resource / expertise sharing over a long period of time.
Hi, thanks for providing those reasons, I can totally see the rationale!
One general point I’d like to make is if a proposed intervention is “improving the efficiency of work on cause X”, a large amount of resources already being poured into cause X should actually increase the EV of the proposed intervention (but obviously, this is assuming that the work on cause X is positive in expectation, and as you say, some may not feel this way about some pro-Palestinian activism).
That’s great to hear! I too am quite skeptical about finding many good interventions in this area for the reasons you describe, I think most good interventions here would be along the lines of “improving the efficiency with which resources are being used” rather than “adding more resources”
Hi, thank you for your post!
As a student involved with some community building work and some other voluntary EA-aligned work, I’m still a bit reluctant (perhaps irrationally so) to apply for “converting energy to time” funding and thought that I’d share what I think my reservations are.
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I think it feels too self-centred to consider things like healthy ready meals and Ubers for me to be worth EA funding when this could theoretically go to AMF instead.
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I’m worried that I won’t end up using the time saved for EA work.
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I’m worried that getting funding will make me feel a stronger external obligation towards EA work than I’d like (over say, just relaxing).
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I’m personally a little paranoid about EA falling into a meta trap (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/J3gZxFqsCFmzNosNa/ea-risks-falling-into-a-meta-trap-but-we-can-avoid-it) which slightly biases me against funding + asking to be funded for meta work.
Having thought about this, I think it could make sense for me to try spending more for a while to convert money into time, then determine how much of this time I’m using for EA work, and then try to work out what a reasonable amount of funding to request would be based on this.
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I think this is still a good cause area for EAs:
I think the potential positive effects of global drug legalisation on opioid access in LMICs adds massively to the expected value
I agree that this area is probably not neglected in absolute terms, but I suspect that it might be neglected relative to the expected value of global drug legalisation
I think a global angle (which might have more of a focus on working with WHO and the UN) might not even be neglected in absolute terms