London GWWC group co-lead: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/london
Organiser of the EY Effective Altruism workplace group and EA London Quarterly Review coworking sessions.
Original EA Taskmaster https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qcnrRD3ZHSwibtBC/ea-taskmaster-game
In my day job, I’m an accountant turned product person in tax technology.
Thank you for sharing this! It is really brave to share but I think it is valuable to have concrete examples of the value they provide
I read this more like the guy was lonely and wanted community so was looking for some kind of secular religion to provide grounding to his life.
I personally think people overrate people’s stated reasons for extreme behaviour and underrate the material circumstances of their life. In particular, loneliness https://time.com/6223229/loneliness-vulnerable-extremist-views/
(would genuinely be interested to hear counter arguments to this! I’m not a researcher so honestly no idea how to go about testing that hypothesis)
I’ve had similar thoughts. My hunch is that the demographic this messaging would land particularly well with would be wealthy older women.
Somewhat related post about lead in the UK: https://ukdayone.org/briefings/a-hidden-epidemic-addressing-childhood-lead-poisoning-in-the-uk
I enjoyed this, thanks for writing. I definitely think the wrong people read Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
For those (like me) that had the opposite inclination towards domination and shame (rather than sacrifice and guilt), I’d recommend the Tao Te Jing.
It’s a lot about accepting your fundamental lack of control over the world while balancing it with your individual agency.
(The Stephen Mitchell version is my favourite out of the translations I’ve read but apparently is not the most accurate translation: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html)
Sorry to hear that you’re having a rough time!
When I’m feeling like this, I find that the only thing that helps is actually finishing a project end-to-end so I feel momentum.
Something I intrinsically think is valuable but wasn’t going to get done otherwise. (Like improving wikis or cleaning up a mess in a park).
Going as small as possible while still being satisfying helps remind me that there are things within my control and people around me that I can help.
I also liked this post from FarmKind
I personally think of it similarly to wearing my pledge pin irl. I don’t use emojis to signal anything else.
Imo I’d only really push you to add it on LinkedIn:
Users are often wealthy or status seeking people doing business development work
LinkedIn is a reasonable place to signal association with a particular brand ie. Giving What We Can.
If you’ve got an impressive / high status CV then that adds credibility to GWWC
It is a marketing to a more risk averse segment and signalling that this is already a movement with momentum
It makes it less cringe for future pledgers to add the emoji and perhaps do further advocacy for effective giving
Useful post.
I think basic accounting ratios and financial analysis are quite helpful for getting a basic view on return on donations and high level valuations of charities.
This is a decent high level overview: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fundamentalanalysis.asp
However, I do think this post underrates the value of assets.
Increased cost effectiveness over time usually comes from investment in quality assets (I’d include staff costs as assets - for management accounting purposes not for external financial reporting purposes).
Does AIM publish any estimates on the valuation of its IP and other intangible assets?
I think there was a conservative counterfactual estimate of the value of a founder somewhere too.
I’d say there’s a decent number of highly effective charities with very valuable IP that are too leveraged on the output of very few staff members.
This makes them riskier and more exposed to shocks.
Quite frankly I’d rather they fundraised more than they needed and hired extra staff / had more in reserves for contractors than continue to run lean.
I’d say this is missing where GiveDirectly is extremely cost effective.
Their corporate and government friendly brand.
If they can turn the tide on cash-transfers being the benchmark for foreign aid (and maybe even internal government policy) then that might change the game in terms of political efficacy.
Your visuals are awesome Alex.
EA designers—we need you 🫵🏻
Agree with this take ⬆️
My mental health has greatly improved since joining EA and I think that’s because:
the culture encourages having an internal locus of control (or being agentic) which is associated with better mental health outcomes
it faced me with the reality that I’m incredibly privileged in global terms so I should be using that to help others rather than feeling sorry for myself
helping others is intrinsically satisfying
I do think there’s more that could be done to develop psychological safety and remind people that their intrinsic value is separate from their instrumental value to the EA movement.
This is why I do community building work.
Idk I’m not a maximiser but I do think it’s useful to have barriers to entry that require strong signals of shared values. I’m not interested in running a social club for privileged people that aren’t actually contributing money and/or labour into EA causes.
I think most EAs living in rich countries should by default be working normal jobs while donating 10% and contributing to EA projects on the side. That does help calibrate with the wider world.
Hey—thanks for your reply!
I’d like to caveat that I’m not sure I got the tone quite right in my original quick take. I’m glad I put it out there, but it is very much based on vibes and is motivated by an impression that there’s opportunities for stronger relationships to be built. (Mostly based on conversations with AIM folks but I don’t speak for them.)
My vibes-based take looks like it might not be true. There might be more collaboration than I can see, or it might just make sense to growth separately since there are clear differences in opinion for cause prioritisation and approach to cost effectiveness. CEA also is beholden to one funder which makes it much harder to be independent from that funder’s views.
To be clear I think everyone involved cares deeply, is competent and is, very reasonably, prioritising other things.
I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I can’t speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have “EA” in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.
Agree with this—I don’t think names should be changed and I don’t think AIM should/wants to maintain the EA brand. I do think there should be more centralisation of comms though (especially as it seems hard to hire for) - I’m generally in favour of investing more in infrastructure and cutting costs on operating expenses where possible (see my comment here)
I think it’s hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and I’m guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and it’s not clear to me what the net result is.
This is fair and my original take was too strong. Edited to reflect that.
I’m not sure who “they” are in this sentence.
I don’t personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.
We shouldn’t be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
As noted above, I don’t speak for either group here—I’m only a volunteer.
I think fighting was too strong a word, but I don’t get the impression there are strong trust-based relationships which I do think is leaving impact on the table by missing potential opportunities to cut costs in the long term by centralising infrastructure/operating expenses.
I’d say the key thing CEA is providing is infrastructure/assets rather than product/services and that tends to be the kind of thing to centralise where possible. Ie. EA forum, community health, shared resources/knowledge, distribution channels etc.
Events are closer to product/services and. AIM has done conferences in the past but they aren’t open to wider groups like EAGxs.
The blocker for those orgs is probably capacity—both AIM and GWWC are <20 people, HIP is 2 people, EA UK [1] is 0.8 FTE. For me personally, I do run a lot of events but my frustration is that the barrier to entry is pretty high because of existing network effects, the fact that they do have know-how and that I basically have to do a ton of my own marketing and maintain my own mailing list to run GWWC events.[2]
We could compete but why are we doing that? This is not a zero sum game for impact, it is very positive sum. There’s so much work to be done.
I agree donations and switching careers are really important! However—I think those shouldn’t be the only ways.
Having your job be EA makes it difficult to be independent—livelihoods rely on this and so it makes EA as a whole less robust IMO. I like the Tour of Service model https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/waeDDnaQBTCNNu7hq/ea-tours-of-service
Earning to give is not a good description for what I do because I’m not optimising across career paths for high pay for donations—more like the highest pay I can get for a 9-5.
I think of it more as “Self-funded community builder”
On cross pollination, yeah I think we agree. The self sorting between cause areas based on intuition and instinct isn’t great though—it means that there are opportunities to innovate that are missed in both camps.
This is helpful and I agree with most of it. I think my take here is mostly driven by:
EA atm doesn’t seem very practical to take action on except for donating and/or applying to a small set of jobs funded mostly by one source. My guess is this is reducing the number of “operator” types that get involved and selects for cerebral philosophising types. I heard about 80k and CEA first but it was the practical testable AIM charities that sparked my interest THEN I’ve developed more of an interest in implications from AI and GCRs.
When I’ve run corporate events, I’ve avoided using the term Effective Altruism (despite it being useful and descriptive) because of the existing brand.
I think current cause prioritisation methods are limiting innovation in the field because it’s not teaching people about tools they can then use in different areas. There’s probably low hanging fruit that isn’t being picked because of this narrow philosophical approach.
I’m not a comms person so my AIM should be the face of EA thing is too strong. But I do think it’s a better face for more practical less abstract thinkers
Yeah on reflection I think b) is too strong (virtue of this being a quick take).
My best explanation is that they don’t have the management capacity to effectively scale and AIM’s current comms are very EA insider coded. Very excited about them making a strong comms hire https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YbP7m187DK6CNbijnu5lHQj4JWpdQB8hR4w6tgFnVfY/edit?usp=drivesdk
I’d be curious about your unpolished thoughts if you’d like to DM me.
Centre for Effective Altruism and Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) are probably named the wrong way around in terms of what they actually do and IMO this feeds into the EA branding problem.
Why do I think this?
“Effective” Altruism implies a value judgement that requires strong evidence to back up—like launching charities aiming to beat GiveWell benchmarks and raising large amounts of money from donors who expect to see evidence significant returns in the next 3 years or shut down.
IMO this is very friendly to a wide business-friendly and government audience
“Ambitious Impact” implies more speculative, less easy to measure activities in pursuit of even higher impact returns. My understanding is that Open Philanthropy split from GiveWell because of the realisation that there was more marginal funding required for “Do-gooding R&D” with a lower existing evidence base.
Why do we need “Do-Gooding R&D”?
So we can find better ways to help others in the future.
To use the example of a pharmaceutical company, why don’t they reduce the prices of all their currently functional drugs to help more people? So, they can fund their expensive hit-based R&D efforts. There’s obviously trade-offs, but it’s short sighted to pretend the low hanging fruit won’t eventually be picked.
So what?
IMO AIM has outcompeted CEA on a number of fronts (their training is better, their content (if not their marketing) is better, they are agile and improve over time). Probably 80% of the useful and practical things I’ve learned about how to do effective altruism, I’ve learned from them.
The AIM folks I’ve spoken to are frustrated that their results—based on exploiting cost-effective high-evidence base interventions—are used to launder the reputation of OP funded low evidence base “Do-gooding R&D.” I think before you should get to work on “Do-Gooding R&D”, you should probably learn how the current state of Do-Gooding best practices.
If we think about EA brand as a product, I’d guess we’re in “The Chasm” below as the EA brand is too associated with the “weird” stuff that innovators are doing to be effectively sold to lower risk tolerance markets.
This is bad because lower risk tolerance markets (governments etc) are the largest scale funders.
AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts. Too strong a take—see this reply to Lorenzo’s comment
Concrete suggestions
I’m not suggesting they swap names, its likely locked in at this point BUT I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ. Looking at where CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns. Retracted—too strong a take as highlight by this comment
One solution would be a merger since there are lots of synergies but they are too far away from each other in terms of views on cost effectiveness and funding independence to do so (yet)
I think they should be collaborating more, maybe coworking in the same office sometimes?
My wider take is that EA should become a profession (post building on this one incoming if I can ever actually finish it) so there is better regulation of individuals enabling us to have internally facing competition/innovation/R&D based on shared principles while generating externally facing standards that can be used by non-insiders and allow us to scale what works.
We shouldn’t be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
+1 Thank you for writing this!
I’d add that this is why I liked working for a big corporate right out of university.
Opportunity to make lots of sideways moves between different career paths without needing to apply for jobs externally. I just needed to network internally (easier on a global shared MS Teams) and ask if I could try stuff out.
Over 5 years and 1 uni internship at EY, I did:
Audit—energy sector
Audit—consumer goods
ICAS chartered accountancy qualification
International tax—transfer pricing
Tax technology—business analyst/sales
Tax technology—product manager
Lots of variety and lots of support which is good because I’m personally quite risk averse.
I’m very lucky to love what I do and I credit being able to try out lots of things out in a low stakes way.