Hi! A bit about me:
• I’m CEO at VIVID—an organization aspiring to scale effective self-improvement.
• I’ve been the executive director of EA Israel for the past 2.5 years
• My writings on the forum mostly discuss criticism and different approaches to community building, and the importance of branding in the context of EA.
I’ve seen very few discussions on “multiplayer perspective” in the community (besides value of coordination on 80k’s website, and the forum post How can we best coordinate as a community?, both written by Benjamin Todd), and I fear that we might be neglecting impactful opportunities.
I wonder whether actively encouraging people to take a multiplayer perspective, particularly in donations, can account for additional impact that we’re missing out on when we talk so often about the marginal impact an individual has. For instance, I wonder if donation advice should significantly change when given to a single person, compared to when it’s given to people who are willing to group together and donate a large amount of money. What do you think?
Thank you so much for putting together this valuable collection!
This is just the kind of effort we need in order to make EAHub better. There is already an organisations page on EAHub but it’s missing some of the organisations you listed. I encourage anyone who is willing to invest in collection activities to contact EAHub and join their team, so we can eventually build a strong knowledge center for the community.
I suggest Measuring Everything with units Of Wellbeing, or, in short, Meow.
This might support the new field of increasing global welfare through kitten distribtuion, as been proposed before.
Thank you for putting this together, I strongly agree with many of these points, especially the point of independent thinking.
I think the strength of this post’s argument varies when taking into account different “services” that the EA movement can provide individuals. For instance, for someone in their mid-career who is interested in EA in order to rethink their career path, there would be much more value in a more divergent EA movement that is focused on the EA toolkit.
Yet, that wouldn’t be the same for someone who looks for donation advice, for which we’d rather put much more focus on very few cause areas and donation opportunities.
That might also be true for someone in their early career who looks for career advice, but that would depend on how much independent thinking they’re willing to do, because I strongly agree that this is missing. I’ll add a quote from a Q&A with Will MacAskill ( Aug 2020) supporting that:
Habiba: … “What mistakes do you think most EAs, or people in the effective altruism community, are making?”
Will: …”more people should just be of the mind that they want to figure out the basics, not take anything for granted, and not defer to [others’ opinions].
At the moment, I think there’s a very small number of people doing that, even though I regard it as the core of what EA is about.”
I’m personally quite worried that the EA movement would end up filled with people who are fans of a certain cause area without being neutral about their cause. EA shouldn’t be about cheering for certain cause areas, it should be about prioritizing opportunities to do good, and not communicating this good enough internally and externally could be very dangerous for the movement in the long term and would make us miss a lot of our potential.
I’ve noticed that there are quite a few downvotes for this post, and not enough criticizing comments. I’d be happy to hear others’ opinions on this subject!
I’m adding another suggestion to the list: I think that instead of removing emphasis from the movement’s top causes, we might want to put an equal emphasis on the EA toolkit.
I believe that if you would ask all highly active EAs “what tools do EAs use in order to prioritize opportunities to do good?” you’d get very different answers, while I would hope that everyone could easily be able to recall a closed set of actionable guiding principles.
Thank you for this input! I agree this is an important question, but the team decided not to include it and other several questions in the larger survey as we wanted to make it relatively short. We did include this question in our in-depth survey, but when looking at the results, we realized it doesn’t hold actionable insight when looking only at our contributors and not at the larger community followers—so we didn’t include this question in the report as well.
This is one of the points we wanted to review before conducting next year’s survey—I’ll refer the team to your comment when this is reviewed, thank you!
Thank you for this post David. I’d like to add two points that emphasize how important this discussion is, and that its implications are beyond the moral stances of individuals:
1. I believe that when looking at this distinction as a movement, we should also take into account how people are put off by strong longtermism—whether we view regular longtermism as a good entry point for EA ideas, or if we endorse it as a legitimate ‘camp’. I think that the core idea of regular longtermism is very appealing when discussing the next few generations, while strong longtermism does imply disregarding current generations and thinking of “all future generations” (which obviously requires most people to think far beyond their current moral circle).
2. In practice, I think that an EA community that has a welcoming space for this mid-point view, would have more emphasis on interventions that are on mid-point position in the tradeoff between tractability (they’re more likely to make a change) and importance (they’re not as rewarding as preventing human extinction). We would see more emphasis than we currently have on improving institutions, interventions for improving developing economies, meta-science, and others.
Stumbled upon this great post, just adding a minor comment: On certain occasions, it might be even more convincing the build the pitch around an example of an intervention such as Strongminds (which HLI often compares to Givedirectly in terms of cost-effectiveness). It helps make the pitch more concrete.
Thank you for this feedback lukasberglund and Maricio, I think I underestimated the misrepresentation argument, so I highly appreciate this.
About your second argument on the impact of volunteer guidance, and the discussion with Mauricio: I entirely agree with your opinion on the impact of volunteering, but I think that the main case for including volunteering in the pitch (and in general, investing in guidance for effective volunteering) is that it for specific individuals, who are interested in volunteering, this can be the entry point that would attract them to learn more about EA—whether we eventually help them with prioritizing volunteer opportunities or with career/donation decisions.
For this reason (and because specific volunteering opportunities can be highly impactful, as you both discussed), I still think it’s beneficial to include volunteering on EA pitches. I believe that the argument about misrepresentation makes a good case for not mentioning volunteering as the first on the list, but I don’t think that the order is of high significance.
I’ll soon make some updates to the post about that. Thank you both again for your feedback!
I strongly agree. Personally (and I know a couple more EAs with the same dilemma), I’d be thrilled to apply to an EA org or even start a new large scale project, but this is too risky for my financial security—I’m forced to spend a couple of years on the credibility of my CV outside EA, since outsiders are not familiar with the professional level of work in EA (I’ve mostly encountered people associating it with the common low expertise of nonprofits).
Maybe there are ways to directly confront this, such as offering training courses by top universities or enterprises (Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc.) to people who work in the EA sphere, in order to improve the credibility (and level) of their professional skills.