Oh, I didn’t mean “going to the people” as an activity, but a cultural tradition of valuing the masses. Namely, get to that part of the intelligentsia that values such activities, and show that EA is actually a great way to achieve their goal of valuing human beings in the most effective way possible (and later perhaps expand to other sentient beings).
Ah, didn’t know about Yuliy’s disengagement. Thanks for updating me about that.
Speaking from my perspective as someone who has researched Soviet civic engagement, I’m curious if it would be good to tie EA to existing Russian cultural ideas. For example, the idea of “going to the people” might be useful. This sort of cultural translation is what is being tried right now in translating EA to Muslim norms of giving to charity. Also, have you worked with the sizable LessWrong community in Moscow? They might be particularly amenable to EA. I can put you in touch with the group leader there if you’re not, email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Sounds like there will be a significant focus on collaboration. Also consider collaborating with SHIC if you aren’t yet!
Thanks for sharing about the project! I’m curious how do you plan to engage with existing EA chapters in colleges?
Yup, scared straight is a famous example, but not a charity. Neither are the social interventions at the link. I’d love to see some charities that had scholarly studies proving them either ineffective or net negative.
I’m not sure I know of many studies of charities that show they have negative effects. Do you have any citations of such studies?
Interesting stuff about Effective Environmentalism. Can you share some relevant links for people who might want to learn more?
I personally donated to the fundraiser and encourage other folks to do so as well, it’s a great cause.
Excellent to hear about both the outreach work, and the fundraiser too. We tend to focus too little energy on doing outreach by comparison to moving money, so it’s great to see you and the EA Munich group doing so much great outreach!
I generally perceive spreading rationality as an excellent way to reduce medium-term existential risk, so I support CFAR’s work for that reason. This is also why my organization, Intentional Insights, also orients to spreading rationality broadly, as well as spreading effective altruist ideas.
Excellent job running the survey, and in my role as an organizer of the Columbus EA group, I appreciate the follow-up to provide more resources that took place after the survey. On a meta-level, it would have been good to see a survey question about how good a job LEAN has been doing in providing resources, I know it has been helpful for our group!
Excited to see the outcome of the extensive research that Charity Science did to determine the shape of this new charity! Will be looking forward to updates, and beat of luck!
Good to hear this important project getting more attention. I think the benefits of such preparedness are underappreciated in the EA movement. After reading Taleb’s Black Swan, I have much more appreciation for the need for such projects.
Yeah, it’s nice to feel the specific quantitative impact of one’s donations!
You’re welcome!
Thanks for helping out with the bumper stickers :-)
Meta-comment—this is a very worthwhile project! I’m not sure if the EA Forum is the best place to use for organizing this. Perhaps creating a Facebook group devoted to working on this project would be a nice way to go about organizing it, along with posting a project description on .impact, which is a venue for these kinds of EA meta-projects.
A very exiting piece of news for me as the leader of Intentional Insights was a major piece in the largest newspaper in my region about how Intentional Insights promotes effective giving to a broad audience. Very good to see these messages going into the mainstream, and I’m really proud of the folks in our all-volunteer organization who made it happen!
We collaborated with Animal Charity Evaluators to publish a piece on their blog promoting effective giving regarding animal welfare to non-EA animal rights advocates. This piece was later picked up by Psychology Today, giving it even further impact.
Over the last couple of months, we ran experiments, funded by The Life You Can Save, promoting effective giving at both secular and religious conferences using tabling and Speed Giving Games. The experiments proved quite successful, and we wrote up the results here for anyone interested in the topics of religious and secular outreach, or promoting effective giving via conferences and/or tabling.
Our “Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving” video series is going quite well! We created three new videos, and posted them here. We got even more evidence that these videos moved a number of people who saw them to reconsider their giving and give both more and more effectively, just from observing the comments that people leave on the videos about their donations when the videos are shared on social media.
To address the third beneficiary group of EA, future sentient beings, we created a video about the most effective ways of communicating Artificial Intelligence risk to a broad audience.
This is the result of, and the tip of the iceberg, of much behind-the-scenes work we’ve been doing supporting folks communicating about this and similar issues. We regularly provide support for the EA movement in marketing EA ideas broadly, such as in this videotaped Google Hangout. For instance, we recently did a (non-videotaped) presentation on placing EA-themed articles in broad media venues to a local EA group. Get in touch with me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org if your local EA group needs support around these types of issues.
We ran two local EA-themed events, a Giving Game at a church and a presentation on Effective Altruism to a group of rationalist-oriented folks (slides for the latter here and I will post a video in the next Accomplishments thread).
We did a videotaped interview with Tee Barnett, the leader of Students for High-Impact Charity, to support their fundraiser—watch for that to come out in the next few days.
To advance systemic change on police racial profiling in the US, we published a piece in Salon and did a videotaped interview for Ohio State television.
We’re continuing to work on fundraising for creating the EA Marketing Resource Bank, which aims to provide a central venue for guidelines, templates, coaching, and collaboration for those marketing EA. As some initial outputs, we created a FB group for EA Marketing, which you are welcome to join. We also collected the existing resources on EA marketing in a central document. We are slowly creating marketing-relevant guidelines and posting them on the EA Forum, with the tag EA Marketing Resource Bank. Further progress depends on volunteer and financial support. If interested in learning more, or providing support through your skills with anything relevant to marketing or your donations, please email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org.
Finally, on a personal note, I’m excited to be at EA Global this year! Email me if you’d like to meet up :-)
I will be happy to fund the campaign (just donated) and spread the word. Both in my experience, and based on the evidence provided above, Giving Games are a wonderful means of moving people who never heard about effective giving before into the direction of more effective giving.
I think it’s a really great piece, and look forward to seeing it on the forum!