Naive and broad question: what should EA and EA orgs do differently to interest non-EA donors?
(are there things you feel are frequently under-appreciated by EA actors?)
GV
Karma: 16
Thanks a lot for the hard work! This will certainly be useful to people interested in biosecurity careers in our group!
Thanks a lot to you (and to Claude) for this!
I hadn’t realized that context windows are now big enough to feed entire chapters.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this, Alix!
Thank you @James Herbert and @Shakeel Hashim for drawing attention to this!
Extremely interesting article -and I’d love to see other posts exploring your assumptions!
I had a chance to meet a private foundation’s leader in Europe recently (raising and donating several millions / year). Interestingly, they also mentioned TBP and I’m now wondering whether it was to somehow position themselves as opposed to some sort of highly demanding grantmaking.I do think TBP and EA are compatible, to some degree. We should not confuse (1) “having a very high bar for anticipated effectiveness” and (2) “having a very high bar for evidence of impact”. It is quite simple to apply for a grant from most EA grantmakers. In my (certainly limited) experience, if you want your grant to be renewed (and, supposedly, increased), you’ll probably have to provide significant evidence, and I think it’s fair enough.
I suppose non-EA funders might:
- Have actually little knowledge of EA or the EA funding landscape
- Be discouraged by the depth of analysis that they can see from GiveWell
- Be annoyed or discouraged by EA’s frequent, strong claim of “making decisions based on evidence” (btw, this claim is so often advertized that I’d assume that it can be conflated with a reliance on frequent reports from and control over grantees).Also, maybe it’s be worth distinguishing different cases, in particular:
Funders of “traditional” animal welfare or GHD charities;
Funders of more “exotic” projects (global catastrophic risks, community-building, forecasting...), which usually cannot rely as much on historical data for evaluation.
In the meantime: good spot. I assume they assumed that an experienced “finance” person could probably take on this part-time role pro bono.
I see on the website (https://www.non-trivial.org/program) that the short course is no longer presented. Now it is all about the fellowship. Is there a reason?
Maybe also advertise the Slack in here? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/groups/wiDFRkBrgfiXrPcmb
Very happy to see this! But for information, the Slack link is expired (if you update it, be careful because it’s in multiple places in the article) @SofiaBalderson @Cameron.K
In a scenario where this tech works as well as we are dreaming of and has generalized in hundreds of millions of buildings: isn’t there a risk of a general weakening of our immunity systems, making us more vulnerable over the medium-long run?
Basic logic behind this question: certain/many classes of virus eradicated from many modern buildings ⇒ our bodies are generally less prepared to encounter it in other settings.
(epistemic status: I’m very ignorant in these fields)
Your next question seems like a crucial point to me. Bed nets are imperfect but since mosquitos can feed on on other animals, I suppose mosquito populations don’t disappear when entire regions use bednets more often, they just slowly become less malaria-infected.
Very enthusiastic about this project, which I agree can fill an important gap in the learning journey. I will follow with great interest!
I think it would be relatively simple to replicate for languages other than English in the future. (after this passes beta phase, of course!)
Not as high brow as other suggestions: How to make friends and influence people. It’s useful for the most obvious reasons and also, in my opinion, an accessible nudge towards empathy thanks to the numerous examples.
Your comments here and there make sense to me. I feel like it’s quite straightforward in theory, and harder to do in practice.
I do observe that some orgs are leagues above others in communicating, and I feel like the two important reasons for this are
- the org’s willingness to allocate resources to professional communication work
- the extent to which the org’s activity lends itself to communication (eg most orgs working with cute animals have an advantage here).