Related: GiveWell’s staff personal donations
I strong upvoted the post because I’m really happy to see a discussion about donating—this is an important and actionable topic.
Related: GiveWell’s staff personal donations
I strong upvoted the post because I’m really happy to see a discussion about donating—this is an important and actionable topic.
Does your direct work give you access to knowledge that others don’t have? Even if you are not a professional grantmaker in your cause area, you might still have lots of expertise. If your current best-guess donation opportunity is based on that knowledge, it might be quite a good guess, and maybe better than many individual donors. That’s why I like it that some staff members of open philanthropy project tell where they donate.
As someone who does not do direct work and wants to donate thoughtfully, domain knowledge is something I miss a lot. I cannot be an expert in my priority cause area, no matter how much I would love to.
I’m not a huge fan of this option because it doesn’t feel like my comparative advantage and I don’t like (and am not good at) splitting my focus like this.
I agree attention is a thing.
Strong-upvoted this question. Follow-up question: what kind of research could resolve any factual disagreements?
A possible note of caution for applied physics research or technology development in industry: you might want to take into account differential technological progress: develop safety first, before developing more powerful technologies (such as creating faster hardware). I assume that it depends much on your research field whether you should be concerned about differential technological progress. Does anyone have more thoughts about this?
(Somewhat unrelated to my other comment)
How clear are you on your cause prioritization? If you know your cause area, you might just defer to a charity evaluator. (It sounds boring and too easy for so much money, but it might be the best way to go for many individuals). Obviously this does not work if you don’t know your cause area or your cause area does not have charity evaluators (yet!).
I have a very related job, as test engineer on a web application and have in some places very similar experiences. I might write my own post but this post already covers part of it.
Software testing is easier to transition into from an unrelated background and requires a somewhat different skillset and mindset. People who are more conscientious or more generalist may be a better fit for testing. Rather than working on a small part of the application, you work on the entire application (or at least a bigger part of it, depending on the product or company) and can sometimes understand interactions that developers are less likely to see. Collaboration skills are very important. There is a (mis)conception that testing, especially manual testing, is boring and monotonous. There is a grain of truth in that but it gets better when you become a more senior tester, get to automate things, and improve the overall testing workflow in the company.
I roughly agree with your notes on the “path to impact”. Web development or testing can be a reasonable plan B or plan Z career path.
Focusing on tax-deductibility too much can be a trap for everyday donors, including myself. I keep referring to this article to remind my peers or myself of that.
One piece of information is not mentioned: At least in some countries, donating to a not-tax-deductible charity may be subject to gift tax. I recommend that you check out if this applies to you before you donate . But even then the gift tax can be well worth paying.
Small idea: a second regular Hangout workathon at a time that is more friendly for European or Asian timezones.
Somewhat bigger: organize an EA-coworking weekend. People from different countries/cities come to together for a few days in a central place to on EA related or personal projects, for example finding out the destination of your next donation. This would require people to travel, but it might be worth it. I won’t have the resources to organize it myself in the next few months, but feel free to take over the idea.
Even bigger: organize more weekend camps. GBS Switzerland organized a few summer and winter camps in Switzerland, and there is the LessWrong community weekend. At the latter, a lot of people from outside hubs attended.
There is a lot of discussion about what to DO in the context of EA. But for everything I do, there is something else that I don’t.
What have you decided NOT to do, because it has a (somewhat) lower priority than other things?
Things that I downprioritized:
some recreational activities: playing the guitar, cooking, baking cakes, reading novels.
I quit volunteering in an online education project. It was low time cost anyway.
meditating (would that increase productivity more than the time spent on it? I don’t really care about the other benefits.)
keep an EA blog, because there are already good ones. My comparative advantage would be to write in Dutch to a local public, but that’s a small group of people who can easily read English.
Mentioning the criticism by developmental economists on the EA’s mainstream approach on poverty, however, triggers me to learn more.
This is the post I most often refer to when talking about donating now versus investing to donate later. It provides a good summary of the main considerations and is accessible for non-expert donors. Having a back of the envelope model with real numbers is also really great.
Individual non-expert donors can defer to experts to decide where to donate by using charity evaluators and the EA Funds. But the question when to donate they have to make mostly themselves (except maybe in case of the Patient Philanthropy Fund).
Suggestions for follow-up posts.
updating the Guesstimate model upon new insight.
a better estimate of the exogenous learning rate
what is the effect of AI timelines
what is the effect of the growing amount of funding in EA
how does the investing versus giving question differ per cause area? It would be great to see a breakdown of this analysis for specific causes like global health, climate change, animal welfare, etc.
Some research has already been done on these questions. Having the findings written up in an accessible way for non-expert donors would be really useful.
Low-cost lives are not something to celebrate. They are a reminder that we live on an injured planet, where people suffer for no reason save poor luck.
This is motivational quote that I keep reminding myself of. This is one way I see the dark world.
This piece is not part of the replacing guilt series but has the same vibe. It deserves the same credit as replacing guilt.
From a talk at EAG in 2019, I remembered that your approach could be summarized as empirical research in neglected areas (please correct me if I’m wrong here). Is this still the case? Do you still have a focus on empirical research (Over, say, philosophy)?
Thank you for recommending the cooling gel mat. If heat turns out a problem in my new bedroom, I might give it a try.
My recommendations (not sure how useful they are, I realize some are quite specific for my lifestyle):
cleanable earplugs for sleeping.
I sleep earlier than most people. With these earplugs at hand, I never needed to complain to my flatmates when they talk or watch movies next to my bedroom. Clean with handsoap.
noise-isolating headphones in the bad old days working in an open office.
I tried the noise cancelling headphones of my friends to suppress distraction from colleagues talking in an open office. I did not like the noise cancelling enough to be willing to pay for it, because it generated soft noise by itself. In combination with a gentle rain noise or music I can not understand even conversations nearby. Good sound quality. Currently in use for video calls.
swiffer staubmagnet (“dust magnet”)
Looks nonsense but works. I don’t hate dust cleaning anymore. (H/t my flatmates)
sports watch for running
I wanted a cheap and easy-to-carry timer and not pay for features like a GPS tracker or heartrate measurement. Watches seem often too big for me but this one fits comfortably. If aestetics is important to you, try to find something else.
to reach the upper kitchen shelf. Nicely stable but light enough to lift it and take it to wherever I need it. (H/t my flatmates)
I eat a lot of bread with peanut butter and good peanut butter is hard to get in Switzerland, where I live. Lots of calories per money spent, but no added sugar. A kg lasts me for a while. (H/t my flatmates)
Re: footrest
I’m also pretty short and I can relate to the problems with the footrest. The best footrest I’ve used so far is a folded not-so-soft blanket (in home office, so not wearing shoes). The storage box you’re recommending would be a another good idea in my employer’s office. I got myself a desk with height-adjustable legs but my chair cannot go lower, the blanket is for the last few centimeters.
Ironically, I got a decent footrest using a stack of flattened Hello Fresh meal boxes. The meals were more valuable for my flatmate than for me.
I have no good experiences with footrests that are made to be footrests: not stable, too high, don’t fit between the legs of my chair—my feet end up everywhere except there they are supposed to be.
See also here for more suggestions: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/get-involved/
I don’t think that anyone knows a clear right answer to your question (at least, I don’t). What is ‘easiest’, I guess, depends on your personal situation. If you have enough money, donating is probably the easiest start. If you are early in your career, maybe read up on 80.000 hours.
Another factor is that the less connected people are often shy about reaching out to the busy, high-performing EAs they don’t personally know.
Most of the discussion here has been about the facilities, mostly online like EAhub, skillshare, LWSH, EASH, buddy systems, hangout events, and meetups. Even when the facilities are excellent, user-friendlly and findable, people might be too shy to actually ask.
Overcoming shyness is something different from creating tools, and probably more difficult. What could we do about that?
Some ideas (it would be great if you came up with something better):
explicitly claiming that requests for help are welcome
example stories of how individuals got connected and benefited from the connection
possibility for anonymous questions
Some of them are already implemented to some extent.
The possibility exists, but how many people have ever done this in practise?
Irrespective of how many other people do it (please don’t worry about that too much), I would encourage everyone to overcome their shyness and actually ask for help, information or social support by whatever medium. Personally, I felt delighted when someone sent me a question. Even though I am quite busy, responding was probably well worth my time.
This could lead to good habits, but it might also make you focus on details rather than the big picture. Thinking EA too much can be exhausting, make you feel more guilty than necessary or you could become estranged from the people you meet in everyday life.
On the thoughts you sum up, you might add:
Is the small mistake I made today really bad?
Is this small thing a good step in the way to a greater goal?
For example, I always forgive myself if I happen to spend a few dollars more in the supermarket than absolutely necessary in order to eat healthy, and I there are a lot of bigger mistakes I should forgive myself as well. It’s more important to spend enough time on my career and donation strategy.
About funding overhang:
Peter wrote a comment on a recent post:
I’m optimistic we will unlock new sources of needed funding (Rethink Priorities is working a ton on this) so we should expect the current funding overhang to be temporary, thus making it important to still have future donors ready / have large amounts of money saved up ready to deploy.
You also wrote in your plans for 2022:
Help solve the funding overhang in EA and unlock tons of impact by identifying interventions across cause areas that can take lots of money while still meeting a high bar for cost-effectiveness.
In which cause areas do you expect to identify the most funding opportunities? Will the funding gaps be big enough to resolve a significant part of the funding overhang?
How could individual donors best help in reducing suffering and S-risk? How should longtermist suffering-focussed donors approach donating differently than general longermist donors?