The environmental movement seems to be the closest analogy. It would be strange to find this movement having even the levels of (implicit, claimed) hierarchy that EA does. This should be cause for concern.
impala
Karma: 56
Seconded
Speaking solely for myself, I’ve down voted fundraising announcements when I felt people were asking for money inappropriately, without a good, straightforward case for why I shouldn’t give to AMF instead (to take the example I currently give to). I try not to down vote solely because I disagree with someone.
I’d enjoy reading your reasons for this in a top-level forum post. I expect others would do, and there are certainly plenty who think like you do who could participate in a comment thread discussion of this, which your post could trigger.
What evidence would you (or the other involved in outreach via mass readership articles) cite for it working, besides the Facebook comment you mentioned?
Thank you, my top two suggestions would be:
Break down which activities have led to which members in as much detail as possible.
Justify the “Counter-factual donation rate” more deeply. Use a graduate volunteer’s time to dig into it and present multiple explorations of it, some of which don’t rely on people’s subjective estimates of it when asked by GWWC at the time they’re pledging to it. Include some in-depth exploration of the counter-factual rate for a few members.
I’ll give my own answer when I get time but the questions at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ql/giving_what_we_can_needs_your_help_this_christmas/ look like a decent start.
Thanks, this is helpful (though as you predict not by itself not enough to resolve the issue). Fundraising seems a good reference class—not too broad (like ‘all businesses’ would be) and not too narrow. One comment/question, at least for now:
The activity that GWWC is engaging in is not fundraising for itself, but encouraging people to give (and give effectively). Compared to charities fundraising for themselves, there is less competition, and the approach is also more novel: both of these could support more of the low-hanging fruit still being available. Moreover it may be easier to persuade people to give when there is no obvious conflict-of-interest of the charity receiving funds being the same as the people trying to persuade you.
This seems the main reason that could account for your fundraising being so much more profitable than normal. The lack of conflict of interest could help, and I’ve read Charity Science use the same argument somewhere. But it has very limited strength, there are many independent people who fundraise for charities they’re passionate about, and it’s hard to see why it’d drive up fundraising profitability that much. That would take a novel approach in an enviroment of low hanging fruit (because low competetition). What exactly is GWWC’s approach of this sort? I’m still not clear what you will do with the staff time our money buys to churn out a hundred dollars per dollar.
Amid many critical comments I should give props for going above and beyond the original request by clearly presenting this historical data.
Yeh, your comment was correct and needed, but where it’s truly needed at punching up (which here obviously means calling out MIRI, CFAR and CEA). That’s what I try to do. Otherwise newer and smaller “orgs” like Gleb’s get criticized for being redundant and CEA gets a free pass for being one of the first movers and then claiming the EA movement that sprung up as its fiefdom and pass to limitless funding. Leave Gleb alone and fight the real battles.
Oh and good on you for being less of an insensitive (but truth telling!) ahole than you often are. ;-)
Our positive effect on AMF is clearest at Giving What We Can which has a return of roughly 100:1 in high-value donations (counterfactually adjusted and time-discounted, but not all to AMF). Even if you assume that not a single member of GWWC gives another penny ever, the ratio is still 5:1.
That’s precisely what’s at issue. For one I don’t find it all convincing, having talked with people who have been experienced with the organisation. And prima facie it’s implausibly profitable. So it needs more justification than the prospectus gives.
This is catty, but has anyone else noticed how many of some CEA members’ blog posts and Facebook updates are about how we should keep giving to and growing metacharities like CEA?
I can’t emphasize the exponential growth thing enough. A look at the next page on this forum shows CEA wanting to hire another 13 people. Meanwhile GiveWell were boasting of having grown to 18 full time staff back in March; now they have 30.
This. I haven’t talked to him personally, but that’s the sort of thing that has some of us who made his article one of the most upvoted ever worried about a meta trap, where organisations keep adding jobs for EAs they know without in advance setting out credible limits for when this should stop.
This sounds worryingly close to claiming credit for all “etg donors”, all EAs’ careers and all EA organisations that have had some contact with EA organizations. Of course people like Jonas Vollmer are going to say nice things about 80,000 Hours when asked, and it would be impolitic for any organisation to challenge this, so I’ll say it: I don’t think all of GBS Switzerland’s activities can be classed as counterfactually dependent on 80,000 Hours getting funding. Likewise the volunteers who founded Effective Animal Activism (the predecessor of ACE) or CSER or Effective Fundraising (the predecessor of Charity Science) might have done so at some point anyway, for all I know, and it’s hard to buy their saying otherwise as unbiased.
This isn’t to single out 80,000 Hours as the only organisation with these murky counterfactuals, it’s only jumping off your comment. I’ve likewise heard people say that people were running fundraisers before Charity Science started recruiting people to do so and that people were giving (or, if students, planning to) before signing up to Giving What We Can’s list, and that neither organisation can claim credit for everything these people then go on to do.
It could be worth running this by a mainstream economist to see if they think there’s anything to it.
Charity Science used to do this by going to local atheist meetups and talking to people there and by going to atheist conferences.
That seems totally unquantifiable—were they actually going to track how many donations it led to, or just say that one in X people (for some high value of X) seemed like they were/”must” be convinced of effective charities and then mark down a guess at their whole lifetime giving to them as impact?
Oh I meant how you distinguished between people who signed up to the pledge after seeing GWWC mentioned in the media attention or book (or elsewhere), and people who were a result of the efforts capitalising on this that EA donors are funding. For the question you answered I agree, I can’t think of any better (or other) data to get about individual pledgers and the only thing to compare it to is an overall estimate of the extra donations a pledge could lead to.
How would one tell the difference between extra members which came for “capitalising on the media attention around Effective Altruism over the summer”, and 10% donors who simply got rustled up by this attention? Has GWWC publicly advertised conditions in which the money spent on this wouldn’t have been worthwhile and shouldn’t have been diverted to it?
duplicate comment
There’s a valuable discussion of this on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1750780338311649/