There’s a valuable discussion of this on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1750780338311649/
impala
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.
The point at which you hit diminishing returns to funding an org may actually be pretty low. I’d be skeptical about the marginal value of budget increases of much more than a factor of 2 per year unless the org had demonstrated really impressive traction.
This isn’t incompatible with what you’re saying, but they may diminish well before that also. Taking the present example of Giving What We Can, the people who worked there or are involved with it thought that applied to it. They thought most of the value came from the existence of the organisation and a pledge people could sign if they wanted to commit to giving 10%, and other things which were done even before they started paying staff. So that would be diminish returns right at the $ 0 mark!
There are also signaling issues with only donating to metacharities, so if you’re public about your giving it might not be a great idea (“guys, look at how much I donate to these organizations that promote donating to themselves!”).
There are even less positive ways to frame that also, like giving to one another, and having organisations which heavily focus on promoting themselves (including by promoting the idea of metacharity, and making it a central concept in the movement). Even aside from signalling, we should see others’ discomfort with that as a reason to be wary of it ourselves.
The confidence interval for GWWC’s leverage ratio plausibly already includes numbers below 1
This is what those people I talked to from GWWC thought, due to their various experiences and observations. And GiveWell too as you say; they had had conversations with people at GiveWell who thought that GWWC’s future fundraising ratio was below 1.
Thanks for sticking your head out with this post, I’ve heard a lot of people express similar or stronger concerns but say they’re too frightened about prompting a pile-on (or in some cases organised and tactical retaliation). One thing some of these people have said is that internal knowledge at and research by CEA reveals unflattering facts about the issues you’ve raised, but that CEA hides this from impact evaluations and isn’t honest about it with donors. For example, people not donating and staying on the member lists, including prominent EAs.
Amid many critical comments I should give props for going above and beyond the original request by clearly presenting this historical data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It could be worth running this by a mainstream economist to see if they think there’s anything to it.
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?
I wonder if when GWWC opened the pledge, many people already giving 10% joined, as now they don’t feel constrained by cause area.
That seems clearly what’d happen, and from what I hear is what most people think. People who’d favoured non-poverty causes and who join in the months after that change are unlikely to be giving as a result of GWWC’s work in those months after all, going out and convincing people to give to them from scratch. (Not to say that it’s not valuable for them to record their giving, or that the moves away from poverty have been a mistake.)
What’s the definition of frontend and backend here, which is relevant to earning-to-give potential? If you’re writing database-driven Ruby or PHP code which generates HTML, are you a frontend or backend developer in this sense?
Wow weird.
No, not static WordPress sites—more like the second, or something in between, though as a junior webdev I wouldn’t be the one taking care of the scaling (setting up the server with varnish, etc.), apart from avoiding direct database queries where possible.
Maybe if you gave a salary target that might help us calibrate.
Again I run into the problem of not knowing enough about the industry, but how about €35,000 in a place where you could relatively quickly head up towards €50,000?
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.
Seconded
What evidence would you (or the other involved in outreach via mass readership articles) cite for it working, besides the Facebook comment you mentioned?
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?
Like I said to Gregory, I am limited in what I can say without violating confidences, but I personally wouldn’t find saying other things scary if it’s anonymous. Is there an anonymous way to send messages to you which doesn’t reveal my email (which contains the username I use around the Web)?
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.