Executive Director at One for the World; chair of trustees at High Impact Athletes.
Jack Lewars
Karma: 2,594
Hi guys—Jack here (Executive Director at OFTW). Sabrina makes some great points here. I would add as well that we need to be mindful of how much the average American is giving to effective charities. You’re right, @Larks, that persuading people to give 1% to effective charities would be odd, if the average person would give 3% to them—but, of course, the average American gives ~0% to effective charities! We have introduced some checkout questions to give us an indication of this ‘counterfactual’ argument (‘how much do you already give (if anything) to GiveWell’s charities?’) and also have some students at Yale researching typical giving trends for graduates to give us a proxy control group.
Hi Brian—Jack here (ED at OFTW). Thanks for your thoughtful questions and it looks like Sabrina ha answered them really well :-)
Some quick additions:
as Sabrina says, activation is moderate (~2/3). However, our models suggest that we would still provide decent ROI at even 50% activation rates. One advantage that we have is that we process all our donations ourselves and so actually know our activation and retention rates, where a lot of pledge orgs have to estimate them. My reading of our data is that most orgs are extremely optimistic in their assumptions around this.
definitely open to this and some individual chapters have done it already. It’s on the roadmap!
this is where processing our donations is so helpful—we see in real time how donors behave, and so know if people stop their donations. We do ask people who cancel if they have changed cause area but we only get the usual response rates to cancellation surveys (~1%)
we do not currently plan to expand our cause areas, for few reasons. First, and for transparency, GiveWell is one of our main funders and that influences this decision. Second, our founders were very focussed on global health and poverty and so I would want their input before any change. But third, and most importantly—OFTW on average engages a donor for ~10-60 mins before they pledge (and pre-COVID this was sometimes as little as 2 mins when our volunteers were tabling). When you are recruiting people with this level of engagement, message clarity is essential. Using global health and poverty, which is both the most popular EA cause area and the simplest ‘sell’ to someone who isn’t part of EA yet, makes a lot of sense to me in this context. All that being said, this may well evolve over time!
Hi Alex—these are very good points and largely correct, I think—thanks for contributing them. I’ve added some thoughts and mitigations below:
Yes, we definitely do anchor around poverty. I think this can be good ‘scaffolding’ to come into the movement; but sometimes it will anchor people there. It is worth noting, though, that global health and poverty is consistently the most popular cause area in the EA survey, so there are clearly other factors anchoring to this cause area—it’s hard to say how much OFTW counterfactually increases this effect (and whether it counterfactually stops people from progressing beyond global health and poverty). In terms of mitigation for competing with GWWC—we are in close touch with them and both sides are working hard to foster collaboration and avoid competition.
On point 2, our experience so far is that OFTW and EA groups actually coexist very well. I think (without any systematic evidence) some of this may because a lot of EA groups don’t prioritise donations, preferring to focus on things like career advice, and so OFTW chapters can sort of ‘own’ the donation space; sometimes, though, they just find a way to work alongside each other. I’m not sure it follows that we have to ‘compete for altruistically motivated people’ - in fact, I don’t really see any reason why someone couldn’t take the OFTW pledge and then carry on engaging with EA uninterrupted—but I agree that we could compete on this front. A lot seems to depend on OFTW’s approach/message/ask. Maybe a virtue of OFTW is that we really only need people’s attention for a short period to get them to take one action—so we aren’t competing for their sustained attention, in a way that would crowd out EA programming. Indeed, we can actually be a funnel to get them to pay attention to this content—see for example our recent webinar with Toby Ord on x-risk, which attracted ~200 people, many of whom came from OFTW chapters.
Yes, fair. I’d just bear in mind, though, how many EAs were introduced via global health and poverty (again, see the EA survey for how many people came in via poverty-focussed writing from Peter Singer or Will MacAskill) and did ultimately develop/broaden/change their thinking, so again I’m not sure how much counterfactual anchoring there is from OFTW.
I haven’t watched this yet but will shortly—from your brief precis above, this criticism looks like it might apply equally to any pledge/donation org that support health and poverty causes (GWWC, Founder’s Pledge, GiveWell, EA Funds etc.).
This is absolutely true—I actually think it’s a strength of OFTW, as it happens. The reason I don’t worry overly about anchoring people at 1%/distracting from other cause areas is that I actually think most OFTW pledgers were never good candidates to be super engaged with EA in the first place—but those that are end up getting into EA anyway, and we can be a useful first point of contact to make that happen. To be fully transparent, this is basically all from anecdata, but I have met very, very few OFTW pledgers who I (subjectively) think were ever likely to be a GWWC pledger/dedicate their career to AI research. In a perfect world, we would hoover up all the ‘well I might give 1% but I really wouldn’t give 10%’ crowd and not stop any of the ‘I might give 10%/change my career’ crowd. One project to support this is to give more GWWC and other EA content to our members, so that those who were predisposed to give 10% end up doing it anyway (which has happened for a subset of OFTW members in the past, certainly).
Hey Vaidehi—I hope you’re well :-)
Just on the factual questions:
~12 - this includes some where the EA group explicitly runs the OFTW content, and some where the two just peacefully coexist. Collaboration is broadly positive but not consistent in method or depth.
Hard to say—I would guess that around 1⁄3 know about nothing except effective giving, 1⁄3 know a bit about EA but are mainly focussed on effective giving and 1⁄3 are very knowledgeable about EA/fully committed EAs themselves.
To pick up two of your risks above:
OFTW chapters are certainly vulnerable to changes in leadership, but this point would seem to apply just as strongly to EA groups on campuses, I think? So I’m not sure that we should expect leadership turnover to have any more or less of a negative effect on OFTW-EA relations that it does on EA-student relations.
In fairness, we don’t teach people those memes, or ever reference them in any of our materials or training (at least not in any of the materials or training that I have reviewed/contributed to). OFTW never mentions ETG and in general we don’t really make claims about what EA cares about or focusses on. You helped us with this page, I recall, which is probably the best summary of how we talk about EA—and it reads to me as very neutral in its phrasing: https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/
It might be useful context to some of the comments below to highlight this page on our resource for our volunteers, which encapsulates for me how we talk about EA within OFTW (and how we signpost people to find out more): https://chapters.1fortheworld.org/info/effective-altruism-thinking/ (props to Vaidehi for helping us revise this and make it better this summer)
How we promoted EA at a large tech company (v2.0)
Will send you an email :-) you might also be interested in my post here, although it’s only tangentially-related
Thanks Jan—looking forward to hearing from you!
One for the World—January 2021 update
Join our collaboration for high quality EA outreach events (OFTW + GWWC + EA Community)
Interesting project mate. One use case—I am always interested to know what the total ‘value’ of the community’s donation is. Indeed, I ended up doing a back-of-an-envelope version of this for a presentation in December, using publicly available donations data. The issue is that everyone reports data over different time periods/in different formats, and there’s also a very real risk of double-counting quite a few donations, and so it’s tricky to do.
I’d be interested to keep track of a) total donations influenced by EA; and b) trends in giving over time.
Thanks for the mention :-)
Not sure how helpful this is, but grad schools typically move more money (certainly per pledger/per student/per class etc. and often in naive terms). We have no idea yet of the long term changes in attitudes/actions and how those relate to school-type.
Also FWIW someone just started raising OFTW pledges at HLS and is absolutely crushing it—about $20k/annum of pledges in about a fortnight!
What is the legal and practical feasibility of a global DAF that could facilitate tax deductible donations from any wealthy country to any charity registered in a different country (but not registered in the home country of the donor)? Practical considerations would need to include FX risk.
Or, to put it another way, how might we build a platform to let people in India or China donate to Malaria Consortium?
This exactly chimes with my experience. I’ve been hiring for 10 years now, and the range in application volume has been 10-200 for a position.
In particular, I’ve been using an opt-in for feedback for years and my experience has also been that this is requested by a very low volume of people (I’d actually guess at 5% for early rejections, rising to 75% if they did an interview, at which point most people seem to want feedback).
For what it’s worth, I think this is a moral issue as well—we have a duty to the community to try to give useful feedback when we can; and to treat people with kindness.
I try to take it in good faith when people say “I’m too busy to give feedback” but I feel that this is often not literally true; and in the rare cases where it is (maybe someone running one of the big ‘legacy’ EA organisations and getting hundreds of applicants per position), the solutions in other comments are viable.
Is there an argument here for trying to spread more of a Growth Mindset in EA? I don’t want to diminish the hurt of rejection that people feel by implying that they just need to reframe it and everything will be fine—but the approach of seeing challenges/failures as learning experiences can be genuinely transformative for people.
In general, I think developing a growth mindset is incredibly valuable, and I wonder if this is something Training for Good could look at.
I think you should be cautious about statements like:
”More cynically, maybe the data did not demonstrate a significant reduction in malaria and that in itself was taken as evidence that the data was low quality.”
From reading your post, you don’t seem to have any evidence for this at all and it doesn’t seem like you’ve made any effort to find any evidence (e.g. by asking AMF). If that is indeed the case, this suggestion is baseless.
Hi team—this sounds exciting!
I have some questions about how you will align with other university-focussed organisations (with a healthy dose of self-interest, obviously!).
If you are plausibly providing $17m-$54m in annual budget for university organising at just 17 schools, you’re likely going to dwarf every other organisation on campus (and definitely every other EA org). How will you avoid completely eclipsing other organisations with a different focus/approach/merits? A particular concern here would be if this capital overwhelmingly favoured longtermism, for example, which already benefits from an enormous imbalance in allocated EA funding.
I’m also interested in where the funding for this is coming from—this represents a dramatic increase on CEA’s budget and spend on university organising, which you seem confident that you can source.
I’m especially interested in this because this is a huge amount of money on a new initiative, I think without a track record or tested methodology. So in essence it’s a new idea, seeking to develop and test new approaches, but one being supported with a huge influx of capital (relative to other EA resources directed at these campuses). There are obviously risks here, the most obvious being that the programme might be ineffective/much less effective than alternatives, or make mistakes that have quite wide-ranging consequences, but become the dominant player anyway because of a huge asymmetry of resources.
All of this being said, I want to be clear that I’m actually super excited about this ambition and focus and One for the World will of course support as much as we can :-)
Why your EA group should promote effective giving (and how)
Thanks for this Yonatan and for emphasising that this is a point made in good faith.
I don’t know a lot about cults but I think those that ask people for money usually ask for it to use themselves, rather than to e.g. alleviate the suffering of farmed animals or people in extreme poverty.
There could definitely be a danger of EA becoming quite incestuous as quite a few of the recommendations above are to donate to EA orgs and so it could get to the point where we ask members of the community to fund the community.
However, there are a lot of orgs that are really very independent of EA that are heavily promoted in effective giving. ‘Meta’ giving (giving to charities that work within/on EA) is a very small slice of the pie, at least at the moment.
Finally, I would emphasise that almost all the places effective giving recommends are public charities of some sort and so open to a lot of scrutiny and transparency requirements. Again, I don’t think that’s very characteristic of cults.
Hi Naryan—this sounds like great work, well done. One for the World may be able to help you with your 2020 plans (www.1fortheworld.org). We’re a network of people giving 1% of their income to the GiveWell charities and have a couple of chapters in Canada. My email is jack [at] 1fortheworld [dot] org—please do get in touch!