Came up to this post while wondering why I never saw an add of effective altruism or organisations being part of it, despite FB obviously generated me as interested person in ecological problems, animal welfare and climate change etc, as I very frequently receive ads from diverse charity organisations of that field. Part of the question was answered when I read from the 80000 hours targeting—I am female, live in a country that doesn’t have English as native language and I am older (39) than their usual target audience and not a tech nerd (definitely a nerd and science interested though, as I stumbled across the community via YouTube influencer advertisement in a science video). Nevertheless, I could imagine that despite career advice is less pressing for most people of my age, donating could especially work better when people already have a stable income and the family and job situation settled? When I quick checked the fb sides of giving what you can, effective altruism, give well and 80000 hours fb transperency just told me there were no ads running. I wouldn’t call myself a marketing expert, but as a musician, I constantely have to work with ads to grow my reach and it definitely brings results. How successful a fb/insta/youtube advertisement is, is also highly dependent how you build your campaign and how your creative (the ad itself) looks. Usually split testing helps to narrow down what’s working best and different types of campaigns work differently well depending on the time the algorithm could learn which targets work best. Also I have to correct the error that video ads aren’t possible at fb/insta. And the error that layering on insta ads isn’t possible. Be aware that you have completely different options if you just boost a post or create campaigns in the ads manager. The post boost is more the “ads for beginners” option that makes it easy to create ads but with the price of loosing many options.
Janika
Hey Felix, sure. This is the YouTube channel of my band: https://youtube.com/@molllust You find the band on the common streaming services as well. How I can get involved in EA is exactly the question I am asking myself. Until now, I tried to raise awareness about pressing problems with my songs and worked on my own lifestyle (going vegan, reducing foodwaste with actively being part of foodsharing, avoiding emissions on personal travels with going almost everywhere by bike or rarely public transport, signed petitions, went to demonstrations) and informed myself about models how to shape the world in the future. I found e.g. “Earth for all” from the Club of Rome quite inspiring. But this all feels too few for me and so I am on search how to improve my impact. I think I have at least some reach as an artist. So I am thinking about how I can inspire the audience, as I think just speaking of problems is just unconfortable for many, but presenting solutions could make it easier for people to do good. Then I am trying to figure out if I can help to solve the problems I named in my first post—but this would only work with connections and a team, which I both don’t have. Therefore I was thinking I have to start seaching somewhere and this could be a good place for that. I know that it is seen a bit critical here to improve science globally, but I think it would be possible to tackle the biggest sorrow—one could rank scientific studies after a scale from “highly beneficial for humanity and Earth” to “highly dangerous for humanity/Earth” and just grant access to different groups of people (all vs. very small circle) to results and connect results depending on the ranking. In addition, a platform as I imagine couldn’t get online from one day to the next with all possible publications anyway, so one could classify the studies first and then working from highest to least beneficial and therefore giving the beneficial topics an extra headstart. The third thing I wrap my mind around is: After we just very recently finally have a study with a quite complete status of Earth’s health, wouldn’t it be possible to build a meta-organisation that raises money in Crowdfundings to directly elliminate the biggest problems with concrete projects, in the order how pressing they are regarding the tipping points? E.g. identify the most inefficient and dirty power plant of the world and replace it? Fund a specific scientific project to get the aircraft fuel problem solved? Help farmers change to organic agriculture in an area with exceptional high poisoning of water through herbicites and fertilizers? Just to mention a few ideas. I think it’s easier to motivate people with small chunks of highly effective projects where the personal impact is way easier to see than just a big fond where you don’t even know what exactly your money is taken for. Perhaps one could even engage the people in a community voting between different similiar impactful solutions what to do first. But also here it is at the moment just an idea and I would enjoy finding people to wrap the mind around as well and if it seems a realistic option to start sth. together.
Hey!
Just registered myself here and wanted to quickly introduce myself. I am a classical trained soprano touring with two symphonic metal bands, one (the smaller) of them is my personal “baby” I composed 3 albums and an EP for. My main area is my homeland Germany, but I gave concerts in many European countries, South- and Latin America, in the Caribean Sea, in Turkey, in China and Taiwan. My main occupation is my own band, since I am doing also the work behind the scenes—marketing, booking, organising everything, taxes… I am teaching singing and piano and doing haunted tours as side jobs to make ends meet, since art, especially if you are not mainstream, doesn’t pay the bills despite an immense workload—I usually work 6-7 days a week and rarely less then 10 hours per day, often more.
I started my career with studying communication and media and also made my magister degree (similiar to master, just the older German academic system) and got my professional musical education in parallel (basically, I did music aside from school already as small child). I focused in my studies on TV journalism and media paedagogic, also did some internships at some TV stations—where basically everybody told me: If you can, do sth else, working circumstances are getting worse and worse here. And since I really loved music, I focussed on that. Now, 39 years old, I feel like I exchanged one industry with catastrophic work conditions against an even worse one and I feel kind of a lack of sense in my life.
What makes it even worse, I ask myself if, regarding the pressing problems humanity is facing right now, I should use my personal ressources for art. Even worse, the more I advance in my career, the more I am busy with 1001 jobs around the art that annoy me and that feel completely wrong. Example: You don’t get your music promoted if you don’t spend money on paid ads in social media and guiding people to streaming platforms, but at the same time, these structures are exploiting artists, especially independent artists that are not willing to shape their music in behalf of best selling instead of best artistry. So it would feel way better for me to work on structures that improve the situation instead of feeding the devil with my ressources. In addition, my job gets threatened by AI and generated music. E.G. Deezer is just teaming up with label managers from huge major artists (those, that are the commercial big fishes) in order to rank down all musical tracks in payment (that’s already a nightmare now) under a certain amount of listeners, officially to protect again generated music. As a result, they basically rank down all small or niche artists on the level of white noise (so basically I get paid the same for a professional production that involved almost 40 musicians, a professional producer and several years of work as if I had recorded my running vaccuum cleaner and uploaded the sound file), shifting the shares of the small ones to the big labels.
But it is not only a lack of structures for fair spread and payment of art online that make me worry in my field of expertise, but also the power of misused AI in combination with good marketing skills. You can manipulate already now public opinion and sometimes also people in leader positions quite well, but you don’t have to be a prophet to see the danger on the near horizon to drown the truth in science with a spiderweb of fake studies, easily generated and spread with AI and bots. Combined with fake proofs of reality (AI generated videos and pictures, AI generated voices), there is a huge risk we completely loose track of reality and truth. While, at the same time, journalists are under immense pressure for output, as their earnings went down with the internet as well and deep research often is too expensive, therefore it’s easier to quickly spread news they get from press agencies and they are under pressure to make content that is clicked a lot, which usually works best with click bait titles and provocing/shocking themes. And I strongly wish to do sth. against all that mess.
In my opinion, we need a global safe space of information, science and art, that respects the preferences of media use of people to be broadly used and gives the creators an income safety net and fair equal opportunities to publish (no matter who they are) as long as they fullfill the standards of different categories. I developed quite some ideas for that, this is a super rough presentation of the idea, but I am unsure how to get such a huge project running and quite sure I will need a bigger amount of allies in order to have a chance to successfully get sth. from scratch board to reality (besides the fact that I don’t consider myself as perfect super human and therefore I am convinced that more heads wrapping around the matter and scientific comparison of different approaches is needed to create a system that’s as effective and fair as possible). That’s (besides that I am also deeply worried about many other pressing problems, but where I don’t feel such a strong personal fit) how I ended up here.
I feel like I would love to write a lot more, but for a quick introduction I already created a novel. ;-)
Is it also possible to read the materials for the sessions without participating? I guess this could also help many people—at least more than not having any access to that kind of information at all.