I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
Jason
Unclear—revenue per view varies widely but 2 cents per view seems in the ballpark for YouTube general content. Close enough for a BOTEC at least. This video has 20M views, so an estimated $400K in ad revenue. There’s also a sponsor, revenue unknown.
It’s unclear how much the exposure to 20M viewers is worth for GiveDirectly, but my guesses would be within an OOM of the ad/sponsor revenue. Rationale: given that YouTube takes about half of ad revenue in general, the advertiser seems to valued reaching the average YouTube watcher at ~4 cents, and the video can be seen as akin to an extended-length promoted ad and so is probably worth several times that.
Depends on the subsection, at least in the US. 501(c)(3) organizations are fairly limited on political activity. While 501(c)(4) organizations are less constrained, one does not get a tax break from donating to them. So you’ll see some 501(c)(3)s have an associated 501(c)(4) organization.
Relatedly, how does one guard against the risk of viewers feeling good about themselves for watching / feeling they did their part by watching a video? If the viewer walks away from the video feeling like that, and takes no action, they may be less likely to do something actually meaningful because they feel they “did their part” by becoming educated / causing a few cents to go to Beast Philanthropy’s work. Thus there is at least some possibility that watching the video was net negative!
In my mind, there are structural features that make this very difficult for EA in particular to do. The major font of money is a well-known Democratic donor, and the EA movement is predominately left-of-center. Almost any attempt at combatting polarization is going to come across like a operation on behalf of Team Blue, rightly or wrongly. For example, taking money from Open Phil would be the kiss of death for any potential “sincere populist leadership in the Republican apparatus” who actually wanted to gain influence in conservative circles. The only way I see offhand around this is to plow lots of money in advance into an organization controlled by a group of people proportionally representing the U.S. political spectrum—which means some people you really don’t like.[1]
Moreover, I don’t get a non-partisan feel from the proposal as currently written. Reforming the Senate would take power away from rural voters and Team Red; what are you planning to offer them in exchange? What are you expecting Team Blue to give up in the interests of depolarization, and how would you go about that? “Depolarization” can’t have the effect of moving the country leftward, or it isn’t going to be effective in places you need it to be effective.
Finally, I get the sense that some of this would require a serious revamp of First Amendment doctrine. Some recent doctrine is controversial (e.g., Citizens United), but attempts to regulate media content are generally going to be found unconstitutional based on broadly respected doctrines going back decades. You can’t even stop newspapers from publishing leaked highly classified information, for instance. There are certain people who want their hyperpolarized news, and there are people with ideological reasons to produce it (on top of economic reasons). The market abhors a vacuum, so those consumers will gravitate to those news sources. For example, the threat to Fox News appears to be to the right—when it started pulling back due to its massive libel exposure in 2020, people starting shifting to more polarizing news sources like Newsmax and OAN.
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No matter what your political views, you won’t like some of the people. The range would probably need to be at least 10th to 90th percentile, and few people approve of both the 10th and 90th percentile political view in the US.
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Yes, at some moral weights, it would be very hard to recommend ~any global-health charities, and perhaps any GCR ones. We don’t know how much incidental effect on meat consumption the OP is willing to accept. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the answer to her question is ~none.
All of those cause many (if not most) of their effects through giving people money directly or through positive impact on earnings. So it would seem they are not particularly good fits for Avila’s question.
How do you factor in the possibility that family planning = smaller families & greater family economic resources = more meat consumption in that family?
Depression and other mental-health conditions often have a significant impact on productivity and income, though. This suggests that programs that alleviate them may have a significant effect on income (and thus meat consumption).
While I generally do not weigh the meat-eater problem much in evaluating global health charities, I think the indirect income-promoting effect would be of concern to some people.
I haven’t seen explicit cost-effectiveness analyses, but hospice programs for the terminally ill in low-income countries aren’t designed to save human lives or increase income. I suppose they might have a small, incidental life-prolonging effect.
Sorry, by predictors I had meant “people who had predicted you would find higher levels of neuroticism,” not your survey questions. Edited my comment to clarify.
I had never thought about it, but I can see some features of the intellectual and practical ecosystem that would select against people with higher neuroticism (at least to the extent it manifested as anxiety and certain other dimensions):
People who are higher in neuroticism might find EA’s attitude toward risk tolerance challenging to accept.
The prevalence of grant-based funding is difficult for many people more temperamentally prone to anxiety to tolerate.
More generally, effectiveness orientation is more anxiety-inducing than a belief in Lake Wobegon charity where all efforts are above average.
So I wonder if the [edit: people who predicted high neuroticism] are conflating EA’s pressures can cause neurotic symptoms with EA attracts relatively more people with neurotic temperaments. My rough (and extreme) analogy might be air-traffic controllers; the work seems very likely to cause anxiety and some other negative emotional states. At the same time, people who are higher in neuroticism may be more likely to choose another career (or be screened out by psychological testing).
Unfortunately, to test these hypotheses, one would probably need to sample an appropriate non-EA population and correlate certain attitudes toward generalized openness to the EA way of thought.
How many of these findings are likely to be of practical (as opposed to statistical) significance? (I’m looking mostly at the 21-30 group and to a lesser extent at the 31-40 group given EA demographics and the relatedly low number of 40+ respondents.)
It’s been a long time since I was a graduate student, but it looks like most of the differences are +/- 0.25 points on a seven-point scale even before we consider the error bars. In other words, it seems that the differences we can be statistically confident in are significantly less than .25 in almost all cases. Is a difference of .1 or .25 on a seven-point scale likely to be substantively meaningful?
Likewise, most of the correlations between traits and donation were .03 or less and not statistically significant. But then again, I vaguely recall that correlations can be fairly low and still meaningful when one of the variables is binary?
The exception looks to be lower rates of male neuroticism, which seems more likely to be of practical significance.
(Do you mean Vitamin A—https://www.givewell.org/charities/helen-keller-international? The B vitamins are water-soluble, with the body only being able to absorb a relatively “normal” amount per day in most instances. So I think that supplements are a harder approach for Vitamin B when compared to, e.g., food fortification approaches).
I can see at least three somewhat overlapping potential paths to impact for Beast Philanthropy:
Advertisers and sponsors pay, you use the money to do stuff (and make videos about it);
Viewers donate to Beast Philanthropy, which serves as a grantmaker of sorts—in other words, they delegate some of their charitable decisionmaking to you; and
Through the videos, viewers are connected to the featured charities, with whom they go on to form relationships that lead to direct-to-charity donations.
Of course, there are probably other paths I haven’t thought of, too! I can see advantages and drawbacks to all three, and can also imagine that each pathway might call for different strategical and tactical choices.
What, in your mind, is the relative importance of these different pathways to impact? And to the extent you think there is tension amongst them, how do you navigate that tension?
In ordinary language, I wouldn’t generally consider something that gets 1% of resources to be a “priority.” Applying your reasoning above, that would create a theoretical maximum of 100 “priorities” and a more realistic range of perhaps 10-40. As we move beyond the low teens, the idea of a “priority” gets pretty watered down in my book.
Every other week feels exhausting, at least if the voting went in a certain direction.
Minor suggestion: on all time donations, it would be helpful to specify the currency. I am guessing USD (with EUR or GBP as possibilities), but the raw unspecified number might look underwhelming to someone used to thinking in (say) yen.
How realistic do you think your initial expectations of the work and policymaker reception to it were? That’s a vague question, but I’m wondering if an expectations-reality mismatch made it harder to maintain motivation.
On my (mostly uninformed) reading of your postmortem, you achieved significantly better than I would have predicted on some important domains (e.g., gaining access to important decisionmakers). Unfortunately, it seems like the theory of change required strong showings in a number of different domains (e.g., political strategy/savvy), and a middling showing on any of those domains would be fatal to the project. My guess is that it would be very rare for a two-person team to have strengths in all the needed domains.
Finally, although you speak of having “failed,” the potential downstream effects of the conversations you had are unknown and unknowable. That measurable outcomes were in short supply doesn’t mean that your advocacy didn’t have a counterfactual effect on any of the policymakers. That you concluded that didn’t make sense to continue is might be as much about your awareness of the strong alternative uses of your donors’ money as it is about your execution and results.
Thank you for trying this, even if it didn’t pan out as you had hoped.
I don’t think it would help much for this question, but I could imagine using this feature for future questions in which the ability to answer anonymously would be important. (One might limit this to users with a certain amount of karma to prevent brigading.)
It’s hard to figure out the discount (or premium) rate for GiveDirectly vis-a-vis an advertiser here. I agree that the demographic mix would likely warrant a reduction in value. On the other hand, there’s at least some selection for interest in philanthropy based on the user clicking on the video (and it having only a fraction of the views of an average Mr. Beast video). Moreover, GiveDirectly is getting something that seems much more valuable: an extended favorable presentation from a source who is trusted by his viewers. The advertiser is getting 6-20 seconds on a non-skippable ad—and viewers may have some level of default skepticism toward advertisements.