Unfortunately, we could only track website visitors as far as clicking a “donate” button on TLYCS “Where To Donate” page (http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/Where-to-Donate). After clicking the button they are directed to the individual charity website, so we don’t have visibility into if they actually followed through with making a donation, or how much that donation was.
Does LYCS have any estimates which speak to that, even tangentially, for instance for it’s general impact evaluations?
We are considering a/b testing some new questions, and would love suggestions on different phrasing.
How about using different questions from the EA Census? There was already a big community discussion on what suggestions to include on that, on this forum I think.
This is especiall useful and practical compared with other posts in your series so far—a lot of what you say about individuals and institutions is plausible.
I like the multiple targets way of fundraising—it helps bring clarity to thinking about the effect of my possible donations.
Yes, my understanding is not many people are doing this.
The key question with hierarchies is whether the people at the top are thoughtful and competent people. I feel like the EA movement has been pretty lucky in this regard.
Not sure if I agree with this—it seems like that’s the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who’ve just been funnelling more and more of the cult’s money to themselves. More of an “outside view” would be helpful.
I’ve seen people get very embarrassed by this but perhaps that’s irrational on there part and due to social oversensitivity out of proportion to the actual social costs (hardly unheard of)
Effective Altruism isn’t an organisation though; it’s some combination of:
An attitude (or a question), and the collection or community of people who share it
A movement
A cause, or collection of causes
We don’t normally see a strong top-down hierarchy in these except in some religious movements new and old:
Take the attitude of scepticism towards religious claims, or of asking the question which position on religion has the strongest evidence. Richard Dawkins is the closest person to being a leader of this, but isn’t very close (fortunately, if you ask me!)
The enviromental movement looks like a good parallel, and we don’t see something like the Global Environment Facility at the top of it.
The same goes for the environmental cause. You might find causes which have top dogs, but they’re mostly extra narrowly defined (e.g. the cause of catching Kony).
Does this mainly just require knowing CSS? Or can you do mockups in a graphics program and leave the CSS to someone else?
What sort of technical skills does this require? Is it mainly testing out a few plugins for MediaWiki (or WordPress or whatever)?
In extremis, presumably the prestige costs of being totally uninformed about the news are worth avoiding?
Why did you want to go that direction?
How about the prestige/social benefits of being up on the news? Or indeed some TV?
That reply:
Ok this is all fair. I think, however, that a big fraction of the historical impact is due to on-going activity, of the kind that could continue, rather than being all due to the ‘set up’ generating the stream. And that would mean the historical ratio is a reasonable guide to the future.
This can be hard to see from the outside, but if you look at where new pledgers are coming from, it’s often new press coverage or student group activity. Many also only take the pledge after being nudged by someone in person, even if they had heard about GWWC some time before, so there’s an important role just talking to lots of people about the pledge. These kinds of activities can be scaled much further.
Continues at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/hz/please_support_giving_what_we_can_this_spring/3vw
To expand on this, the difference between core GWWC (and various layers of the core) and marginal GWWC appears to be a fundamental issue here. In response to a long thread in the other post were people were worrying about GWWC’s expansion at some point hitting lower than 1:1 fundraising ratios, Peter put it succinctly:
I agree that GWWC’s ratio is probably above 1 with a good deal of confidence (though I haven’t done the formal math to evaluate how extreme that statement is). But I think the more compelling argument is that expansion funding on the margin may not have a ratio above 1.
And I expanded:
Yes, there’s a huge, huge difference between the impact of GWWC existing as a place where people who wanted to pledge 10% of their income to help those living in global poverty could join others in publicly doing so, and the impact of its marginal funded activities now. GWWC existed as that place before The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded around it as an organisation with donors and a budget supporting paid employees. If minimal resources were spent on creating the basic infrastructure, and I don’t know if that’s so, but if so, then it had a mega high impact ratio. But it seems wrong to use that to justify keeping on spending more money on more employees doing more marginal projects until the impact from the original resource gets “used up.”
Yes, there’s a huge, huge difference between the impact of GWWC existing as a place where people who wanted to pledge 10% of their income to help those living in global poverty could join others in publicly doing so, and the impact of its marginal funded activities now. GWWC existed as that place before The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded around it as an organisation with donors and a budget supporting paid employees. If minimal resources were spent on creating the basic infrastructure, and I don’t know if that’s so, but if so, then it had a mega high impact ratio. But it seems wrong to use that to justify keeping on spending more money on more employees doing more marginal projects until the impact from the original resource gets “used up.”
Anyone want to create one on the EA Wiki?
I understand The Centre for Effective Altruism (TGPP, GWWC, e.t.c.) does and has done a lot of philosophical and methodological research, so you might want to talk to them.
The AI sabotage begins.