I like the multiple targets way of fundraising—it helps bring clarity to thinking about the effect of my possible donations.
jayd
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).
A neutral look at the graph doesn’t suggest that—it shows membership growth staying flat for a long time before and after Giving What We Can started taking money, which is at least equally compatible with the hypothesis that that money didn’t increase membership. You couldn’t say that any increase in membership at any point after this showed otherwise.
What were the new initiatives undertaken halfway through 2012 which plausibly led to more members over a year later?
This is not especially egregious in a fundraising post, and I understand that in these you have to adopt the persona of a marketer and can’t add too many qualifications and doubts. So I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that you said this. But, as an intellectual matter, I don’t think it’s quite fair to count “[DFID] reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work” as one of your “tangible results so far”. This was discussed plenty on the Facebook group, and as several people pointed out there was no clear evidence that you rather than the very many other groups that commented on DFID’s proposals were responsible for this particular spending decision.
What ACE is doing reminds me a lot of what Open Phil is doing in terms of how hard it is for them to quantify the impact of the charities. This doesn’t seem to be so much in the nature of the cause areas – as with prioritizing research or existential risk – but rather the result of the neglect of the area, so that ACE has only little and poor-quality prior research to draw on.
This seems correct.
Evidence Action and SCI are top contenders, but I think the evidentiary basis for the effectiveness of deworming, while sizable, is more ambiguous than that for bednets, and more extreme estimates are also more likely to be wrong.
True.
GiveWell seems relatively less neglected than ACE.
I’m not sure this is correct, unless our metric is just size?
Some metacharities have estimated some leverage ratios, but they were always (as far as I’ve seen) the average ones of their past donations not of marginal donations, which may bias the estimate upward.
True.
(Except when the metacharity was just fundraising for operating expenses like Giving What We Can.)
This isn’t true—it hardly takes ~$350,000 a year to cover the most basic operating costs rather than marginal activities, especially when you already have ~$320,000 in the bank and your parent organisation has got almost a million in its coffers. One indication of this is that a very large share of Giving What We Can’s past donations come from the initial (volunteer-led, unfunded) creation of a website where the case for giving more and giving better was made and people could report their pledges. But few of their salaries go to basic maintenance of this, as opposed to charity evaluation and philosophy research, conferences, etc.
I don’t know whether it would be speciesist to value a human QALY one or two orders of magnitude higher than a nonhuman “QALY”
It seems that it would.
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.”
Can people donate specifically to provide EA Ventures seed funding and if so how?
I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
That’s not EA as a movement though.
Do you have any of your research to date on this written up in a form that you can share and people can comment on?
This is an interesting discussion, people listing high earning careers which’re comparatively easy to get: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1002743319782025/
spending a few bucks on recreation is not likely to move the needle in terms of your overall impact
Why is that? Do you mean that someone spending $500 less on entertainment over the year and donating it instead will result in less rather than more money going to help people, due to damage to sustainability and marketability?
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.
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.”
Listing newsletters for all orgs would be helpful.
Makes sense, but points to meta being an unusually broad and unspecific description.
In most cases I don’t see a compelling reason to fund an individual rather than an organization.
I don’t see the difference between funding individuals and organisations, since you can treat individuals as one-person organisations with a narrower range of projects, and by funding organisations you’re ultimately funding individuals. Some of the things produced by .impact members, which I believe are mostly done by individuals or small groups, compare quite well with those produced by organisations.
Having some downvoting is good, and part of the raison d’etre of this forum as opposed to the Facebook group. I agree that people downvote slightly too often, but that’s a matter of changing the norms.
I’ve just used the guide to write my own will via WillAid—I left everything except a few gifts to family to charity.
What’s the explanatory gap argument?
William MacAskill and his ex-wife recently published a high profile article on wild animal suffering, using Cecil the Lion as a hook to argue that (given he was a predator) his death may have been a good thing, and that we should perhaps kill all lions: http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/
What did people think of this? I fear it may have done more harm than good, and I don’t understand the choice to publish something so controversial now, with a book to promote and a chance to get EA more into the mainstream.