I want to make the biggest positive difference in the world that I can. My mission is to cause more effective charities to exist in the world by connecting talented individuals with high-impact intervention opportunities. This is why I co-founded the organisation Charity Entrepreneurship to achieve this through an extensive research process and incubation program.
Joey
Karma: 7,249
Hello everyone,
I’m Joey I have worked and volunteered for a ton of different EA organizations (80k, ACE, GWWC, THINK, Leverage) and now have founded one (Charity Science) that works on moving money to the most effective and evidence based charities (GiveWell recommendations).
Meetup : How to Evaluate a Charity Meetup
I have always found it extremely inspiring to see others who are making huge efforts to change the world! Also like the fact it’s community owned :)
Great project!!! Cannot wait to see the results for the annual survey.
Charity Science’s first annual review: how effective is fundraising?
Hey Ryan I do in fact have a month to month graph of donations but it did not move over to the forum for some reason. You can see it here http://www.charityscience.com/operations-details/one-year-internal-review
There is in fact already an EA system for cause neutral pledging that includes AR rights and far-future causes. http://effectivealtruismhub.com/donations
“It’s worth noting that your stance towards evidence appears to be unusual amongst modern philanthropists, and in particular the standard of “provable” seems both counterproductive and radical. I hope that this stance doesn’t become a standard part of what makes effective altruism distinctive.”
I think this stance towards evidence is pretty common in GiveWell donors (which far outnumber EAs) and I agree it’s not super common among general philanthropists (although pretty common in government health aid) circles but many EA concepts are not common among general philanthropists.
It is a pretty common belief among x-risk/meta focused people that poverty is a good introduction to EA and people will later switch to x-risk/meta causes.
Currently I donate to poverty causes although last time we talked I think I was donating to AR.
“Those committed to poverty, who—in other EA orgs—often seem to be looked on as incomplete or fledgling EAs,”
My experience matches Arepo’s both online and in person. (I found it most prevalent in Oxford in fact). Also I agree this is even more true when it comes to AR.
The short answer is that we have internalized opportunity costs and thus donate (or in this case take a really low salary) anything above our basic living costs (which is always lower than 20k for the two of us).
Comparative Bias
I would also recommend running a Christmas Fundraiser (Basically asking for donations instead of gifts during Christmas). http://christmas.causevox.com/
I will post a longer description + guide on how to set this up on a main thread early December.
I suspect that one could make a chart to show a bottle neck in a lot of different places. From my understanding GW does not seem to think what the YED chart would imply.
“I reject the idea that placing high value on the far future – no matter how high the value – makes it clear that one should focus on reducing the risks of catastrophes” http://blog.givewell.org/2014/07/03/the-moral-value-of-the-far-future/
I can put you in contact with an EA who has experience with podcasts if you would like.
I would be interested in more detailed numbers on these, including the numbers for spending in $s as well as the %.
I quite like the idea of randomizing who gets matching funding on birthdays and seeing if we can pick up any differences between the two groups.
Thanks Ervin for the kind words. You’re right that if we shut down there would be a loss of contacts / knowledge. We have gotten a lot better at fundraising overall and expect if other people were to do other fundraising projects there would be a similar learning curve. We have also built up some contacts through networking that would be useful for later projects (e.g. legacy fundraising).
An update on what happened here Matt posted the question to Givewell and they responded http://blog.givewell.org/2014/10/03/a-promising-study-on-the-long-term-effects-of-deworming/comment-page-1/#comment-913365