I’m not an expert… you’re probably best off googling yourself & doing your own research.
John_Maxwell
Maybe have one of the domains always redirect to the equivalent url on the other domain?
In a couple of weeks, I’m going to give a 10-minute talk (with slides) on effective altruism at the software company I work for (Scribd.com). The audience will be ~40 people, many of whom I am friends with & many of whom are well-compensated and intelligent software engineers/designers/etc. (This is part of a thing Scribd does where employees periodically give talks on random topics that interest them.)
I’d love to hear any suggestions for the content of my talk. I’m curious what evidence we have about the most effective ways to convince people of effective altruism. I’m also curious if anyone has any interesting calls to action for the end of my talk aside from “donate money to Givewell-recommended charities”. It feels like the ideal case would be bringing more people in to the EA community, and I’m not sure what the best first step there is.
Regarding content, I’m open to outlandish suggestions—I’m fairly willing to make a fool of myself (I’m about to quit to work on MealSquares full time) and Scribd has a great sense of humor.
(And, unrelated question: if there are any books that are available on Scribd that you think more people should read, let me know and maybe I can get them featured before I leave. I already got Stuart Armstrong’s book on AI risk featured in our Computers & Technology section. I’m thinking I might try to get this book featured as well because I found it pretty enlightening and spreading the ideas in it seems robustly positive.)
ETA: Here is a follow-up comment discussing the contents and reception of my talk.
- 22 Nov 2014 5:11 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Open thread 5 by (
I’d be interested to learn how a more sales-pitch type framing would have worked… e.g. “what if I told you that for the same amount of money, you could save 2x as many lives in the developing world?”
Both not available on Scribd :/
Probably not :(
As a follow-up to this comment: I gave my 10-minute talk on effective altruism at Scribd. The talk went better than I expected: several of my coworkers told me afterwards that it was really good. So I thought I would summarize the contents of the talk so it can be used as a data point for presenting on effective altruism.
You can see the slides for my talk in keynote, pptx, and html. Here are some notes on the slides:
The thought experiment on the second slide was Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment. After giving everyone a few seconds to think about the thought experiment, I asked everyone who thought there was 50% probability or higher that they would save the drowning child to raise their hand (inspired by this essay). Almost everyone raised their hands.
I threw in a few ideas that haven’t seen wide discussion of in the effective altruist community. For example, in the last chapter of Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism he explains how he thinks that Western culture’s focus on consumerism and our lack of purpose and connection has contributed to our depression epidemic, which I covered on slides 6-7.
On slide 9, I tried to make things concrete and interesting by suggesting that Scribd could save money by giving everyone Chromebooks to work with, but this would probably end up being bad for the company’s bottom line in the long run because we would work less efficiently.
Another thing I haven’t seen wide discussion of in the EA community is the analogy between groups like Givewell and scientists (see this LW comment for more on this idea). I discussed this on slides 11-12.
On slide 14, I discussed in depth the idea that doctors don’t do all that much good due to replaceability effects. (The 4 principles were stolen from Ben Kuhn’s writeup.)
Overall, I found this experience really encouraging. Initially I was afraid that the drowning child thought experiment would make people hostile, but that didn’t seem to happen at all… there wasn’t any criticism of the idea even during the Q&A period at the end. I was also afraid that the talk tried to cram too many ideas in to just 10 minutes, which may have occurred but all the evidence I observed afterwards suggested to me that the concepts I tried to communicate were well-understood. The people at Scribd are pretty smart though: the talk before mine was about the physics of motorcycle riding, and the talk after mine was by a champion Go player. So a different presentation might be optimal for a different crowd.
Although several people told me they thought the talk was good, I didn’t hear much discussion about the concepts I presented afterwards. And of course it’s hard to measure whether people actually became significantly inclined towards effective altruism or not. So in the long run we should still probably do rigorous message A/B testing.
- 8 Nov 2014 8:37 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Open Thread 4 by (
- 22 Nov 2014 5:31 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Effective Altruism at Your Work by (
- 31 Dec 2014 10:50 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on List of Introductory EA Presentations by (
I gave a presentation at work on effective altruism as part of a series of talks that one of my co-workers organized. It seemed well-received. You can see more details here.
If anyone is undecided about applying for this kind of position vs earning to give, I found the following quote from Ben Kuhn interesting:
All the EA organizations that I’ve talked to have mentioned difficulty in finding people. This is despite the fact that I know many people in the movement who seem like they would be quite good candidates. I’m wondering if this is because the earning-to-give meme has propagated so strongly that everyone decides they would rather earn money and fund someone else working there, and then they don’t apply, leading to a shortage of qualified applicants. At any rate, few enough people have the required skills and attitudes to work at e.g. GiveWell, Giving What We Can or 80,000 Hours that it seems pretty non-replaceable.
I think cognitive dissonance and value erosion work similarly here, and both point in favour of veganism.
But they may point against the spreading of veg*nism. By spreading the idea that animals in factory farms suffer, you may cause people to decide that they don’t care about animals after all. (It seems like every person who is unconvinced of your arguments for veg*nism is at risk for this.)
Seems like 80K could probably stand to link to more of Cognito Mentoring’s old stuff in general. No reason to duplicate effort.
Has there been A/B testing of the messaging for the book launches? It’d be a huge missed opportunity if, for example, the books hammer on the standard drowning child thought experiment type opportunity cost arguments if an excited altruism perspective turns out to be more effective for getting people to actually take action. (For example, the entire last chapter of Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism is basically about how being altruistic makes people happier. He analogizes donating to charity and volunteering to “moral jogging”—somewhat unpleasant in the short run but good for your happiness in the long run.)
Re: random solid jobs.
Being a dentist is much better than being a doctor according to this guy; ctrl-f “dentist” for commentary.
Indeed.com has a cool salary estimator tool; here is an example usage examining specialties within software development, but it can also easily be used to compare occupations.
There are lots of threads on the internet about this, e.g. this one and this one and this one.
My general impression is that certain blue collar occupations like cop, prison warden, plumber, welder, oil rig worker, etc. can be lucrative if you’re operating in the right area. (Cops/prison wardens in areas with solvent governments have pensions that can be factored in.)
I heard somewhere that government jobs typically hire based on an aptitude test rather than degrees, and economist Steven Landsburg thinks that they pay more on average.
Good post. Maybe it’d be valuable to start discussions on other online forums and try to gather external perspectives on EA, instead of just discussing what hypothetical external perspectives might look like here amongst ourselves :) For example, most of Less Wrong knows what EA is, but over half don’t identify as EA. This thread has lots of non-EA LWers explaining themselves. Maybe we can come up with a list of questions and try to administer an informal survey to further our understanding?
(Yes, we have many people from the LW demographic already… but smart people concerned with cognitive biases seem like good EA recruits if they’re less likely to see their good intentions go awry. So I think more people from that demographic are still highly valuable on the margin. The EA movement is currently full of smart thoughtful people, but it’s growing fast, and there are only so many people who are smart and thoughtful… what will happen when less intelligent, less thoughtful people dominate?)
The BLS also has regional data if you check the second link. Seems the BLS thinks programmers in the Bay Area make perhaps 1.3x the national average. But Bay Area programmers don’t just work for highly profitable tech companies… there are non-software-company salaries and salaries at less profitable tech companies pulling the average down. It’s also not clear whether the BLS is taking in to account equity compensation, which is obviously very significant at many Bay Area tech companies.
Fair points.
Do you think maybe this data would be more usefully presented as percentages of survey respondents rather than raw numbers?
A thought: It seems like the EA community has a pretty strong focus on criticism, whether it’s internal or external. Is it possible that this can itself be counterproductive? If the EA community is a fun place to be, that’s good for both recruiting and retention, right?
Or to steelman Robin Hanson’s recent post, if the EA community is ever to expand beyond high-scrupulosity, taking-abstract-moral-arguments-seriously, relentlessly-self-criticizing folks, it may need to find a way to help people achieve conventional self-interested goals like making friends, finding mates, and signaling desirable qualities.
(I don’t necessarily agree with this position but it seems like an interesting one. There may be some kind of quality vs quantity tradeoff where we can either have a smaller movement full of dedicated, careful, effective nerds or a larger movement that could spin out of the control of its founders.)
Be careful about duplicating content between effectivealtruism.com and effectivealtruism.org; I think maybe Google frowns when it sees the same content duplicated on different domains/webpages.