Jon_Behar

• Jon_Behar 13 May 2015 21:02 UTC

  9 points

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  on: How to save more lives to­day than in a year of earn-to-give

  If you move ahead with this project, I’d urge you to try asking different things. It’d be easy to turn this into an experiment. I’d suggest testing out High (e.g. Take a pledge), Medium (e.g. Watch Peter Singer’s TED Talk), and Low (e.g. Check out the EA forum) asks.

  More generally, this seems like an interesting idea though I don’t find the logic of the post all that compelling. Tyler, you seem to be conflating two arguments: 1) conversions are extremely valuable and require low conversion rates and 2) building this list and sending cold emails is our best conversion opportunity. I agree with 1 (and have made similar arguments here) but 2 seems to require a pretty big leap of faith.

• Jon_Behar 14 May 2015 17:52 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Please sup­port Giv­ing What We Can this Spring

  I think you could strengthen your model for calculating your multiplier quite a bit by adjusting for the fact that people will earn, and give, more over time. As you note in your writeup, assuming people will give an equal amount each year is an aggressive assumption, but I doubt people have good intuition for how much this matters (and its effects interact a great deal with assumptions about discount/​attrition rates).

  If you’d like, you can borrow the calcs to model this dynamic simplistically from the spreadsheet found in this blog post.

  You’ll probably find this cuts your realistic estimate by at least half, though of course that still leaves a substantial multiplier :)

  What links here?

  • SamDeere's comment on Giv­ing What We Can needs your help this Christ­mas! by Michelle_Hutchinson (9 Dec 2015 13:51 UTC; 5 points)

• Jon_Behar 14 May 2015 20:16 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: SamDeere’s comment on: Please sup­port Giv­ing What We Can this Spring

  Thanks Sam! Very helpful, I hadn’t realized how much conservatism was built into the income estimates.

• Jon_Behar 22 May 2015 0:54 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Sugges­tions thread for plan­ning and ex­e­cut­ing the 2015 EA Survey

  What would make you get more involved in the EA movement? What approaches have you found particularly (in)effective in communicating EA ideas? Which best describes your EA behavior: a big initial commitment or an incremental progression over time?

• Jon_Behar 22 May 2015 14:57 UTC

  7 points

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  in reply to: Tom_Ash’s comment on: Sugges­tions thread for plan­ning and ex­e­cut­ing the 2015 EA Survey

  We’d use the first two questions I listed as a source of ideas. The third would help inform our general strategy. Our working assumption is that it’s better to make small, incremental asks rather than one big ask (e.g. a significant pledge) at the outset. Would be nice to see if that’s consistent with the experiences of the EA community.

• Jon_Behar 23 May 2015 0:52 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: jayd’s comment on: How to save more lives to­day than in a year of earn-to-give

  I’d argue for using TLYCS’s pledge for the high ask for three reasons, two of which seem pretty compelling:

  1) I work for TLYCS 2) TLYCS has a lower minimum pledge than GWWC, so it’ll give a richer, more informative, data set. Our baseline assumption is presumably that cold-emailing people doesn’t get a lot of pledges. If we get that result with a high minimum pledge, we won’t know if a lower minimum would do better. Conversely, if we use TLYCS’s pledge and see a bunch of people pledging 3%, that’s valuable info. (If we see a lot of pledges, we can/​should test TLYCS vs. GWWC pledges directly against each other.) 3) This would directly inform TLYCS strategy. Our working assumption is that pledging is too big an initial ask. We’d be very interested in this data point.

• Jon_Behar 10 Jun 2015 0:26 UTC

  4 points

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  on: [Dis­cus­sion] What does win­ning look like?

  Turning the current negative feedback loop (donors give based on “warm glow”, not impact-> charities dis-incentivized to gather/​provide meaningful impact info->donors who want impact info can’t find it and give based on warm glow) into a positive feedback loop (donors give based on impact-> charities incentivized to achieve/​measure/​report impact->easier for donors to conduct better analysis).

  More generally, drastically shifting incentives people face re: EA behavior (giving effectively, impact-based career decisions, keeping robots from killing us, etc.)

• Jon_Behar 12 Aug 2015 16:01 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: jonathonsmith’s comment on: TLYCS Pam­phlet Pilot Results

  TLYCS’s (very) rough estimate is that on average each “donate click” equates to ~$100 in donations. However, that’s on overall average for our site, so my guess for a new visitor, currently enrolled in college, would be significantly lower.

  As a reminder, TLYCS also expects to generate a multiplier on its expenditures, so the true breakeven cost would have to be <33% or so of the expected donations.

  Sorry to take so long to respond to this!

• Jon_Behar 29 Dec 2015 21:23 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Gleb_T’s comment on: Tap­ping Skep­tic Hearts Through Giv­ing Games

  I think the biggest issue is that you shouldn’t pit an effective charity against (only) a strawman. There should be at least one other choice that’s compelling for emotional/​effectiveness/​etc based reasons. It’s fine to include a strawman in a 3+ charity GG and could lead to some useful outcomes. For instance, if you had college students choose between AMF/​not EA but still compelling charity/​their school, they’d probably see their school as a strawman. So this setup can get people who might counterfactually give to their school without thinking to instead think: “there are reasons to give to my school, but my charitable dollars can do way more good elsewhere.” Not only do people explicitly reject a default giving option, they also do so based on comparative impact which is how we want them to make future giving decisions.

  My hunch is that the real value of an emotionally compelling charity is in the intensity of the experience it can create. This provides the opportunity to make really valuable “post-game asks” like getting them to sign up for the newsletter of an effective charity or charity evaluator.

  What links here?

  • Gleb_T's comment on Tap­ping Skep­tic Hearts Through Giv­ing Games by Gleb_T (30 Dec 2015 20:29 UTC; 1 point)

• Jon_Behar 29 Dec 2015 22:29 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Tap­ping Skep­tic Hearts Through Giv­ing Games

  Quick update on where things stand w/​ our ability to analyze the relative efficacy of different sorts of Giving Games…

  I’m working on a spreadsheet that will basically take all the data we collect about each game and put it into a pivot table. Then users will be able to look at whatever cuts of data they want: all data for games involving AMF, all data for games including a local option, games w/​ 2 charities vs. games with 3, games in US vs. games in UK, etc. I just completed a very preliminary prototype, but there’s still a bunch of work to do to get it operating smoothly and back populate some of our old data. Eventually I’d like to make this a shared resource that GG facilitators and researchers can access.

• Jon_Behar 30 Dec 2015 18:28 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: Tap­ping Skep­tic Hearts Through Giv­ing Games

  We’ve run a lab experiment where we tested the effects of giving people money to donate to their choice of two charities featured in a TED talk all subjects watched. It’s described here, my collaborator is working on writing it up for publication. Takeaway is that the “Giving Game Treatment” saw huge (2-4x) increases in amount of their own money people donated, % of people who signed up for at least one charity newsletter, and total # of subscriptions relative to the control group.

  Next thing we want to test is whether we can create lasting changes in attitudes and behaviors. Not sure yet whether that will be a formal (intended for academic publication) study or not.

  Btw, while not directly related to the efficacy of Giving Games, there are also a couple of academic studies likely to be published that have used the Giving Game model to test hypotheses by varying the information provided to different treatments. Some U Chicago researchers did this to extend their research on the “other minds problem” and I’m working with someone at U of Hamburg to expand the literature on how “social information” affects giving.

  What links here?

  • Gleb_T's comment on Tap­ping Skep­tic Hearts Through Giv­ing Games by Gleb_T (30 Dec 2015 20:29 UTC; 1 point)

The Life You Can Save’s 2015 Year in Review

• Jon_Behar 16 Feb 2016 16:35 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: The Life You Can Save’s 2015 Year in Review

  Charlie Bresler and I could both definitely earn significantly higher salaries in the private sector (especially since Charlie is unpaid in his role as TLYCS’s Executive Director). However, neither of us is in a place in life where we’re particularly passionate about or interested in maximizing our earning potential (even if the motivation were earning to give). So it’s not clear how much of our work should be considered “giving in kind.”

  I should also point out that our business experience has opened up a lot of doors for us, helping us get in front of investment clubs, high net worth donors, media appearances, etc. As a simple example, Charlie is giving a talk tonight for Harvard and MIT business school students, and his background prompted the local EA groups who arranged the talk to invite student groups interested in retail/​apparel. So I feel it’s important that this sort of background is represented in the effective giving outreach community so we can take advantage of these opportunities.

  What links here?

  • Peter Wildeford's comment on The Life You Can Save’s 2015 Year in Review by Jon_Behar (18 Feb 2016 18:32 UTC; 2 points)

• Jon_Behar 17 Feb 2016 17:34 UTC

  1 point

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  on: The Value of Those in Effec­tive Altruism

  Nice post- good to see the discussion it’s generating.

  While I find the first-order expected utility calcs useful, I think it’s also important to consider the direction and possible magnitude of second order effects. I think these point strongly in the favor of seeking more but less dedicated EAs due to reasons of scale.

  We want the charitable marketplace to become more efficient- for more capital to flow to the highest impact projects, higher quality information, easier access to information, etc. We’re currently trapped in a negative feedback loop- donors don’t give based on impact, so charities aren’t incentivized to measure/​report impact, so donors can’t find impact data, so it’s harder for donors to give based on impact, etc. The more people we have who buy into EA principles to some degree, the easier it’ll be to reverse this feedback loop. Take someone who gives 5% of their income to charity, half of it to EA causes and half to more traditional causes. If this person improves the impact of their traditional giving by doing more research or thinking about cause selection, it will barely show up in our expected utility calc but it will help propagate some of the key messages we care about.

  There are also issues of optics. If every EA social media account magically gained 100x followers, the movement as a whole would appear a lot more credible.

  So all else equal, if I knew that 1000 people were going to accomplish 1000 units of good, I’d much rather have that good distributed evenly rather than highly concentrated in a few people.

  What links here?

  • Gleb_T's comment on The Value of Those in Effec­tive Altruism by Gleb_T (20 Feb 2016 23:49 UTC; 1 point)

• Jon_Behar 18 Feb 2016 20:52 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: The Life You Can Save’s 2015 Year in Review

  Thanks Rob. I definitely agree with the thrust of the article, and we’re basically taking that approach with Giving Games.

• Jon_Behar 18 Feb 2016 20:55 UTC

  0 points

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  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: The Life You Can Save’s 2015 Year in Review

  Good points… these would be good numbers to add to future reports, though I’ll note that profit calcs (like ratio calcs) don’t do a great job of handling investments with upfront costs and delayed benefits.

  I think your profit calc is in the ballpark, and agree that growth in that number would be >2x.

• Jon_Behar 7 Mar 2016 21:53 UTC

  8 points

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  on: Ac­com­plish­ments Open Thread—March 2016

  Scott, loved your opendemocracy article! Very well written!

  Gleb did a good job summarizing progress on running Giving Games with secular audiences, which I’m really excited about.

  Lots of other good news to report on the GG front. Cafelow’s week running GG in New Zealand was indeed epic, here’s hoping her EA course comes to fruition!

  I also got two inquiries last week that could signal the next stage of growth for GG (though we’re in preliminary stages of conversation in both cases, so no guarantee that either will come to fruition). So far, we’ve run GG with a few classes or student groups at a given school. It’s great to reach some students that way, but we really want to be reaching entire student bodies. Now people are looking to do just that. One person reached out to me about a campus wide GG (co-sponsored by the school) and the second reached out about building GG into a mandatory curriculum for 2nd year students at another school. If all goes well, these GG would reach ~1800 and ~2500 students respectively!

• Jon_Behar 18 Mar 2016 17:09 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Us­ing Break­ing News Sto­ries for Effec­tive Altruism

  I’m surprised that the comments and voting seem largely negative. I’m not sure if that’s a response to the specific phase “newsjacking”, the general strategy of borrowing news, or Gleb’s particular application of that strategy. I hope there’s support for the general strategy- EA has a long history of news borrowing and my impression is that it has been by and large successful.

  I’d find it helpful to move the discussion toward guidelines we can use to determine when “news borrowing” is a good idea. My sense is that a guiding factor should be how sympathetic the people in the news are. This would suggest that charity fraud/​behavior that most people would find really distasteful (e.g. Wounded Warriors) is fair game, news about a heartwarming but ineffective charity or a large ineffective gift (e.g. Batkid or John Paulson giving $400mil to Harvard) is ok but should be approached delicately, and disaster relief should generally be left alone (especially in the immediate aftermath).

  Another very important aspect of the news borrowing strategy (at least at scale) is Search Engine Optimization. Basically, the more we have high profile sites like Time linking to EA orgs, content from those orgs will show up higher in people’s search results. Disclaimer: I don’t know a ton about SEO, it’d be great if an expert could write up some best practices for the movement. But as far as I can tell, news borrowing is perfect for SEO since as Wikipedia puts it:

  “Search engines often use the number of backlinks [inbound links] that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity and importance… The significance of Search Engine rankings is pretty high, and it is regarded as a crucial parameter in online business and the conversion rate of visitors to any website, particularly when it comes to online shopping… There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the web page granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable ‘editorial vote’ for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage.”

• Jon_Behar 9 May 2016 17:01 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Ac­com­plish­ments Open Thread—May 2016

  Love these threads, very nice (and inspiring) to read what people are up to.

  Plenty of recent good news on the Giving Game project. We got our biggest external donation to date for sponsorship of GG, started work on a lab experiment (slated to run in the fall) that will look at whether GG produce medium term (probably ~1 month) changes in giving attitudes and behaviors, ran our first GG in Russia, had GG pitched as a workshop to a large network of middle school teachers, and continued to make good progress running GG w/​ secular audiences.

  And while I had nothing to do with it, big shout-out to my colleagues at The Life You Can Save who have significantly improved our newsletter subscription rates through an “exit intent” campaign (basically a popup that comes up when people are about to close the window).

Wish Peter Singer a happy 70th birth­day!