Julia_Wise

• Julia_Wise 25 Mar 2019 15:08 UTC

  112 points

  in reply to: pton's comment on: Apology

  The ac­cu­sa­tion of sex­ual mis­con­duct at Brown is one of the things that wor­ried us at CEA. But we ap­proached Jacy pri­mar­ily out of con­cern about other more re­cent re­ports from mem­bers of the an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy and EA com­mu­ni­ties.

• Julia_Wise 28 Feb 2019 18:27 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: You have more than one goal, and that’s fine

  My ad­vice on how to de­cide the pots of money is ba­si­cally in this post: http://​​www.giv­ing­gladly.com/​​2012/​​03/​​trade­offs.html

  TL;DR: spend some time notic­ing how much other peo­ple and let that in­form your bud­get, but don’t try to pay at­ten­tion them ev­ery day, be­cause you prob­a­bly can’t go around pow­ered by guilt for­ever.

  That ad­vice was writ­ten at a time when I thought of dona­tion as ba­si­cally the only path to im­pact, at least for my­self. I do think it’s worth se­ri­ously con­sid­er­ing whether other paths are vi­able for you and not com­mit­ting to a level of dona­tion that will se­ri­ously re­duce your abil­ity to pur­sue other things. This prob­a­bly won’t be sur­pris­ing com­ing from the per­son run­ning Giv­ing What We Can, but I think some­thing like 10% is a level that’s both sig­nifi­cant and also com­pat­i­ble with, for ex­am­ple, work­ing for a non­profit.

  I find the up­side of de­cid­ing an­nu­ally on my dona­tion bud­get is that I can then make all the other de­ci­sions the way ev­ery­one else does. Va­ca­tion? Lunch with a friend? Dona­tion to friend’s fundraiser? They’re all in the “stuff that will en­rich my life” cat­e­gory, so I can trade them off against each other how­ever I think will be best for me.

• Julia_Wise 20 Feb 2019 18:03 UTC

  5 points

  on: Time-se­ries data for in­come & hap­piness?

  I’d also ex­pect peo­ple to do a thing of tak­ing high-pay­ing jobs with the ex­pec­ta­tion that it benefits their chil­dren more than their own hap­piness. I don’t know if there’s ev­i­dence on that.

You have more than one goal, and that’s fine

• Julia_Wise 1 Feb 2019 14:06 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: rafa_fanboy's comment on: Will com­pa­nies meet their an­i­mal welfare com­mit­ments?

  This is not a ques­tion that any­one has an ob­jec­tive an­swer to.

• Julia_Wise 31 Jan 2019 16:22 UTC

  6 points

  on: Lat­est Re­search and Up­dates for Jan­uary 2019

  I’m sur­prised and im­pressed by that BBC ver­ti­cal! I won­der how much their sense of “long term” will over­lap with the sense used in EA. It seems the Vox ver­ti­cal on EA has needed to churn out so much con­tent that they tend to in­clude ma­te­rial that I don’t see as a great fit for the theme. I hope BBC will be more re­laxed about the quan­tity of ma­te­rial they need to pro­duce, so that the ma­te­rial can be more on-topic.

• Julia_Wise 17 Jan 2019 16:30 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: rafa_fanboy's comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Spar­row: a user-friendly app to sim­plify effec­tive giving

  Rafa_fan­boy, I’ve writ­ten to you but I’m not sure if you saw the mes­sage. You con­sis­tently make com­ments that aren’t helpful, and peo­ple reg­u­larly re­port them. Please try to keep your com­ments in the realm of “friendly and pro­duc­tive.”

• Julia_Wise 10 Jan 2019 14:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo's comment on: What Is Effec­tive Altru­ism?

  “Whichever will have the best life” seems very com­pat­i­ble with “welfare.” I agree there are a lot of con­sid­er­a­tions that aren’t ob­vi­ously in­di­cated by any of these defi­ni­tions, though, even if they’re com­pat­i­ble.

• Julia_Wise 9 Jan 2019 18:59 UTC

  6 points

  on: Cor­po­rate match­ing—good?

  I think the ques­tion be­ing asked is not quite what it seems. If you work at a com­pany that offers cor­po­rate match­ing, that’s great and I’d en­courage you to take ad­van­tage of it.

  If you are fun­nel­ing money to your friend for them to give be­cause they work for a com­pany that offers cor­po­rate match­ing, that seems bor­der­line fraud­u­lent. Pre­sum­ably what the com­pany in­tends is to offer a benefit to their em­ploy­ees, not to their em­ploy­ees’ friends. For more dis­cus­sion: https://​​dou­blethe­do­na­tion.com/​​tips/​​blog/​​2013/​​08/​​reader-ques­tion-sub­mit­ting-match-re­quests-for-non-per­sonal-dona­tions/​​

• Julia_Wise 4 Jan 2019 20:33 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: rafa_fanboy's comment on: Dona­tion Post: 2018

  There’s a prob­lem with the way posts are im­ported from some blogs, which we’re work­ing to fix.

• Julia_Wise 1 Jan 2019 12:42 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: LHarrison's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  I think it’s that none of the ex­ist­ing EA or­ga­ni­za­tions would want to hire gov­ern­ment and policy ex­perts to their own orgs, but would very much like to see peo­ple with an EA ap­proach work­ing in gov­ern­ment.

Sub­mit ques­tions about Giv­ing What We Can for Q&A ses­sion De­cem­ber 30

• Julia_Wise 28 Dec 2018 21:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Greg_Colbourn's comment on: EA Ho­tel Fundraiser 1: the story

  >The Trus­tees do the se­lect­ing for stays over a month. Man­agers for stays un­der a month.

  I see where the Trus­tees are listed, but who are the Man­agers?

• Julia_Wise 28 Dec 2018 13:43 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Liam_Donovan's comment on: Re­sponse to a Dy­lan Matthews ar­ti­cle on Vox about bipartisanship

  He wrote one of the early ar­ti­cles about earn­ing to give, as far as I know “be­came as­so­ci­ated with EA” in the same way that other EAs do—by get­ting in­ter­ested in the ideas and start­ing to act on them. For ex­am­ple, he donated a kid­ney.

• Julia_Wise 25 Dec 2018 13:35 UTC

  24 points

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: How Effec­tive Altru­ists Can Be Wel­com­ing To Conservatives

  Giv­ing What We Can has always em­pha­sized that the ev­i­dence points to some in­ter­ven­tions be­ing much more effec­tive than oth­ers, al­though it’s in­creased the scope of in­ter­ven­tions it now en­courages mem­bers to con­sider.

  In keep­ing with the “ev­i­dence and rea­son” ba­sis of effec­tive al­tru­ism, we en­courage peo­ple to­wards cause ar­eas that hold up well un­der at least rea­son even if there is not yet ev­i­dence. For ex­am­ple, there’s plenty of sci­en­tific ev­i­dence on how an­i­mals re­spond be­hav­iorally and neu­rolog­i­cally to stim­uli that would be painful to hu­mans, so it seems rea­son­able to con­clude they do ex­pe­rience pain, and to con­sider whether in­ter­ven­tions aimed at re­duc­ing that pain might be more effec­tive than in­ter­ven­tions aimed at other morally rele­vant pop­u­la­tions. While the ev­i­dence on some­thing like policy change or pre­vent­ing GCRs isn’t nearly as es­tab­lished, be­cause they’re about try­ing to cause or pre­vent some­thing that hasn’t hap­pened yet, we think there is of­ten good rea­son­ing be­hind efforts in these ar­eas. We see evan­ge­lism as differ­ent be­cause be­liev­ing that peo­ple who are cur­rently al­ive will con­tinue to be moral pa­tients af­ter we can no longer ob­serve any ev­i­dence of them hav­ing con­tinued con­scious­ness, and that their hold­ing spe­cific re­li­gious be­liefs is es­sen­tial to their wellbe­ing in the af­ter­life, is called “faith” be­cause it doesn’t fully rest on ei­ther ev­i­dence or rea­son.

  I agree there’s not a ter­ribly bright line here, and we could find more cases that could plau­si­bly go ei­ther way. There are also more causes that some peo­ple con­sider best but that Giv­ing What We Can would not ac­cept to­wards the pledge, like white supremacy or de­struc­tion of the world to pre­vent fu­ture suffer­ing.

• Julia_Wise 23 Dec 2018 17:07 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: Carl_Shulman's comment on: How Effec­tive Altru­ists Can Be Wel­com­ing To Conservatives

  Reli­gious evan­ge­lism is not counted to­ward the Giv­ing What We Can pledge. https://​​www.giv­ing­whatwe­can.org/​​post/​​2015/​​11/​​giv­ing-what-we-can-peo­ple-faith/​​

  We re­al­ize that some peo­ple do gen­uinely be­lieve it’s the best way to help oth­ers, but it’s far enough from the goals of our pro­ject that we think peo­ple who want sup­port in stick­ing to their goals of dona­tion for that cause should in­stead con­nect with the many ex­ist­ing com­mu­ni­ties that fa­vor fund­ing evan­ge­lism.

• Julia_Wise 22 Dec 2018 14:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelLewis's comment on: Hu­mane Pes­ti­cides as the Most Marginally Effec­tive Cause

  I as­sume the post was pri­mar­ily about agri­cul­tural pes­ti­cides rather than home pes­ti­cides.

• Julia_Wise 21 Dec 2018 14:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: michaelchen's comment on: Is it bet­ter to be a wild rat or a fac­tory farmed cow? A sys­tem­atic method for com­par­ing an­i­mal welfare.

  Yeah, I think there’s a bad dy­namic where peo­ple who have read To­masik ei­ther se­ri­ously or jok­ingly pro­pose “pave ev­ery­thing” and other peo­ple find that alarm­ing and want noth­ing to do with any ideas that could lead in that di­rec­tion. I spent years in­ten­tion­ally not read­ing To­masik be­cause I was afraid it would make me into some kind of fa­natic.

• Julia_Wise 21 Dec 2018 14:41 UTC

  20 points

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: How Effec­tive Altru­ists Can Be Wel­com­ing To Conservatives

  I don’t think it’s an ab­surd ex­am­ple. It’s come up se­ri­ously as a ques­tion about how Giv­ing What We Can mem­bers can donate as part of their pledge.

• Julia_Wise 7 Dec 2018 3:26 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: michaelchen's comment on: Is it bet­ter to be a wild rat or a fac­tory farmed cow? A sys­tem­atic method for com­par­ing an­i­mal welfare.

  I find that dis­cus­sion about wild an­i­mal suffer­ing very quickly gets to “but it would be lu­dicrous to be­lieve X be­cause then we’d have to do Y.” I think it’s bet­ter to fo­cus on “How might we find out if X is true” rather than the dras­tic con­se­quences that would have.

  As a par­allel, peo­ple in power have of­ten found it con­ve­nient to be­lieve that slaves, im­mi­grants, poor peo­ple, etc have nat­u­rally higher pain tol­er­ance than them­selves and thus it’s not a prob­lem for them to do hard la­bor, have in­ad­e­quate med­i­cal care, etc. The fact that chang­ing this be­lief would have dis­rup­tive con­se­quences doesn’t have any­thing to do with its ac­cu­racy.