Kaleem Ahmid. Entrepreneur in Residence at EV.
Previously a Community Builder at Northeastern and in Boston. Previously a Visiting Scholar at JHU Center for Health Security. EAGxBoston 2022 and EAGxNYC 2023 organiser.
Kaleem
Karma: 2,052
EZ#2
After doing a LOT of reading of Fiqh, and speaking to islamic scholars, it seems that (for the purposes of EA- so ignoring most of the permitted uses of zakat, like freeing slaves, promoting the faith etc), anything other than an org which directs zakat to poor muslims would be religiously dubious and unlikely to be strictly zakat compliant.
This is a pretty big disappointment for me: I went into this research with an expectation that there would be some reputable, sizeable minority of opinions which would support using zakat for things like the public health of a largely but not solely Muslim population, which would at least enable us to try and promote a small number of e.g. GiveWell recommended charities.
I think that this means a couple of things:
-
thinking about “To Whom?”: in terms of interventions, direct cash transfers to the poorest people (which are truly what zakat is meant to be used for) is likely going to be the most cost-effective way to deploy zakat. The most widely appealing way to do this would either be to start a new org which is basically “GiveDirectly to Muslims only”, or to get GD to run a dedicated zakat compliant program (like the one they ran in Yemen in 2023). We could try and run a “Give Directly for Mostly Muslims” and hope that we’d still be able to convince/attract a sizeable portion of zakat from Muslims who aren’t super orthodox with their adherence to the obligations of zakat when it comes to recipient eligibility (I guess this would look like promoting GD more strongly as an org to give zakat to, and helping GD set-up proper zakat-compliant systems for handling zakat).
-
Thinking about “From Whom?”: I think the bulk of the work to do now on this project is to figure out how to go about capturing the biggest slice of zakat possible. There are a bunch of ways which philanthropic fundraising can go (focusing on UHNWIs, retail donors, institutional donors etc), and figuring out which strategy to prioritise, and honing the pitch for effective zakat, are all important steps.
-
I’ve been doing judging for the African EA forum post competition, and its been really irritating/sad to see how uncharitable (and keen to be harsh) more experienced EAs have been towards the posts of first-time posters or people who write in a non-rationalist way. Come on people....
If you think a post is bad or could easily be improved, just point out how. Don’t strong downvote and deride the author?
EZ#1
The world of Zakat is really infuriating/frustrating. There is almost NO accountability/transparency demonstrated by orgs which collect and distribute zakat—they don’t seem to feel any obligation to show what they do with what they collect. Correspondingly, nearly every Muslim I’ve spoken to about zakat/effective zakat has expressed that their number 1 gripe with zakat is the strong suspicion that it’s being pocketed or corruptly used by these collection orgs.
Given this, it seems like there’s a really big niche in the market to be exploited by an EA-aligned zakat org. My feeling at the moment is that the org should focus on, and emphasise, its ability to be highly accountable and transparent about how it stores and distributes the zakat it collects.
The trick here is finding ways to distribute zakat to eligible recipients in cost-effective ways. Currently, possibly only two of the several dozen ‘most effective’ charities we endorse as a community would be likely zakat-compliant (New Incentives, and Give Directly), and even then, only one or two of GiveDirectly’s programs would qualify.
This is pretty disappointing, because it means that the EA community would probably have to spend quite a lot of money either identifying new highly effective charities which are zakat-compliant, or start new highly-effective zakat complaint orgs from scratch.
Thank you for writing this—it articulates so many things that I have also been feeling and thinking over the past few days, in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to. I hope I’m not mistaken in sensing that you hold some optimism and hope even during this tumultuous time—if so, you’re not alone. I think that fellow EAs who resonate with these sentiments will emerge at the end of this storm with the same convictions and moral beliefs that lead us here, and that things will be ok.
I’m sorry that you had to go through this terrible event, but thanks for writing this—I found it really moving and I think the lesson is a good one. I think you conveyed the value of moth wellbeing, and your respect for it, in a touching way.
EA (via discussion of SBF and FTX) was briefly discussed on the The Rest is Politics Podcast today (the 3rd of April) and …. I’m really irritated by what was said. This is one of the largest politics podcasts in the world at the moment, and has a seriously influential listener-base.
Rory Stewart said that after 15min someone at FTXFF cut his call with Rory short because that person wanted to go have lunch. The person reportedly also said “I don’t care about poverty”.
Rory Stewart (the ex-President of GiveDirectly, and ex-MP) now seems to think that we are weird futurists who care more about “asteroids and killer robots” than we care about the 700M people currently in poverty.
Great work, whoever that FTX person was...
We should hire leaders based on how well suited they are to running the organization in question
I’d argue that an important part of running a new philanthropic organisation is stakeholder engagement and relationship management, and this was not a good example of fostering a good relationship with someone who is highly influential and a likely source of valuable connections with respect to FF’s goals.
Hi Vaipan, thanks for writing this. As someone who’s applied for (many) dozens of EA and non-EA jobs over the past 2 years, I can identify and empathise with your story here.
From my experience, I think EA orgs do use ‘work tests’ way more often than non-EA orgs (I very rarely had to do a work test for non-EA job hiring, only interviews). There are obviously pros and cons to using work tests, and in my short time at a couple of different EA orgs, I’ve been part of pretty frequent discussion about how/when/why we should use work tests in hiring rounds (to their credit, I think).
The main thing that I’m surprised by in your post is the high frequency that you report to have done unpaid work tests. In recent times I’ve been really happy to see most EA orgs offering compensation for work tests, and I think the vast majority of work tests that I did were compensated.
“but it feels that organizations use my work without them having the intention to hire me. ”
^This quote is pretty concerning .In general, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone use the product of work tests for anything other than assessing them for hiring purposes. Are you saying that orgs have used the product of your work tests for other purposes? In that case, it does seem especially bad for that work test to have been uncompensated, and I’d assume (and hope) that most other EA’s would agree with me.
(This isn’t an in depth or insightful comment but) Wow that increase in funds raised is massive! This is super exciting and impressive—I’m a little surprised that I (or people in my circle) haven’t heard about your success up until reading this. Keep up the great work !
I’m curious about ways you think to mitigate against being seen as the face of/spokesperson for EA
I’m really excited to see what this competition produces!
Small suggestion—I think changing the prize/incentive would be good—I think non-altruistically motivated people who could produce good slogans might not find an educational video call a worthwhile prize. I personally wouldn’t be motivated by this prize (and I think people on this forum likely won’t be either, although they’re obviously not a demographic which needs much incentive to help GD)
I Have to throw this in: my friend’s response when I sent him the post this morning. “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Video call a man and he’ll say “what the hell am I supposed to do with this??””
Downvoted because I think this is clickbait and doesn’t seem like it’d be valuable for anyone to read it, or that it is the type of content I’d want to see on the forum.
(I’m contracting for CEA’s events team to work on EAGxNYC)
I like this idea—It’d be nice to hear from a wider range of people in the community, and away to give more people a platform—which would be good for defusing fame in the community.
We’re doing a non-blinded version of this for EAGxNYC—I think ~30% of applicants were people who we wouldn’t have thought to ask to present—which is good I think. BUT it is riskier or more costly as an event organiser to select them (you don’t know if they’re good speakers, you have to vet them and their work before deciding etc).
I find this appealing but then I realised that most EAG attendees are US and UK based, so it’d result in “attendees” as a group spending more money on traveling to the conference. But maybe this expense would still be outweighed by the savings.
FAW#2.
An interesting potentially high-impact intervention: banning dog meat production/trade in Indonesia.
I was surprised to find out that Indonesia produces/consumes ~1M dogs per year, given that it’s ~89% Muslim, and dogs are absolutely not permissible to consume in Islam. For context, very quick googling and estimating leads me to believe that the number of dogs killed per year in Indonesia is ~half the number of cows consumed in Indonesia per year (nowhere near the ~700M chickens per year though).
I’d assume it’d be WAY easier to help push through a dog meat ban in Indonesia than it would be to get people to eat less chicken or beef? I know there are already quite a few orgs working for dog meat bans across all of Asia, and (at least one) working in some capacity towards a ban in Indonesia (which OP has mad a small grant to, but I don’t think it was specifically for this issue). This could be a very cost effective opportunity in terms of $/animal saved, given that I assume there’d be quite a lot of domestic and international support.
Interesting—do you have any thoughts as to what status within the community is currently aligned? My recent thought was that we make a mistake by over-emphasizing impact (or success) when it comes to social status, rather than “trying your best on a high EV project regardless of outcome” for instance.
I’m no longer able to do this/trying to do this
I’m thinking about organising a couple of talks for Non-EAG-attending students in the Boston area, either the week before or week after EAG. I’m hoping we’d be able to get ~250 students from Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts, BU, BC (and all the other unis). I have event planning experience and would be willing to put significant time into making these good.
If you’re comming to Boston and have a talk or message you’d be excited to communicate to a bunch of students (likely ranging from no-EA experience to EAG-attendee level experience) please message me !
Hi—thanks for engaging so thoroughly with the post, and for caring about our shared interest in diversity and inclusion within EA.
I have mixed-feelings concerning your post.
lol same.
2.
yours go into the ‘Let’s narrow EA because diversity is overrated’I do want to point out that I don’t think I stated my own position on this topic anywhere. A reason for the post generally focusing more on the global approach to EA community building is because the status quo is to accept that narrowly focused community building (at top universities, and rich/influential cities like London and SFO) is valuable, and I think the case for global community building hasn’t been made as explicitly as the case for community building at top universities has been, for example.
3.
It is well-known mechanism for people previously on the margins who have succeeded into prestigious, privileged places to be against diversity. I think about Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak ; take me in, but don’t let anyone enter after me
Trying to charitably restate what I think you meant in point 1: In my post I express some doubt about my own value or belonging in the US EA community, and you’ve combined that with the aforementioned perception that I am against diversity and inclusion (because you think I support the ‘narrow’ version of community building) and suggested that this might be an example of the ‘pulling the ladder up from behind me’ phenomenon, which might generally be seen as part of many factors which affect underrepresentation in hierarchies.
How I can’t help but reading your point 1: you don’t know anything about me, or any of the work I have/haven’t done to try help ‘promote’ other EA’s from underrepresented groups over the past 5 years, but you’ve decided to try psychoanalyse me and then evoke the metaphor of me deliberately preventing others from succeeding. Whether or not this was your intention, I think other people have also interpreted your point in this way (an odhominem attack), which might explain the downvoting.
4.
I do think that fellow South Africans or people coming from low-income countries can bring insights EAs in wealthy countries can’t. Thats the reason why the UN recruits people from these countries instead of giving the job to a white, wealthy candidate from a first world country who just got their masters in development
I think this point is pointing to a point which I have maybe under-explained or poorly articulated. You are correct in the example you’re pointing out—those people would bring valuable skills and insights into UN in the context of working on local development projects. But I don’t think EA is like the UN in this case, I think EA could be explained (from a narrow EA point of view) as a movement of exceptionally wealthy and privileged people, for exceptionally wealthy and privileged people, to try and do the most good that they can. In this case, even though people from all over the world might bring unique and underrepresented perspectives to the table, the question is “how are these perspectives/experiences going to help with this specific project (of EA)?”. Specifically in the context of EA community building, if one thinks that the purpose of community building is to attract/retain/find/train the most wealthy and influential people in the world in order to solve the most pressing issues facing current and future generations, then I don’t find it convincing that we should be prioritising the ‘global EA’ model that I described in the post. That’s mainly the point I’d like decision makers in the community building space to address/clarify.
5.
This kind of argument is a pushback from a group of people who do not like to share resources, power and influenceI think you might just have a fundamental disagreement with people who think about justice and/or EA in a utilitarian way? If, from my perspective, EA is movement predicated on the acceptance that we have far too few resources to solve the worlds problems, and that we should try and allocate the resources we do have such that we produce the best outcomes for as many people (or to the highest degree) possible; then I don’t think that taking our resources and sharing them equally amongst everyone who wants some of them is the morally right thing to do, because I don’t think theres a reasonable argument for that likely producing the best outcomes.
I think your reflections on the piece are valuable and the important issues you point out are valuable. However I’m downvoting because I wouldn’t want people wasting their time reading the linked post because:
the author’s self-admitted use of dishonesty in writing the article in the first place, which happens between this comment from Will and this comment from Will.
Even if the post had some merit in the way the EA movement and EA orgs treated criticism at the time of posting, it seems to be extremely out of date and inaccurately reflecting how EA relates to criticism in 2022 (E.g. we offer people significant reward for writing good critiques of EA and make clear to people in the community and outside of it that we value criticism highly)
Hi James,
Thanks for writing this—its difficult/intimidating to write and post things of this nature on here, and its also really important and valuable. So thanks for sharing your experience.
Please don’t read this response as being critical/dismissive of your experiences—I have no doubt that these dynamics do exist, and that these types of interaction do happen (too frequently), in EA spaces. It makes me unhappy to know that well-intentioned people who want to make a different in the world are turned off by interacting with some people in the EA community, or attending some EA events.
I do want to say though, for fairness sake, that as a member of an ethnic, religious, and geographical minority in the EA community, I feel valued and respected, and that I don’t think the attitudes or opinions of the people you’re reporting in your post are that common in the greater community, and that (the vast majority of the EAs I know) would be upset to hear another EA behave the way you’re reporting they did.
^This preempts what is the overall theme of the ideas I had when reading your post: that we make a mistake of thinking about the EA community, and EA events, as monolithic or homogenous (in some ways—it is obviously homogenous in many ways). These aren’t directed at you, but they’re relevant here.
1. Specifically about EA events:
People attend EA events (especially EAG(x)s for many different reasons. Some people go to expand their network in a specific way/in a specific domain. Others go to further their work or certain objectives and are singularly focused on doing so. Others attend because they value the social and communal spirit of being in a big gathering of altruistically motivated people. However, in my opinion, we should not lose track of the fact that these events exist to improve/enhance attendees positive impact on the world, and to improve the wellbeing of the beings we serve—those suffering in the developing world, animals in factory farms and elsewhere, and the disenfranchised yet to be. We shouldn’t be viewing conferences primarily as places for the EA community to congratulate and celebrate ourselves and have a jolly good time. Given how limited/scarce time is at these events, I do think its reasonable for people to be mindful of the way that they use their time, and be open in communicating when they think an interaction isn’t producing value (to other people, not just the participants of the interaction). But the way that they do that can vary in appropriateness and It’s hard to see a reason that someone does this in a way that insults the other person when a non-insulting alternative could have easily been deployed.
2. Generally about the EA community:
There are people from overlapping communities, sub-groups, and differently-motivated backgrounds in the EA community—yet alone people with differing moral schools of thought, cause-area interest, and needs of the EA community. Not to try and caricature you or try and psychologically analyse you, but the types of complaints in your post point to the types of deficiencies which would be most noticed by someone who would highly value the social and communal nature of the EA community, which many people do. However it’s easy to forget that not everyone cares about the community—many people who are in the EA community care about the community and its network for purely instrumental reasons (in that its only valuable because it helps them achieve their goals). I’m sorry that the community interactions you had were so negative and not what you’d want them to be like. However, there are lots of other places where ‘nice’ people abound that you could be part of at the same time as being part of the EA community. One thing I worry about is EAs trying to use the EA community/ecosystem to fulfil every possible social function/need, because its clearly not set up to do that. Please don’t abandon EA values or goals just because of these interactions—being an EA is about how you live your life and how you behave and treat others.
(again, I really do mean this all in the most understanding and sympathetic way—I hope it comes across, but I apologise if it doesn’t).