Me and some others are interesting in creating an Effective Altruism video that can serve as the go-to introductory video for EA. Does anyone know of examples of videos that we might want to emulate?
Kerry_Vaughan
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I see two claims in the post: 1) EA is asking a question not answering it and 2) the practical benefits of thinking of EA as asking a question outweigh the costs. I’m uncertain about the first claim and I disagree with the second.
For the first claim, it seems to me that EA is answering a question. The question is “what should I do with my life” and the answer is “do the most good with the resources available to me.” This at least seems equally as reasonable as the interpretation you suggest. Perhaps there’s some method of determining which interpretation is better, but I don’t know what that method might be.
For the second claim, I think there are very significant practical downside to thinking of EA as a question and avoiding calling ourselves “effective altruists.” It seems to me that, Paul Graham’s arguments aside, people like creating identities. We build identities around all kinds of things and are motivated to act based on the identities we create. So, if increasing the number of people with the EA meme is beneficial (and I think it is) and if building an identity around it is useful for spreading the meme, then it seems like there are huge practical benefits to representing EA as an identity.
I’m still not sure how to distinguish between EA as a question versus an answer. You mention that the “should” component of my question is not represented in the intros to EA. I suspect that this is a PR move, not a philosophical move. In any case, I can rewrite the question to avoid this. The question might be “what’s the best way to improve the world?” Where EA provides some tentative answers (reduce X-risk, earn to give) and a general schema for answering the question (use the best available reasoning tools to analyze your options and then act on one of them).
Based on the way people in this community behave, they seem to see EA as an answer not a question. Questions don’t seem to generate identity and radical life change. Yet both of these sometimes occur in EA.
In terms of the actual term “effective altruist,” I agree that there are downsides to the term. It can be elitist and condescending. But, I’ve never really seen a better term. My guess is that it’s at least close to being the best available option.
A separate question is how closely the EA meme should be related to sub-memes like earn to give or X-risk. I agree with your concern that we don’t want to be defined by any particular object-level strategy, but I don’t see that the name or identity of EA as currently construed is a problem. It seems to me to be a great strength of the EA meme that we have created a social movement where what people actually do is relatively diverse. My sense of other social movements is that this is not the case.
Hey Giles! The current page is, admittedly, not very informative. We’re currently using Unbounce to test a number of hypotheses that will inform the building of the completed effectivealtruism.org.
A more informative page will be coming soon.
Hey Brian. This is an interesting idea which I’ve thought about a bit. Here are a few considerations in favor of holding it simultaneously:
1) Stronger feeling of community: By hosting it simultaneously we can do things to make us feel like one community. For example, we can livestream what’s going on in other locations, have EAs ask questions of the speak live on Twitter etc.
2) Better movement PR: One of the things I noticed in coming up with the idea is that non-EAs instantly get the wow factor of holding multiple events simultaneously all over the world. It helps give EA a globa This would be lost by holding multiple events at different times. Since this event helps attract new EAs, I think the PR matters a good deal.
3) Less organizational attention devoted to EA Global: Holding the events in sequence means that EA Global steals attentional resources for longer. Since staff attention is one of our scarcest resources, I think it would be good to finish the event all in one weekend and then devote attention elsewhere.
That said, I’m not confident that simultaneously holding the events is the best option, so I’d be happy to have someone convince me otherwise.
Hi Jayd,
Here is a more complete writeup of the project. I’d also recommend getting in touch with me so we can set up some time to chat!
Another factor that I notice is that because Niel and I are, as far as I know, the first EAs to focus exclusively on EA outreach, the space of possible projects is vast, and there’s lots of low-hanging fruit.
EA Ventures is a great example. I think I’ve talked to around a dozen people who independently had an idea similar to EAV, but didn’t have the time to get it off the ground. Given a vast space of high-impact projects, I think it makes sense to try many different things and then double down on the projects that show the most promise.
That said, if there are good arguments for not doing some projects or for doing others instead, I think Niel and I would be very keen to update our views.
Just to add to this, I do think EA Ventures is an outreach project.
The medium-term plan is to change the name of the project to something other than EA Ventures and to pitch the project to impact-oriented donors who do not self-identify as EA. Tyler has already had some success in doing this. I think we can also reach entrepreneurs who are looking for funding for high-impact projects but who do not self identify as EA.
To be sure, the primary benefit is likely to be connecting EAs with funding from other EAs, but there’s no reason that needs to be the only benefit of the project.
Interesting—is what Tyler or Leverage are doing written up anywhere?
Not as of yet. I’ll let Tyler decide when is a good time to write some things up.
Likewise interesting—what are the options for this?
I’m talking to Tom later today. One obvious plan include linking to more .impact projects from effectivealtruism.org .
Would this be the sort of thing that EA Ventures might fund, or are you imagining slightly different sorts of projects?
This could be the sort of thing EA Ventures might fund. I think EA Ventures will be in a position to fund a diverse range of projects including for-profits, nonprofits and projects that are valuable, but too small to be considered a full-fledged startup.
Nitpick: are there any plans to fix the fact that effective-altruism.org and effectivealtruism.org are two different sites? I could see this being pretty confusing for a first impression.
I’ll be fixing the domain structure once effectivealtruism.org gets up and running. In addition to fixing this issue, the question of how to connect effectivealtruism.org and the forum will be part of what I investigate.
Google estimates that there are 720 searches a month for “effective altruism.” I expect that to increase over time, but I don’t expect search to be the biggest source of traffic initially. I’m expecting that link traffic from people who want a site to explain EA will be the biggest source of traffic initially.
I don’t have a number attached to my expectations about traffic numbers. But, since CEA has a number of web properties, we can benchmark effectivelatruism.org pretty easily by comparing our traffic profile to the traffic profile of other CEA sites. We can use this to figure out whether the site is succeeding or failing from a traffic standpoint.
However, I slightly disagree with Niel that low traffic is the biggest risk. I think the biggest risk is that the site does become the de facto landing page for EA, but the site isn’t very good or doesn’t encourage people to want to get involved. You can get lots of traffic and still not have much of an impact.
I’m working to hedge against this by working with Andy Fallshaw who is an extremely talented designer and branding expert and by A/B testing a wide variety of aspects of the site.
It seems like organizing the events itself will be another large difficulty. I understand that previous EA summits required a fairly large push from Leverage; I’m guessing Tyler Alterman will be able to command at least some of the same resources, but potentially not all of them (at least, that’s what I infer from him explicitly being in charge and not Geoff Anders). Meanwhile, if costs are lower, the events could be even larger and more difficult to organize, especially for those without such extensive experience as Leverage.
There’s no doubt that EA Global is an ambitious project and I agree that the size and scope of the plan creates an opportunity for failure. But, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that make me think this is manageable: 1) we’re planning to hire an event planner to help with coordination and logistics, freeing up more of my time to focus on strategy and marketing; 2) I’ve been consulting with Nevin and Cathleen regularly and am benefiting from their experience; 3) We’ve scaled down some aspects of the events themselves which will reduce the number of components that might go wrong.
If there are a number of different summits going on, some of which are less-officially organized but under the same “EA brand,” it seems like this increases the potential for damaging that brand if something weird happens. I think this was a decent risk factor even for the 2014 summit as it was run, for instance.
I think the probability that some negative event happens increases as we add more different locations for events, but I think the total risk to the brand decreases. If something weird happened in 2014, it would mean that something went wrong at the only EA gathering of the year. If something weird happens at a single location this year, it’s more plausible to explain that it was an isolated incident than that it is representative of all of EA.
That said, I’m vetting people running the events carefully and focusing mostly on finding experienced event runners. I plan to exercise more extensive oversight for areas of managing the event that could damage the EA brand.
In an efficient market, non-EA venture capitalists would already invest in all and only those entrepreneurs whose ventures would in expectation yield positive returns (above those available from alternative investments). We’d want EA venture capitalists to invest in all and only those ventures. Of course, the VC market isn’t perfectly efficient, but I’m not aware of any reason to think that EA VCs are better.
EA VCs are going to assign different values to outcomes than a traditional VC would. For a traditional VC, a founder with a 1% change of making a billion dollars is as good as a founder with a 1% change of making a billion dollars and a 100% chance of donating most of that money to cost-effective charities. EAs value the second entrepreneur far more than the first.
So, in a perfectly efficient market, EA VC would evaluate the risks of a startup the same as traditional VCs, but would assign different values to the startups potential success. This might cause EA VCs to make investments that traditional VCs might not make. Two specific examples:
Meal Squares. For a traditional VC, Meal Squares probably does not have the giant exit potential that they need. But, for an EA VC, they have a strong possibility of generating lots of donations and philanthropic value. A traditional VC might pass on investing in them, an EA VC might want to invest.
Wave. Wave creates value both through being a profitable business and by helping people send money from rich economies to poor ones. A traditional VC only values the profit potential, an EA VC values both the profit and the service that the app provides itself.
I agree with this. The problem is coming up with an alternative phrase that doesn’t require some kind of in-group buy-in. I find myself often using phrases like “saving the world” or “creating a flourishing world” because I can’t come up with better alternatives.
Announcing Effective Altruism Ventures
I’m going to be posting the full equation on the website in the near future. It’ll be easier to answer in-depth questions about the process after that has been posted.
The evaluation process includes an assessment of the importance of each characteristic to the project at hand which determines the weightings. So, if our raters assess persuasion as being particularly important to the project at hand, the weighting of persuasion in the overall score will be greater. This allows our weightings to be adaptable to the details of the project at hand. We also weight the assessment of the importance of a variable to the project by the expertise of the evaluater.
Right now, a good score in the evaluation process is necessary but not sufficient for a project to be funded. This is because I expect to significantly update the details of the evaluation process as we review our inaugural round of applicants.
We have a list of these projects that we’ve been circulating to interested people privately. After we’ve had a chance to add any additional funders on the basis of this blog post, we’ll add the list projects we think are interesting and the list of projects funders think are interesting to the website.
In both cases we expect project sourcing to be the primary benefit of the collaboration. We plan to pass interesting projects along to YC and FC and vice-versa.
I’m Kerry. I’m currently in the last year of a PhD program in philosophy, specializing in ethics and I work for the Centre for Effective Altruism on effective altruism outreach.
Previously I spent 3 years at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation where I ran the technology and innovation department. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to influence foundations to give more effectively and how to improve the functioning of the nonprofit marketplace. I’m currently thinking about a number of hard problems in how to ensure that the EA movement is the last social movement the world ever needs.