Former and, hopefully, future software developer.
(My organizing is not a professional role; I just wanted it to show up in the directory view.)
Kevin Ulug
Karma: 403
What’s the minimum sized audience that you’d be happy to present to?
Will is promoting longtermism as a key moral priority—merely one of our priorities, not the sole priority. He’ll say things like (heavily paraphrased from my memory) “we spend so little on existential risk reduction—I don’t know how much we should spend, but maybe once we’re spending 1% of GDP we can come back and revisit the question”.
It’s therefore disappointing to me when people write responses like this, responding to the not-widely-promoted idea that longtermism should be the only priority.
A bit of a sidestep but there there is also the new Longtermism Fund , for more legible longtermist donations that are probably easier to justify.
Thanks!
I think that is discussed in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dsCTSCbfHWxmAr2ZT/open-ea-global (perhaps more directly in the comments if only indirectly in the main post, I don’t quite recall).
I think it’s because the conferences are networking-focused and the organizers want the attendees to be likely to have productive meetings (like if you physically bump in to someone, CEA wants high odds that they can help you or you can help them).
(Please correct me if I am wrong.)
I assume the broad categories for rejection from EAG are that CEA doesn’t think an individual will increase their personal impact, from having gone, more than someone else they could admit, and similarly won’t have as much value as a mentor/good-person-to-run-in-to than someone else they could admit.
In case anyone else is curious, the podcast is Ben Yeoh Chats
“Agency” needs nuance—an update from the author.
I appreciate the link. I didn’t make good use of it, unfortunately—instead of reading it carefully I searched the page for the acronym hoping to find an expansion, and didn’t end up reading the list of properties.
I am told that APS, in this context, stands for “advanced, planning, strategically aware” and is from Carlsmith’s report https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353
NPR ask for personal messages from people involved in their local EA communities to play during a live interview with William MacAskill: https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/wq1nlm/help_with_upcoming_npr_interview_with_william/
To the extent that I’m outside of the general population I think it’s because of my giving, but I generally feel squarely inside the box of ordinary people. I can relate to not feeling as smart as many EAs.
I think there are numerous things a typical person could do to take EA ideas and try to concretely make the world a better place:One action that I think is broadly available is to join some advocacy group for EA-related policies on some local / regional / national level like animal welfare, electoral reform, sane land use policy, or something else. You could try to introduce EA ideas or a focus on effective methods in to the discussion, if they are missing.
I think there’s lots of information to be picked up from EA Global talks and some 80,000 Hours podcast episodes (not necessarily every episode!), and other EA podcasts that have been posted previously to the forum.
You could also talk about EA with your friends or your workplace (though I have an ugh-field around talking about EA and an ugh-field around reflecting on this, so I can sympathize if you do too). Maybe you could influence / organize a work fundraiser while spreading the ideas of effective giving.
Similarly, talking about EA related books.
If available, going to your local EA meetup and contributing to a warm & welcoming environment.
You could also keep an eye out for ideas or programs that seem highly cost effective and then try and signal boost them them on that basis.Also things like answering questions where you can, with whatever time you have for it, to help ramp up others on these concepts you’re excited about.
High Impact Athletes might have more potential super donors than the general population:
I know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they aren’t funding more projects, but aren’t out of dollars.
None of our big donors were intending to spend all of their funding before now. It’s taken Open Phil years to grow their capacity and increase their giving in line with their standards of diligence. They intend to spend down their funds, I believe, within the lifetime of their funders.
With respect to the last dollar of funding: I think Open Philanthropy expects to spend their last dollar on something more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. So I think the last dollar of spending will still look good, and at the worst case your spending now will move some other funding to something somewhat less effective but still pretty good down the line.
Another potential advantage for an individual donor would be identifying something not currently receiving large amounts of funding that you think is worth taking a bet on. That would give the initiative more time to demonstrate it’s value and to gather information on how well it’s achieving its goals (or it could be funding an individual to grow their skills or something).
We’ve also seen Will write that the FTX Future Fund rejected 95% of their applicants, so it’s not the case that there’s a money firehose that everyone has access to. Plenty of people are, presumably, open to working on new projects given funding.
Sounds like an ugh field. Spencer Greenberg also had a podcast episode on motivation recently, including backchaining to your ultimate motivations through a series of “why” questions in order to access more motivating feelings.
My random advice would be to book a friend or maybe some EA whose done it before to walk you through the process and provide their flight-booking wisdom (a pretense or useful or both) like “you have to pay for a checked bag both ways so maybe it’s better to upgrade to the seat with a free checked bag”.
Scott Alexander reviewed this book that reviewed health care systems in different countries:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-thehttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health?s=r
I appreciate that I can donate to Polish Centre for International Aid via their Facebook fundraiser for Ukraine, instead of having to figure out crypto.
Just to note these:
- Outreach to high schoolers has been tried in the form of Students for High Impact Charity. Their postmortem is here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3HaXa7dtu86NQNEZJ/shic-will-suspend-outreach-operations—
I think I recall that one of the EA funds (longterm or meta) funded a project to give top math competitors copies of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I’m not sure whether any retrospective for that effort is available.
How does one donate to the Effective Institutions Project?
I’d guess that a lot of non-longtermist, non-EA-meta charities are more more likely to be funding constrained and less likely to be topped up by FTX. I also suspect FTX isn’t taking up all the opportunities for organizations to spend money, even for the ones it supports.
I suspect organizations with a research focus, such as Sentience Institute, ALLFED, and other answers on this post, are often happy to hire more researcher time with marginal donations.
Organizations that do marketing probably have room to spend more there, such as 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can. GWWC wrote earlier this year that they were looking for funding (I’m not sure what the status of that is).
I believe the Center for Election Science is looking for more funding since approval voting has a lot of room to grow in the US—it sounds like their goal is to scale campaigns with more funding.
I’m not sure how much room they have, but probably Effective Institutions Project.