Woman // Christian // Canadian // Londoner // Married // Donates to Global Development // Works on Energy Policy
Khorton
Karma: 4,882
I’ve been impressed recently with the work of the Simon Institute for Long-Term Governance, which might match the brief for new, experimental long-termist organizations. https://www.simoninstitute.ch/
I disagree. One of the original rationales for the lottery if I recall correctly was to increase the diversity* of funding sources and increase the number of grantmakers. I think if the LTFF is particularly funding constrained, there’s a good chance the Open Philanthropy Project or a similar organisation will donate to them. I value increased diversity and number of grantmakers enough that I think it’s worth trying to beat LTFF’s grantmaking even if you might fail.
*By diversity, I don’t mean gender or ethnicity, I just mean having more than one grantmaker doing the same thing, ideally with different knowledge, experience and connections.
I do like the idea of creating a community and a bit of an accountability mechanism around career impact. I do have a critique of your suggestion: there’s a big difference between a “donate 10%” pledge and a “maximize the impact of my career” pledge.
You have more than one goal, and that’s fine [1]. Truly maximizing the impact of your career is more like donating 90% of your income than 10% - it would mean giving up all the other goals you have in order to focus on one thing. I don’t see many examples of that even in EA and I wouldn’t encourage it.
In this situation, the fact that we probably wouldn’t want to encourage literally maximizing impact from careers would unfortunately make a pledge even more difficult to operationalize!
I’m not going to downvote it as that would give you negative karma and hide this comment!
I could imagine that happening in some situations where after a lot of careful thought you decide to defer to another grantmaker, but if you know in advance that you’d like to give your money to a grantmaker, shouldn’t you just do that?
I’m becoming concerned that the title “EA-aligned organisation” is doing more harm than good. Obviously it’s pointing at something real and you can expect your colleagues to be familiar with certain concepts, but there’s no barrier to calling yourself an EA-aligned organisation, and in my view some are low or even negative impact. The fact that people can say “I do ops at an EA org” and be warmly greeted as high status even if they could do much more good outside EA rubs me the wrong way. If people talked about working at a “high-impact organisation” instead, that would push community incentives in a good way I think.
This is exactly what I first thought of too—I really think this could be useful!
Welcome Madhav, it’s great to have you on the Forum!
I’m pretty late to this! Something I notice in this post, which is mentioned in one of the comments, is that it focuses on money and competence as the main barriers to tackling Covid. I would say that the way institutions are set up to make decisions and implement them is a much bigger factor.
The fast timeline described would only be possible in a world where our institutions were set up completely differently. For example, when thinking about how things should have gone, it’s easy to say person X and person Y should have talked to each other without realising that they probably didn’t have each other’s phone numbers, and might not have known each other existed!
We can and should look at how our institutions could have been set up differently to handle Covid better, but that requires some thought too. Institutions that are optimised for one thing are by default not optimised for other things—if we redesigned our institutions to prepare for the next Covid, that might not help us very much in dealing with a super-volcano, or everyday life.
The reason I point this out is because I think this kind of naive analysis is actually very useful—I think it does achieve the goal of showing us where we could have done better—and at its most useful, it highlights weaknesses in systems that can be improved. But I’m concerned that if this kind of analysis were shared without recognizing its limitations it could come across badly.
For the record I don’t think this comment deserved negative karma
It’s actually a bit of numbers 1-3; I’m imagining decreased engagement generally, especially sharing ideas transparently.
One additional risk: if done poorly, harsh criticism of someone else’s blog post from several years ago could be pretty unpleasant and make the EA community seem less friendly.
I’m actually super excited about this idea though—let’s set some courtesy norms around contacting the author privately before red-teaming their paper and then get going!
Dollar Street is great for visualizing this!
Here’s a family in Jordan with a monthly income of $249: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?active=5fd03b43f2d9500e4358f313
And a family in the Philippines who earn $238 per month: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?min=169&max=285&active=5fd043b2f2d9500e435926ea
Thanks for sharing a write up of a potential new cause area—I’d love to see more of these and I think yours is really clear.
These two statements on the surface seem contradictory, given I haven’t heard of significant activist work on this in Canada, Australia, etc:
“It has been practiced in the United States since the late 1800s, and will only continue if nothing is done about it.”
“In the Anglosphere countries besides the United States, circumcision was once widespread, but has since declined precipitously.”
I think you must be at least partially mistaken—I interviewed someone myself just last week so we certainly have not outsourced all recruitment. I’m sorry I can’t help more but I’m really not familiar with what you’re describing.
I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of any change to AI-based screening and don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you share a link that explains what you’re talking about?
Unfortunately I can’t think of a service that would help with what you’re looking for! A potential alternative way to improve your skills could be to identify promising options, post them on the Forum, and see what feedback you get?
Yes, I’ve also gotten really sick from stress in the past! Both times, my doctors asked if I was under a lot of stress, and both times I said no, even though in retrospect it seems obvious that I was.
I think it’s great you shared your experiences—thanks for posting! Fyi the Science vs Probiotics podcast episode suggested that gut health is very important but probiotic supplements probably aren’t a good way to improve your gut health, so I might downgrade that suggestion (and maybe focus on eating more fiber instead?) https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/v4hblnk
I think perhaps we agree then—if after significant research, you realize you can’t beat an EA Fund, that seems like a reasonable fallback, but that should not be plan A.
Re: increasing grantmakers, I meant increasing the number of grantmakers who have spent significant time thinking about where to donate significant capital—obviously having hundreds of people donating $1k each would have more diversity but in practice I think most $1k donors defer their decision-making to someone else, like an EA Fund or GiveWell.