UK Civil Servant and prolific tweeter (@EAheadlines)
Kirsten
Karma: 11,748
In the EA space, people like Will sharing every thought they have could in some cases have negative effects because people in EA have a history of deferring (and it gets worse the more Will talks to EAs about EA).
If Will had a weekly podcast where he was like “Does lobster welfare matter? Ehh, probably not” and “I’d love to see an EA working on every nuclear submarine” that wouldn’t actually be a good thing, even if he believed both of those points. I predict a small group of EAs would love the podcast, defer to it way too much, and adopt Will’s opinions wholesale.
(I notice that all three of your examples are situations where you wanted people to adopt the public intellectual’s opinions wholesale)
I find it annoying if people argue for a policy for reasons other than the ones that truly motivate them, although it is very instrumentally useful and I don’t think it’s necessarily morally wrong.
Declining to share an opinion on a topic (eg Kelsey not telling the public she was proposing for a global pandemic) seems completely fine? Unless I’m missing some context and she was writing about COVID in a way that contradicted her actual beliefs at that time? I agree it would have been better for her to share her beliefs but there is no rule that people, even public intellectuals, need to share every thought!
When on the fence, I ranked smaller and newer charities higher
Same—wrote about it once. https://x.com/kirsten3531/status/1400747953090969602?s=46&t=7jI2LUFFCdoHtZr1AtWyCA
>If I’m happy to buy you a beer or cover your portion of the Uber, why wouldn’t I donate £5 or £10 to your fundraiser for a cause you care a lot about?
thanks for sharing! Glad to hear it
Glad to see people engaging with this consultation. My experience when I’ve done work reviewing consultation responses in UK government:
-put more weight on novel, well-supported arguments (so I’d recommend including a short, clear piece of strong evidence for your arguments)
-put more weight on responses from credible people or organisations with legible qualifications or expertise (so I’d recommend emphasising any legible qualifications, experience or affiliations—or if you don’t have that, just presenting yourself as a normal private citizen)
-put less weight on responses that are identical or very similar; I basically considered them as a group
However note that every organisation has its own way of doing things, so other organisations might put more weight on private individuals repeating the same arguments than I did.
Kids can’t always easily explain what’s going on. Even adults would have a tough time answering that question I think! Most would probably just say ”… because I need to use the bathroom??”
I’d be curious to understand his views on the role of individual Christians and the Church as an institution in politics
We also experimented with an EAG in the Bay Area focused on Global Catastrophic Risks
Have you decided yet whether to run another GCR-focused EAG?
Personally I’d be very interested in more content from policymakers or people who regularly influence policymakers! I don’t normally go to EAGs because they don’t really speak to my career but I would be much more interested in this kind of content.
I’m not sure I have an answer, but one thing I aim to do is save a good amount and enable charitable donations of 10% or more by keeping housing and other fixed costs lower than I could, rather than seeing my budget as just a tradeoff between giving and saving.
I absolutely agree! One thing I’ve been thinking about recently: I used to think that if I want to make a career move in the next 6 months, I should start out by applying to really ambitious jobs and then lower my standards. I’m rethinking this. I now think it’s probably good to get better-than-now Plan B offers early on too, even if I end up turning them down, both because it helps me calibrate, but honestly much more importantly because it keeps me motivated! Getting even 3 or 4 rejections in a row can be really hard emotionally
The British civil service is really good for this. We don’t pay as much at a senior level as the private sector, so instead we put a lot of effort into creating a good work culture with lots of training and feedback (of course still varies between departments and managers!).
It’s also very easy to get experience presenting to boards or helping to hire people, and relatively easy to get management experience.
The year in question, when they decided to hold some cash for a few months, it was because they had been researching new giving opportunities that were 10x cash and wanted to be able to use the money for that, rather than dropping the bar. (GiveDirectly criticised them for this and said they should’ve effectively lowered their bar to 1x cash in order to use the funds as soon as possible; they thought GiveWell’s decision would be indefensible to the world’s poorest people.)
The section “What more donations will enable” from November 2023 looks relevant. Some excerpts below: https://blog.givewell.org/2023/11/21/givewells-2023-recommendations-to-donors/
“We set our cost-effectiveness threshold such that we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities above a given level of cost-effectiveness. Currently, we generally fund opportunities that we believe are at least 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people living in poverty (i.e., “10x cash“). But there’s nothing magical about the 10x cash threshold. We’d be very excited to recommend programs that are 6x cash, for example, if we had enough funding—a program that’s 6x cash might save a life for less than $15,000.”
“If we had a very weak Giving Season this year and expected donations to continue lagging, we might have to raise our cost-effectiveness threshold to something like 12x cash and fund fewer programs going forward. In contrast, with exceptionally strong growth in donations we might be able to use a bar of 8x cash, expanding the set of opportunities we can fund.”
A bit of feedback, since this is a sales piece and I do actually like Giving What We Can:
Saying that there’s no good reason not to pledge if you’re already donating 10% sits really poorly with me. It feels insulting that you’ve decided that my reasons aren’t good enough and must be only based misunderstandings.
Even if my only reason not to pledge is that I’ve thought about it carefully and decided I don’t want to, shouldn’t that be enough?
I also really disliked this section. “Let’s say only one other person in your network hears that you took the pledge and is inspired to do the same.”
I don’t care if other people take the pledge! I only care if other people give, and give effectively.
If they’d be influenced to “take the pledge” because me taking the pledge, why wouldn’t they be influenced donate a proportion of their income effectively by seeing me donate?
You can make the argument for why the pledge is more effective than just donating, but you haven’t done it here.
That would make sense! I think the civil servant in charge might also have a certain level of discretion with regards to how they represent the results—I did in my case.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that more responses mean nothing, just that bringing up a sensible consideration is more likely to affect outcomes than copying and pasting a response (which may have between no weight and a little weight with the policymakers)
There weren’t many, so I don’t know unfortunately. In this consultation you’d have a better chance because it’s about a public-facing issue
I don’t have an “in” but I’d love to hear the book discussed on Best Laid Plan (a podcast about planning) or Best of Both Worlds (a podcast about making work and life fit together, primarily aimed at mothers—better fit if someone at HIP can speak to combining parenting with a high impact career).