I think this is an incredibly powerful post, and definitely worth sharing. I wonder if there’s a way to edit some of it to make it more front-facing, without losing out on any of the emotional power.
Linch
Karma: 24,242
Thanks for the comment!
1) Please see my reply to kbog for some reasons why I think a donation pool is less feasible in the short run than 2-party donation insurance.
2) I think that’s a possible solution. I also think the number of naive EV utilitarians is vastly overestimated (it’s quite probable the number is under 10, and quite possible it’s actually 0). Alternatively people can just trust fellow aspiring effective altruists well enough to not renege on the spirit of an agreement.
http://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/…/1352…/making-a-difference
“On this blog, I’ve talked a lot about my bad luck. I have a ’tragic backstory’ tag, after all. I was born in the third world, in a place with incredibly low incomes which fail to be mirrored in particularly low cost of living. As such, people make do with malnutrition, lack of medication, and ever present mosquitoes. There’s just no other way. You live cheap or die – living free was never an option.
I also happen to be transgender. If living in squalor wasn’t enough, try living in squalor while surrounded by hatred. I am queer in a place where politicians talk about the importance of getting rid of people like me, due to the threat we pose to “public morals”. Where, as a member of my school’s debate team, I was forced to argue for why people like me should be barred entry to the country. The head of the team wanted to know why I found the topic upsetting. Of course, I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to be expelled.
However, despite all that and more, I have a lot of good luck.
″ There are now plans in motion for me to emigrate to California next year. This would completely change my life. All that bad luck wiped away with a set of immigration papers. But that’s just a cure for me. There are billions of people who are also in dire straits. People who can’t string a few words together and pull themselves up into a better life. There are people who face more poverty than I. More malnutrition and mosquitoes and lack of medication. People who aren’t safe in their homes.
I don’t deserve my luck. I don’t deserve the bad that’s happened to me, but I don’t deserve the good either. I haven’t earned my fortune. Luck just happens. We often feel like the world is how it is for a reason and that all the good and the bad is where it is with just cause. We’re wrong. The world isn’t fair. Fate doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints.
But the world doesn’t have to be as bad as it is. I don’t want anyone to have the bad luck I’ve had, and I wish they could all have my good luck. Well, there’s something I can do about that. The very first thing I want to do when I have a job in California. I can give money to push the scales of fate until they’re a little more fair. I can give money to people so they can feed their families. I can provide them with medication. I can protect them from the mosquitoes.
“Giving What We Can is currently holding a pledge drive. They’re asking people to pledge that they’ll give 10% of their income to the world’s most effective charities every year for the rest of their lives. I want to do that. I want to take the opportunity that human kindness has given me and make a hundred more. And I’d like you to do the same.
If you feel like making someone’s life dramatically better, saving the world, or just committing to be as good tomorrow as you are today; I couldn’t recommend this enough. Each of us have the power to make the world a little brighter. Each of us can make an enormous difference with just a tenth of what we have. I believe we should take the good luck we have and spread it around. If you agree with any of that, this is your moment. This is your chance to save someone like me. This is your opportunity to be the hero you always wanted to be.
Do not throw away your shot.”
I will caution people to not go the other way and be too emotional. It’s true that EAs are not known for our emotional appeals, but charity in general are, and our ability to not only be different but signal our difference from conventional appeals to charity is part of, I think, how we managed to explosively grow in the first place.
Anecdatally, I’m much more successful with persuading people by being high-minded and rational and giving stylized facts than by directly appealing to their emotions.
Here are some things I’ve done that worked: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/963258230397201/?comment_id=963339963722361&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R6%22%7D
I disagree with the idea of offsetting in general (http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/#comment-239528) , but think that MacAskill’s argument that offsetting is acceptable for climate change but not vegetarianism is especially odd. Suffering is suffering is suffering.
″ Say that being vegetarian costs an extra $500 a year compared to eating meat, due to the food being more expensive (to be clear, it’s not, a vegetarian diet can be substantially cheaper). ”
A realistic scenario where this might happen is when food is not purchased by yourself. For example the company I used to work at will have free food at certain times in the day, and they don’t always have fully plant-based options. If I decide to value my personal aestheticism over actual suffering, then I will indirectly cause more suffering by choosing to purchase my calories instead of taking advantage of the free options.
Because they’re more expensive?
Standard EV calculations tells you that (given risk neutrality) insurance is a loser’s game, assuming that you don’t have special information that the insurers do not.
The author addresses this:
“The reader may be an activist, already convinced that some specific moral catastrophe is taking place, and doing everything he can to put an end to it. However, so as not to obscure my main point about unidentified catastrophes, I ask the reader to set known catastrophes aside; let him imagine that all of his favorite political causes triumph, and society becomes organized exactly as he thinks best. I hope to convince him that even in such a scenario, a moral catastrophe would still probably be taking place. My reason is this: there are so many different ways in which a society—whether our actual one or the one of the reader’s dreams—could be catastrophically wrong that it is almost impossible to get everything right.”
This will make sense, except that pretty much every argument for offsets that I’ve seen comes from consequentialists or consequentialist-aligned people.
Offsetting doesn’t seem very virtuous, and deontologists generally have a poor model for positive rights/obligations.
Congratulations! I think that’s really awesome! :D
“Giving What We Can is running their annual pledge event – they’ve had 136 new members join so far over December and January. If you haven’t joined their community yet, this is a great time to do so!” 153 now. :D
One thing we’d be interested in seeing is if on Jan. 10th we can reach a record number of pledges on the same day. So far the number to beat is 11 (which is a fluke).
The Bystander
It renders pretty normally for me (Chrome). What font will you recommend instead?
Is it better now? I switched to Calibri. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p1jcML-5-xNAzMumG1lHNQprOA6RD9XhyGOgojQR7Ig/edit
Awesome. It’s annoying because I can’t actually adjust the font on here, so I have to transport to GDocs to edit.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for the feedback!! :D
Btw, people who like the essay should consider hitting the “heart” at the bottom left of the article to tell Medium’s algorithms that you recommend it!
I’m not entirely sure how Medium’s algorithms work, but my hope is that once we hit critical mass, it’d start showing my article to random users of Medium, and not just people I link to it.
Wow, that’s incredibly fantastic!
One thing to consider is that when you’re raising money from friends&family, the cost to you isn’t just time but also social capital.
For example (just because this is most obvious thing on my mind) right now, getting people to donate to a Christmas fundraiser probably means it’d be awkward to also ask them to Try Giving for 2016.
By the way, I just want to say that I’m very grateful for all of the help and constructive advice I’ve gotten from my EA and non-EA friends for this article. It would not have turned out nearly as well without extensive revision.
In addition, with the help of at least two EA friends, I’ve gotten it published on HuffPo AND the article is “Featured” on HuffPo!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linch-zhang/the-bystander_b_8982968.html
https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/963258230397201/
I think this Facebook discussion could be really useful for you. It includes both my personal impressions of how to do outreach (which is fairly highly upvoted, suggesting that other people share my experiences to some extent) as well as links to longer, more sophisticated investigations done by other EAs and EA organizations.
Hi again kbog,
We’ve discussed this a bit on Facebook but I think I want to leave my thought process in the open.
I think it is very awkward to ask people for loans, and also very emotionally/”morally” fraught to plan for the possibility that you may need to ask other EAs for loans or assistance. Eventually we can probably help to combat this by creating social norms where it becomes more acceptable to do so, but I think it’s a nontrivial cultural shift.
In contrast, suggesting a new and cool plan (with the donation serving as a VERY credible mitigation of potential adverse selection) might sidestep a lot of cultural and other emotional concerns. I was not thinking of very official terms and contracts (which can be expensive in terms of transaction costs), but just something more formalized than completely informal agreements between friends (eg. public pre-agreements, akin to public Bayesian bets or GWWC’s Try Giving).
Getting people to precommit to helping each other seems like it can plausibly lead to more short run donations and lower average savings base than a very vague understanding that your friends can pitch in eventually.
(This all assumes at least a weak belief in some variant of the haste consideration, of course)
I agree that there are strong advantages of a very large centralized risk pool. There are some disadvantages though, which we’ve talked about in the PM and I will cover in more detail after I rewrite this post.
However, the biggest difference is that I think take-up of 2-party donation insurance by early adopters can happen NOW (in a sense just formalizing the “friendly loans or assistance” that some EAs already sort of have anyway). If there’s enough takeup and evidence in favor of increased donations, this can morph into more advanced risk pooling systems if it’s advantageous, and if Knightian uncertainty kicks in and it flops, the downside risk to our community or image is much lower than if a centralized “Effective altruism” organization is running it.
So I think a 2-party donation insurance scheme is both something we can have right NOW, something that I believe with over 90% confidence better than the entirely informal arrangements the community currently has, and something that can fail gracefully if it ends up failing.