I very much agree, and I believe the whole community needs to think about our values. Every local group or other EA group should agree on some values and live by them.
ludwigbald
Karma: 459
Charity Navigator has published a list of trustworthy, disaster relief organizations working in the area: https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/where-to-give/israel-hamas-conflict/
They only evaluated one organization for impact and gave it a perfect score, but don’t show their work: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/453782061
Knowing nothing else, you could select a few promising orgs from that bucket, but I wouldn’t give them the label of being “highly effective”. Maybe the best thing to do is even to support groups in Israel that advocate for a more humanitarian military response.
I really like this frame of “given these constraints, how can we do the most good?”, and I think EA doesn’t do enough of that.
Giving the standard EA answer: Usually, people in crisis situations are less neglected than the global poor, that also lack access to clean water and healthcare. Right now, millions of people are thinking about how they can help Palestinians. So you should still prefer donating to e.g. GiveWell recommendations.
However, that misses the point that there are cheap effectiveness improvements you can unlock by slightly improving your friends’ decision making and having them select a better Palestinian org.
First, some terminology: cash transfers are an intervention within the Cause Area of extreme poverty.
Their effectiveness needs to be compared to other available interventions. GiveWell is an organization that does just that, and they found bednets much more effective than cash transfers. I suppose many EAs choose to follow GiveWell on these judgements.
While Give Directly is definitely awesome and more effective than most charities, they don’t really put together a convincing argument that they are more effective than bednets in this post. In general, I do like their point that we should think beyond the marginal donation. However, this isn’t a post about politics or how to influence large amounts of money. It’s a post that wants to get you to donate to Give Directly.
The Problem isn’t that they make money from their superior product. The problem, as I understand, is that they use an unethical business model to do so, heavily distorting the options available to doctors and locking them into using their product.
At the very least, I think they should openly justify their pricing strategy. The public and Danaher’s customers should know about their profits, per-machine and per-test, so they can negotiate fairer deals.
I suppose the question then is: does EA bring out the best in people? If not, how can we empower community members to be their best self in an EA context?
For example, community members should notice when they’re not being their best self, and have enough agency to change the causes for that.
Thank you for doing this important work! I especially like that you’re proactively creating structures that decrease interpersonal risk.
I would like to be able to subscribe to notifications for sequences like this one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/FxFwhFG227F6FgnKk
I’m happy to see that the increased community focus on gender diversity seems to be paying off, that’s a healthy increase!
There’s still quite a way to go to gender equality though. If you want to forecast on where it will go, I have a market: https://manifold.markets/LudwigBald/in-2025-what-percentage-of-eas-are It currently predicts 36% non-male survey respondents by 2025
Community notes are great, even though they are (still?) restricted to the US. The good thing is that they seem to work fast enough so most tweet impressions are actually annotated.
Hey, there’s a new university around!
EAs have long floated the idea of starting or buying a university, but a group of sustainability activists and experts has actually done so. It’s privately funded, accredited in Germany, offers bachelor’s, master’s and MBA degrees. Teaching is online-only, I suppose for cost savings and global inclusivity.
What do you think?
A year later, it seems like Elon does not value sane discussion on the Birdsite. If he does, he can’t change Twitter too much, because he is under a lot of pressure to make money. This is the fundamental problem with modern ad-supported social media—The business model is not aligned with users, and there’s not really an easy way of escaping this.
EA Germany board members are voted into office by members (aka the community). The board is formally responsible to ordinary community members, and they need to explain their actions. So the remaining board members would at the very least face questions. It’s not a complete fix of course, but I think it could have helped.
As a community member, reading this kind of marketing language being applied to me is kind of uncomfortable. I want to be enabled, not persuaded.
This general approach still makes sense, so I think it should still be applied when doing outreach or planning events. But please don’t forget there are people on the other side.
It’s important that community members feel valued even if they don’t seem likely to have massive impact!
I’m not familiar with your work so far, but there definitely is room for developing and advertising “EA for Normal People”. I think there’s value in addressing the very practical problems of doing EA: it’s weird, it can be expensive, it’s hard to stay motivated, the community is brainy, people won’t believe your motivations, you have many existing commitments already.
I think the book might benefit from focusing on a target audience.
As a prolific writer of blogs, you seem to be in a very good position to also write a book. Good luck!
Is this the time to bring up better governance again? Why do we allow CEA to be part of a foundation, controlling community assets without community oversight?
If there was functional community oversight (like e.g. EA Germany has), we would know exactly why SBF was forced out of EVF (then CEA) board.
I think this is broadly a correct take. Longtermists care about expected value. Instead, classic EA is about following the evidence.
I perceive this as a very good and thoughtful collection of criticism and good ideas for reform. It’s also very long and dense and I’m not sure how to best interact with it.
Hi, I think this is an interesting experiment, but I want to remind readers that this is not a sustainable strategy for learning. You should not compare your typical work day to a well-prepared cramming session.
I wonder what EV projects the money was dedicated for. Which project actually ended up with a budget shortfall?