Researcher at Giving What We Can.
Michael Townsend
Karma: 2,463
Thanks so much for doing this!
As someone who is looking to build skills writing/researching for EA Orgs, I’m really excited to check out the resources you’ve provided.
This is fantastic! Especially exciting to see resources on how to run a fellowship, I think this is a really exciting thing for groups to be doing, but it can be tricky to pull off.
In case it’s helpful, I thought I’d share some older, somewhat forgotten (but I still think excellent) resources from GWWC for group organisers.
As someone who just went through a bunch of these, this list sounds like it could be really useful!
Giving What We Can recently did some hiring, and we gave the option for applicants who reached the work trial stage to receive unedited, anonymously graded reviewer feedback. We also look to work with people who scored well in the work trials on a contract basis.
Thanks for this post, Ryan!
I just have two additional points I think might be worth adding.
I think (1) you might be able to do more about burnout without having experienced it than you imply, and (2) that it’s worth a reminder that having a support network isn’t enough: you have to use it.
On the first point:
I think you can have at least some sense of the early warning signs of burnout without having experienced it. People often talk about sudden lack of sleep, bad dreams, greater than usual friction in personal relationships, and a few have reported lying to friends and family about their present emotional state and stress levels. I’m sure there are other signs too—I’d be interested to see if there’s a less arbitrarily produced list somewhere.
On the second point:
You mention building a support network, which I think is clearly a great idea! But a support network needs to be used.
I personally haven’t experienced burn-out, but (I think?) I have experienced some early warning signs. I’ve found it really helpful to over-share these symptoms with my closest friends and family, and I’m also lucky I get to share it with my manager who has been non-judgemental, and consistently emphasises that doing so is a good thing (he doesn’t want me to burn-out either!). I don’t always find this easy to do, but I’ve never really regretted it. They often encourage me to do the things (many that you suggest) that will help me return to my usual state, and I think very often I wouldn’t be able to do these things without encouragement.
Hope the points helped, and thanks again for the post :)
The value of small donations from a longtermist perspective
I appreciate the point of your story, Nuño, but I don’t think it fairly characterises my post, and I think its dismissiveness is unwarranted.
For one, I didn’t suggest that, from a longtermist perspective, “the optimal thing to promote was earning to give.” I explicitly said the opposite here:
...my personal all-things-considered view is pretty similar to Ben’s: when someone has a good personal fit for high-impact direct work, they’re likely to have more impact pursuing that than earning to give. This view is also shared by Giving What We Can leadership.
And in general, I quite repeatedly indicate that my argument does not make claims about the value of effective giving compared to direct work. Promoting effective giving is not the same thing as promoting earning to give.
So I think your story, though humorous and (I take it) coming from a place of love, is directed at something I’m not saying.
Thanks for your reply.
It seems to me your key disagreement is with my view that promoting effective giving is compatible with (even complementary to) encouraging people to do direct work. Though, I’m not exactly sure I understand your precise claim — there are two I think you might be making, and I’ll respond to each.
One way to interpret what you’re saying is that you think that promoting effective giving actually reduces the number of people doing direct work:
Because in fact, effective giving is in tension with pursuing direct work.
As an example, you suggest that GWWC members, upon reading this post, might fail to switch to direct work due to its emphasis. I don’t agree, in part because I don’t think people are going to make career decisions based on the “emphasis” of a post, in spite of the fact that same post has a section titled “So, should I earn to give?” which highlights that:
It’s possible for donations to be impactful, but for direct work to be much more impactful.
And in part I disagree because I more broadly think that a journey from improving the world by effective giving, to doing direct work, is one many have already taken, and I expect many future people will continue to take. But I’m not sure how to resolve our disagreement about this broad point (as mentioned, I’ll be providing more arguments for it in an upcoming post).
But perhaps you aren’t making as strong a claim as this (that GWWC, and promoting effective giving generally, actually reduces the amount of people doing direct work). Another way to interpret you (based more off what you’ve said in our personal conversations than your comments here) is that, though GWWC and promoting effective giving likely does help encourage people to do direct work, it’s not “optimal” or “the best strategy now.”
The issue with this less strong view is I’m not sure I follow it, because I don’t know what you mean by optimal or “best strategy.” My claim is that effective giving should remain a part of the effective altruism portfolio, in part because effective giving — even from a longtermist perspective — is still impactful. The reason I think it should be part of the effective altruism portfolio isn’t because I think it provides the best marginal use of money or time from a longtermist perspective (I don’t think that’s the relevant bar).
Perhaps I can state my position in your terms: I think it wouldn’t be optimal for GWWC to stop promoting effective giving (from a longtermist worldview, but perhaps especially from other plausible non-longtermist worldviews). I also think it wouldn’t be optimal for us to be squeamish about mentioning that we think donations can be extremely impactful, for fear of making people mistakenly pursuing earning to give when direct work would have been better.
This is mostly responding to the negative case against effective giving, and I want to flag that I’m excited about promoting effective giving much more because of its positive case than my scepticism of the negative one! But I thought there was enough in this comment already for you to respond to.
RE your pet peeve:
Also, as a pet peeve, I think that the near-termist part of EA also has enough money that, e.g., as a near-termist, attempting to create a new NGO through Charity Entrepreneurship also beats earning to give.
Obviously, it’ll depend on the fit for earning to give/starting a new NGO, but this sounds plausible to me in general — I’m extremely excited about people creating new NGOs through Charity Entrepreneurship (among other ways of doing direct good in global health and development, animal welfare, etc.).
Thanks for sharing this!
My sense is that having a funding landscape with multiple funders, each with a different focus, could be really valuable (especially if it’s possible for these funders to share lessons with each other, minimise wheel-reinventing in a relatively new area). Looking forward to your future posts outlining what you’ve learned along the way.
This is very exciting!
For those interested in applying to to become a regrantor, is there a deadline? And even if there’s no hard deadline, is there a time that would be useful to apply by?
Good to know, thanks!
This was fantastic, thanks for sharing!
I think there’re a lot of inferential steps most people would need to go through to get from their current worldview, to a longtermist worldview. But I think a pretty massive one is just getting people to appreciate how big the future could be, and I think this post does a great job of that.
An added bonus is that the idea that the future could be huge is a claim the longtermist community is particularly certain of (whereas other important ideas, such as the likelihood of various existential risks and what we can do about them are extremely uncertain and contested). While quantifying how big the future could be, or is on expectation, is really difficult—but the idea that it could be extremely big stands up to scrutiny quite well. I think it’s really useful to have such beautifully illustrated graphs that put where humanity is now into context, I’m excited to use them for future work on longtermism at Giving What We Can.
RE something that would be useful for OWID on longtermism. I’d be very interested in approximate data on the amount of funding each year that gets directed to improving the very long-term future. Given there’d be a lot of difficult edge-cases here (e.g., should climate change funding be included?), it may need to be operationalised quite narrowly (perhaps “How much money do we spend each year on avoiding human extinction?” would be better.)
Makes sense! From your appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast, I was shocked by how much you have managed to do given you’re such a small team. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you accomplish as you expand :)
Very excited to see this! Hoping to pre-order enough books to have Christmas and birthday presents for years to come...
I’d just like to give a shotout to the organisers for their great work!
I don’t think anyone appreciates how hard running a conference can be at the best of times. But on Mars, the logistical difficulties are on another planet: the organisers have had astronomical health and safety challenges, and don’t get them started on the availability of vegan catering…
Like other commenters, to back-up the tone of this piece, I’d want to see further evidence of these kinds of conversations (e.g., which online circles are you hearing this in?).
That said, it’s pretty clear that the funding available is very large, and it’d be surprising if that news didn’t get out. Even in wealthy countries, becoming a community builder in effective altruism might just be one of the most profitable jobs for students or early-career professionals. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t (eventually) conversations like the ones you described. And even if I think “the vultures are circling” is a little alarmist right now, I appreciate the post pointing to this issue.
On that issue: I agree with your suggestions of “what not to do”—I think these knee-jerk reactions could easily cause bigger problems than they solve. But what are we to do? What potential damage could there be if the kind of behaviour you described did become substantially more prevalent?
Here’s one of my concerns: we might lose something that makes EA pretty special right now. I’m an early-career employee who just started working at an EA org . And something that’s struck me is just how much I can trust (and feel trusted by) people working on completely different things in other organisations.
I’m constantly describing parts of my work environment to friends and family outside of EA, and something I often have to repeat is that “Oh no, I don’t work with them—they’re a totally different legal entity—it’s just that we really want to cooperate with each other because we share (or respect the differences in) each other’s values”. If I had to start second-guessing what people’s motives were, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel able to trust so easily. And that’d be pretty sad.
I agree that the term, whether neartermist or not-longtermist, does not describe a natural category. But I think the latter does a better job at communicating that. The way I hear it, “not-longtermist” sounds like “not that part of idea-space”, whereas neartermist sounds like an actual view people may hold that relates to how we should prioritise the nearterm versus the longterm. So I think your point actually supports one of David’s alternative suggested terms.
And though you say you don’t think we need a term for it at all, the fact that the term “neartermist” has caught on suggests otherwise. If it wasn’t helpful, people wouldn’t use it. However, perhaps you didn’t just mean that we didn’t need one, but that we shouldn’t use one at all. I’d disagree with that too because it seems to me reasonable in many cases to want to distinguish longtermism with other worldviews EAs often have (i.e., it seems fair to me to say that Open Philanthropy’s internal structure is divided on longtermist/not-longtermist lines).
Also, cool image!
Thanks for posting this—as the other comments also suggest, I don’t think you’re alone in feeling a tension between your conviction of longtermism and lack of enthusiasm for marginal longtermist donation opportunities.
I want to distinguish between two different ways at approaching this. The first is simply maximising expected value, the second is trying to act as if you’re representing some kind of parliament of different moral theories/worldviews. I think these are pretty different. [1]
For example, suppose you were 80% sure of longtermism, but had a 20% credence in animal welfare being the most important issue of our time, and you were deciding whether to donate to the LTFF or the animal welfare fund. The expected value maximiser would likely think one had a higher expected value, and so would donate all their funds to that one. However, the moral parliamentarian might compromise by donating 80% of their funds to the LTFF and 20% to the animal welfare fund.
From this comment you left:
I’m not convinced small scale longtermist donations are presently more impactful than neartermist ones, nor am I convinced of the reverse. Given this uncertainty, I am tempted to opt for neartermist donations to achieve better optics.
I take it that you’re in the game of maximising expected value, but you’re just not sure that the longtermist charities are actually higher impact than the best available neartermist ones (even if they’re being judged by you, someone with a high credence in longtermism). That makes sense to me!
But I’m not sure I agree. I think there’d be something suspicious about the idea that neartermism/longtermism align on which charities are best (given they are optimising for very different things, it’d be surprising if they turned out with the same recommendation). But more importantly, I think I might just be relatively more excited about the kinds of grants the LTFF are making than you are, and also more excited about the idea that my donations could essentially ‘funge’ open philanthropy (meaning I get the same impact as their last dollar).
I also think that if you place significant value on the optics of your donations, you can always just donate to multiple different causes, allowing you to honestly say something like “I donate to X, Y and Z—all charities that I really care about and think are doing tremendous work” which, at least in my best guess, gets you most of the signalling value.
Time to wrapup the lengthy comment! I’d suggest reading Ben Todd’s post on this topic, and potentially also the Red-Team against it. I also wrote “The value of small donations from a longtermist perspective” which you may find interesting.
Thanks again for the post, I appreciate the discussion it’s generating. You’ve put your finger on something important.
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At least, I think the high-level intuition behind each of these mental models are different. But my understanding from a podcast with Hilary Greaves is that when you get down to trying to formalise the ideas, it gets much murkier. I found these slides of her talk on this subject, in case you’re interested!
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I like this framing!
In general, I think that the fact that funding is often not a bottleneck for the most impactful longtermist projects often gets conflated with the idea that marginal donations aren’t valuable (which they are! Many/most of those previous opportunities in non-longtermist causes that got many of us excited to be part of effective altruism still exist).
Thanks for this post! As someone looking to apply to the UK Civil Service in the future, it’s really useful to have a resource like this :)
One question I have is whether you have a sense of the value of a Master’s program in public policy. In particular, are you aware of many/any positions where having a Master’s is either required or would significantly increase the chances of a successful application?