It’d be good to hear from more GWWC donors. So far “not being sufficiently convinced” is in the double digits (perhaps predictable given most Effective Altruists appear to donate to the charities that GiveWell thinks do the most good, and this is the most plausible explanation of that). But only 1 person has voted for something else, “I donated money that wouldn’t have otherwise have gone to help anyone else”. Not that I didn’t want to know people’s reasons for not donating and wouldn’t welcome more about these, but I was equally curious to understand why people did donate.
Nekoinentr
Karma: 96
Broadening it out a little, many EA organisations (at the very least GiveWell, CEA and Leverage Research) are heavily research-focused, and in some cases founded and staffed by people who were on the academic track and wanted to be academics or researchers. So it’s worth considering them at the same time, partly as a related alternative which will appeal to some of those interested in this thread.
@PETER_HURFORD, seconded. I don’t know how to put this properly but I hope you’ve moved past any analysis paralysis!
it does strike me that emphasis on things that can be codified and argued over probably means that fora like this don’t encompass important aspects of EA, such as the forces that motivate many of us.
Yes the tendency to spend all our energy on (“abstruse”?) intellectual battles which I’m guilty of myself has other problems besides.
That is well worth doing. There are instructions on doing this somewhere on their website https://impact.hackpad.com/ .
Oh I didn’t know you could do polls! Testing them out with one with a fuller set of options:
[pollid:4]
Presumably it’s not wholly uneducated, given you’ve been looking into this issue :) Would you have time at some point to share what’s feeding into that estimate (even if it’s more a partial list of factors rather than being a full defense)?
It might put people off submitting projects—I think one ought to ask for permission in these cases.
That seems perfectly reasonable, and like your energy and willpower is plausibly better spent on other things (says I, as a possibly rationalising meat eater).
I think this is probably just a personal thing—for me I think eating somewhat cheaper food would be worse in terms of enjoyment than cutting out dairy.
People’s mileage on these things clearly varies very much, leading to a lot of talking past one another.
That seems like a good system. Presumably you changed it after the 5 years—in what way, and why? (I hope you feel it’s OK to say if you ate more meat—I for one won’t judge as I find vegetarianism too difficult even though I buy the arguments for it. Much harder than the ‘small, set %’ version of EA I do anyway.)
I more meant what a specific, concrete example of such a charity would be. E.g. one which gets a certain group (EAs, or the sciency types you’ve targeted before I think) to commit to meat-reduction.
Yes, the effect would be more to prevent him from dipping into the several hundreds of thousands of UK pounds of income CEA brings in each year (I’m using this figure.)
So it’d be a meta charity (movement building, or something like you current money-moving one), rather a direct poverty relief charity like I asked? I was looking for a more concrete example.
What makes you think EAs would provide enough money? That would be excellent if so.
It does seem to be a large and in that respect ill chosen ask and conversion target. I wouldn’t be surprised if finding 50 mailing lists yields no one who gets convinced to donate 10% of their lifetime income as a result of getting some emails. At best it might find some more people who are already on track to do something similar, and there has been value to having their numbers listed publicly on the Giving What We Can website, but it’s less than that of saving 20 lives.
Have you thought of choosing a different conversion target? Even keeping to % pledges (which charities wouldn’t conventionally consider a good ask), The Life You Can Save pledge seems a better pick. Did you consider this alongside the Giving What We Can one, and if so why did you pick Giving What We Can?
(I ought to add that you may have talked about saving 20 lives as standard marketing hyperbole to get people excited, which would be fine! In that case I apologize if I’ve doused that excitement with cold water—treat this as a somewhat separate academic discussion.)
What type of (presumably typical, ‘median’) charity were you considering when you got that figure?
Step three – found a new charity
How hard can it be …?
It seems pretty hard ;) To the nearest hundred how many manhours do people think it’d take to start a direct poverty relief charity?
I’m not au fait with metacharity or rationality—can you explain why rationality should be bundled under metacharity? What is the meta plan behind promotion of rationality (particular in it’s specific forms, like the organisation CFAR)?
Is this really true as strongly as that Anglican and Catholic should be bundled under Christian? I guess the point of your analogy may have been that Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism classed rationality/CFAR under meta EA, which is fair.
Here are the figures from Ben’s poll so anyone can refer to them:
″ how many folks have held off donating to GWWC in order to see whether their fundraiser hits its goal without their donations (so that their donation would have been replaceable/had no counterfactual impact)? ”
I donated 0 (0%)
I refrained from donating PRIMARILY for the above reason 1 (3%)
I refrained from donating AT LEAST IN PART for the above reason 13 (45%)
The above reason didn’t affect my decision at all 15 (52%)
And here are the figures from my poll with a fuller set of options:
I donated money that’d otherwise have gone to direct support of the global poor 0 (0%)
I donated money that’d otherwise have gone to help others 0 (0%)
I donated money that wouldn’t have otherwise have gone to help anyone else (e.g. I’d have spent it on myself) 1 (8%)
My main reason for not donating was the thought that my donation wouldn’t raise GWWC’s counterfactual spending 0 (0%)
My main reason for not donating was not being sufficiently convinced that increasing GWWC’s spending would do the most good 12 (92%)
I thought donating would raise GWWC’s counterfactual spending and this would do the most good, but nonetheless didn’t donate 0 (0%)
Of course these polls aren’t fully comparable, as saying “I refrained from donating AT LEAST IN PART for the above reason” means only that you think it’s one reason for not donating, and as ‘Larks’ points out there are two possible ways of cashing out “My main reason for not donating was the thought that my donation wouldn’t raise GWWC’s counterfactual spending”:
My donation would cause others to donate less
My donation would cause CEA central to transfer resources away from GWWC but only one of these is what Ben was talking about.