It’d be good to add links to more EA resources in the sidebar rather than just directing everyone to the “New to Effective Altruism?” website, especially now while it isn’t a particularly good link for that purpose, but also in general, no matter how good that one website is.
Nekoinentr
Karma: 96
Is anyone considering giving to them?
If The Humane League can convert people to vegetarianism for anything like the amounts estimated, and people who find vegetarianism particularly difficult and unpleasant would rather pay to convert someone else than go vegetarianism themselves, then isn’t this the best option? It certainly seems to beat haranguing people who find vegetarianism too difficult, which only causes bad feelings on all sides. I’ve heard some prominent EAA group people advocate this sort of ‘vegetarian offsetting’.
I agree with the weakest statement that you make in this article, namely that vegetarianism is not a totally obvious conclusion from EA premises, and non-vegetarian EAs should not be shamed or moralized at.
Yes, that’s the most important thing to keep sight of and is true regardless of whether there are problems with the particular cost-effectiveness analysis here. EG I’m not sure that the evidence for vegan outreach leafleting being that cost-effective is that strong.
I would echo this—I presume the concern is that if many people not committed to effective giving joined Giving What We Can this would dilute the community, but I don’t think this is likely in this case.
The other alternatives; of trying to construct a cause-neutral parallel to GWWC, preferably before the books launch, or a status quo devoid of a central hub new EAs can go to; are far from ideal either. Yet the former is not hopeless (c.f. Tom et al.’s work on a donation registry), and a community norm about giving could propagate without a centralized group (and perhaps we should fear a single EA group becoming too central to the movement). I’d prefer either to this.
I agree, and the EA donation registry looks like a fine place for people to declare cause-neutral pledges already if they’d like to. If we thought having something with a predefined pledge (eg of 10%) was better, then it wouldn’t be too hard to create a way for people to sign up for that—for example, creating a Google Form which people could complete would get you a decent way there. It doesn’t seem to require a centralised group to manage this.
Does anyone have any experience with fundraising? When I search Google, I just find sites about buying their stuff and reselling it, which doesn’t seem like it would be very useful for just one person.
There are likely good resources online about how to do sponsored runs. These can raise a lot.
Great! I was thinking of resources more like Gratipay going directly into the sidebar, rather than a long links page like that one. Gratipay would be worth linking to if that link leads to more money exchanged. In general the things that could benefit from more exposure are the main .impact projects—SkillShare, the EA Donation Registry, the EA Profiles/map (one link would cover both) and the new podcast. Have you talked to the .impact people about this and got their take? It seems worth coordinating these web-based projects with them.