Maybe your college EA idealistic self expectation’s were never that likely, so you shouldn’t beat yourself up about them.
Nekoinentr
103:1 is an incredible fundraising ratio—how are you able to convince people to donate so much with such a small investment, apparently just a small amount of staff time, and how would others go about replicating this? If people could replicate your methods around the world it’d be highly desirable for them to do so.
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.
Surely if someone gave you a few hundred dollars to sustain a staff member such as yourself to spend a few man days leveraging volunteer tech & design effort, you’d do it? So less a matter of prioritizing things and more a matter of the EA Community Fund covering low hanging fruit like this so you don’t have to take time you presumably don’t have laboriously convincing someone that this is worth those few hundred dollars.
80k advice often seems geared to people with quite a particular educational background. I’m keen on earning to give even if my earnings can only be moderate (a different course seems better if they might end up lower than that). But while I’m unusually smart I don’t like school, don’t have very good A levels (Bs and Cs), and prefer to be self-directed—so I decided to skip university to do self-employed start-up business work. However I figure I could go back, or perhaps do an accelerated business course. How can someone in my general situation best get an outside view of their expected mean/median earnings, if they’re willing to do any job to maximise these?
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.)
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.
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.
As a distant observer, your .impact EA work seems unlikely to get replaced, whereas there are plenty of people doing startups—are you worried that adding a startup to your earning to give might squeeze EA work out?
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’.
For example, suppose you see an idea for an effective charity on Charity Science. You contact them and they provide you with advice and link you up with potential cofounders.
Have they done this for anyone?
The Foundational Research Institute site in the links above seems to have a wealth of writing about the far future!
On premise 1, a related but stronger claim is that humans tend to shape the universe to their values much more strongly than do blind natural forces. This allows for a simpler but weaker argument than yours: it follows that, should humans survive, the universe is likely to be better (according to those values) than it otherwise would be.
The idea of a natural kind is helpful. The fact that people mean different things by “consciousness” seems unsurprising, as that’s the case for any complex word that people have strong motives to apply (in this case because consciousness sounds valuable). It also tells us little about the moral questions we’re considering here. Do you guys agree or am I missing something?
I don’t think I understand what you mean by consciousness being objective. When you mention “what processes, materials, etc. we subjectively choose to use as the criteria for consciousness”, this sounds to me as if you’re talking about people having different definitions of consciousness, especially if the criteria are meant as definitive rather than indicative. However presumably in many cases whether the criteria are present will be an objective question.
When you talk about whether “consciousness is an actual property of the world”, do you mean whether it’s part of ontologic base reality?
good job beating out GiveWell
Does speed realistically make that much difference? I don’t see what good it would do for GiveWell to start rushing to get responses out first.
My goal for Q2 was to not get too involved in Charity Science or .impact so I could keep my focus. I succeeded in that goal and both organizations ended up doing very well anyway!
That does appear plausible AFAICT, and focus is good. But they might have done even better with more involvement from you! Perhaps it’s predictable that when posting to an EA forum you’d get advice to focus more on EA projects (inevitably at the expense of others). Hacker News would doubtless tell you to drop anything EA in favour of laser-like focus on your top secret startup. (Very tantalising! Can you give any hints?)
AFAICT the Charity Science fundraising experiments have a few full-time people working on them, so maybe there’s little you could add as a part-timer, but I don’t know how many people would do your .impact work if you didn’t? It’s great that you’ve managed volunteers coding some fixes and features for this very forum, but you can only get so much out of volunteers in general.
What about the books by Nick Cooney (already out I think?) and Larissa MacFarquhar? It’s worth everyone remembering to mention them when we’re giving lists.
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.
Good.
If you feel you’ve become much less EA, I wonder what many others who were very into it must feel. From the outside you seem extremely involved - .impact/Rethink Charity do a huge amount with limited resources, and it seems like you do substantial volunteering with them, which doesn’t seem like putting little of yourself into EA. Thanks for what you do.