I’d recommend reading the links offered here: http://effectivealtruism.org/resources/#reading They are some useful introductory articles to effective altruism.
Niel_Bowerman
Karma: 1,230
In the UK I like “Swedish Glace” as a non-dairy ice cream. Not sure if they have it over the pond though.
Hi Ilya, I think the reason that Paul is discussing this is because he values everyone equally, regardless of when they exist. And thus he is trying to figure out what actions people should take now in order to maximise the impact he can have on everyone in the world at all times. I agree with your sentiment that much academic work has had little to no utility to humankind (the median published paper is cited once apparently), however there are some questions such as “how can I do as much good as possible” that are significantly understudied, and so I think Paul is contributing there. Additionally I know many people who are pursuing technology entrepreneurship and so articles like this one will help them choose which areas they should be working in.
I agree with this, and try (sometimes awkwardly) not to put the phrase “effective altruist” in materials whose intended audience is the general public, much as I do with the acronyms GWWC and 80k.
My worry though is that people will use “effective altruists” as a phrase to describe people in our movement unless we give them a better one to use. Other than “aspiring effective altruist”, which I have used occasionally when talking with journalists, I don’t find any of the others ‘sticky’ enough.
I would love to hear suggestions from others on a short memorable phrase that we can use to describe ourselves collectively and as individuals, because I worry that otherwise “effective altruists” will end up being used.
If your aim is tax-deductibility, and there are charities that you can’t current get tax-deductibility to, then why not setup a charity that simply makes grants to overseas charities? This is what we have done in the UK with the Giving What We Can Trust, which has had hundreds of thousands of pounds donated through it to non-UK charities. This means that you can donate to any charity in the world rather than limiting yourself to Australian charities.
I’m unsure whether these are the reasons why effective altruism started, or simply a compelling narrative, but I often think of EA as having come about as a result of advances in three different disciplines:
The rise in evidence-based development aid, with the use of randomized controlled trials led by economists such as those at the Poverty Action Lab. These provide high-quality research about what works and what doesn’t in development aid.
The development of the heuristics and biases literature by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. This literature shows the failures of human rationality, and thereby opens up the possibility of increasing one’s impact by deliberately countering these biases.
The development of moral arguments, by Peter Singer and others, in favor of there being a duty to use a proportion of one’s resources to fight global poverty, and in favor of an ‘expanded moral circle‘ that gives moral weight to distant strangers, future people and non-human animals.
This gave rise to three communities: the rationalist (e.g. LessWrong), the philosophical (e.g. Giving What We Can), and the randomistas as they are often referred to (e.g. J-PAL and GiveWell)). These three communities merged to form effective altruism.
I wrote this up based on William MacAskill’s arguments at http://effectivealtruism.org/history/ but I would be interested to hear how much people think this explains.
Thanks Thos!
II. Why Does Effective Altruism Neglect (Better) Policy Advocacy?
I’m not sure that this is necessarily the case among EA orgs with full-time staff. The Centre for Effective Altruism (in particular the Global Priorities Project, which is our collaboration with FHI), The Open Philanthropy Project and the Cambridge Centre on Existential Risk are putting considerable effort into policy work. For example, I and others at CEA put the majority of our time over the past week into policy research, and our trustees were at a meeting at No. 10 Downing Street yesterday. I have written up some of my thoughts on our early policy work at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/
I think that there are a few effects going on here which cause policy to appear under-neglected among the community at large...
There is a relatively larger barrier to entry in policy work (compared to e.g. making a donation to a GiveWell recommendation), which means that policy work is often done by people working in this area full-time, or who have past experience in the area. This may be one of the reasons why the community at large isn’t doing more policy analysis. I think it would be useful if the EA community did do more policy analysis, in particular making recommendations of policies that could feasibly happen (i.e. tweak this thing, not ban agriculture subsidies) and doing analyses of the type I outline in my post above (e.g. what are the benefits, what are the costs, who will be in favour, who will be against, how can we change the policy to make it more feasible while retaining most of the benefits, how would we actually make this change, and who do we ultimately need to convince about this to make it happen, etc.). I for one would find this useful in informing the work that I do in this area, and if the ideas are good enough they would likely be taken forwards.
Policy work is often under-publicised unless there are major breakthroughs. In doing this work we are developing ongoing relationships with people, and if we were to publicise these relationships on the internet we could damage them. For this reason we often find it difficult to talk about our policy work extensively in public.
There may also be cultural and path-dependent effects at play here, which people have mentioned above/below and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them in detail.
Thanks Nick. There seems to be a problem with the way the forum currently references the effective-altruism.com URL. I’ve directed the link to the post on the trikeapps site as a temporary workaround. It may break once the problem with the effective-altruism.com URLs is fixed.
Have you put any thought in how to overcome the sorts of political obstacles that cause politicians to favor certain interest groups at the expense of a greater good (such as some agricultural subsidies)?
I find the ‘political entrepreneur’ model useful here. It predicts that a politician would be willing to make changes to these sorts of policies once the balance of costs to them and benefits to them weighs in favour of changing it.
For example, take the common agricultural policy in the EU. If you change it, then you have 26m very angry European farmers, and large scale unemployment that you are labelled as responsible for. So the politician would need to create a mass movement or economic benefits that are clearly greater than these downsides in order for it to go through. Unfortunately people make much more noise about losses than about benefits, and so this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Of course the political entrepreneur model is very simplistic here. It would take a huge coalition of politicians to make this happen. And you would need to get around all of the nationalistic worries that would occur from vast quantities of the EU budget not being allocated to countries that it had previously been allocated to. These are just a few of the many additional obstacles that would need to be overcome.
There is much more to be said about this though. A rather non-evidence-based playbook on this that I used to use in my campaigning days is “How to win campaigns” by Chris Rose if you are interested in reading more about how to do this practically. On the more theoretical side, many of the books linked to in the article propose alternative models that can help illustrate the sorts of changes that would need to be made.
I had previously assumed that political action in this area would be infeasible, but I’m happy to be wrong on this one.
To clarify, I’m not predicting that political action will be feasible. I’m merely predicting that it will be possible for us to gain access to policymakers again in the future. Especially once we have better responses and policy proposals.
Good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet)
‘Special Projects’ at the Centre for Effective Altruism
This is useful thanks. We plan on using the same back-end to host both sites. Do you therefore suggest that we have a clear boundary in the site between the .com and .org sites, rather than simply letting people use the same URL suffix that they entered throughout the site?
No, it was not based on the TMM, though I can see that there are some rough similarities (i.e. these are both stage-based models of human engagement).
I agree. My current best guess is to provide just one or two key actions to take for new users, with the alternative routes still available but not as prominent.
Effective altruism outreach plans
Career opportunities in effective altruism outreach
I’m not sure of the exact numbers but my impression is that FHI has perhaps half a dozen full-time staff members, and CSER has one part-time person who is based in FHI and has been working on grant applications but I am unclear about the long-term financial viability of having this person working on applying for grants.
Additionally, GiveWell have to consider whether they have enough room for more funding for all GiveWell donors (i.e. $ millions per year), which is more difficult case to make than simply having room for more funding from a single donor (presumably $ hundreds or $ thousands per year)