It may also be worth mentioning that if anyone would like to track what EA Outreach are doing in more detail, we send out monthly updates on our activities which you can sign up for here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ea-outreach-updates
Niel_Bowerman
Karma: 1,288
On question six:
6.) How does CEA know that Will’s viral Ice Bucket articles generated £10K for SCI? What is being done, if anything, to track the impact of these outreach projects? Even if we can’t understand well the impact of outreach overall, it would be nice to be able to compare projects against each other.
We got our money moved to SCI data from SCI. They ask where the donations came from and they saw a large spike in donations citing online media at the time when I did a national radio segment with Elie from GiveWell on why to donate to SCI rather than ALS in the ice bucket challenge, which was the reproduced on BBC online and in the Financial Times. They also asked a few of the donors and they said that our articles were the cause.
I agree with you that it would be nice to be able to compare the impact of the different projects. The impact metrics we are tracking for each of the projects are different in places, but we try and measure similar metrics across the projects such as direct money moved wherever we can. We have also been attempting to monitor whenever one of the projects leads to a new Giving What We Can member, and GiveWell have been giving us numbers on new traffic to GiveWell as a result of our media (we will set this up for other projects as well once they reach scale). For example multiple articles we have placed in the media have driven 1000s of new visitors to GiveWell (Approximately 1 in every 200 new visitors donates to GiveWell and the average donations size is $1000, though I imagine the visitors we sent over were substantially less likely than average to donate large amounts). We hope to use direct money moved as one indicator of the impact of each project, though this is quite an imprecise metric that doesn’t capture many of the other benefits of the projects, so we will be monitoring others as well such as the number of people who sign up to an EA org as a result of these projects, the number of people who become actively involved in the movement because of these projects, etc.
I hope this answers some of your questions, and feel free to get in touch if you have further questions.
On question five:
5.) Is there any danger in CEA increasing how central it is to the movement? We certainly do want more resources and CEA seems to be in a very good place to execute these projects in a way that no one else can. But it would be bad for CEA to become a single point of failure for the movement. Has there been any spot in spinning off more orgs out of the CEA umbrella? Any thought in putting some of these projects on hold and use EA Ventures to try to get some of them out instead?
I agree with you that CEA is becoming an increasingly key node in the EA movement, and that this is a potential failure mode, and it is one that we have been taking steps to address. We are currently in the process of finalising a governance reform package within CEA that would turn CEA into more of an incubator, which will make it easier for CEA to start and end projects. We have already successfully spun two projects out of CEA (Animal Charity Evaluators and Life You Can Save), and these reforms would also potentially make it easier for projects to spin out of CEA should they wish to. I won’t go into the details of these reforms publicly until we are able to finalise the package and discuss it with the trustees, but we are certainly taking steps to make CEA more resilient, adaptable, and ultimately less likely to be a failure mode within the movement.
As for whether EA Ventures should try to start up some of these initiatives instead, I see CEA and EA Ventures as occupying two different roles. EA Ventures is a project to make it easier for projects to get financing, whereas CEA is an incubator of new projects. EA Ventures primarily provides funding, whereas CEA provides: office space, book-keeping, hr and logistics support, fundraising support, legal support, charity status, and mentoring and strategy advice. It would take a considerable amount of setup time for EA Ventures to be able to provide all of these services, and I don’t think this would be the best use of resources. Similarly, projects at CEA are always welcome to spin-off from CEA and source these services independently, but they find it beneficial enough that they choose not to do this as it allows them to focus purely on their project and not on non-profit administration which is largely handled by CEA. For this reason I would like to continue using CEA’s incubation services for the projects that I am starting and working on, at least until they reach sufficient scale, because it allows me to focus my attention directly on the project itself.
On question four:
4.) Why is EA Ventures included in this? It doesn’t even seem thematically related.
There are a number of ways of interpreting your question on EA Ventures. The benefits of the project (increased coordination, less matching costs for donors and projects, incentives for and ease of creating new EA projects, etc.) are outlined here: http://bit.ly/EAVentures (note that the intended audience of this document is donors, and so it doesn’t stress the benefits to entrepreneurs as much as it could)
I agree that EA Ventures is less thematically relevant to the rest of the programme than many of the other projects, but I think it is unfair to say that it is not thematically related: this project is about making it easier for EAs to get the funding they need to start new projects, and it is in the plan in the context of getting EAs access to the skills and resources they need to have impact.
The idea was suggested by a number of different EAs in a number of different forums, and multiple people asked whether we were interested in leading on the project as no-one else seemed to want to take the lead on it. We mentioned it to a couple of donors, who seemed pretty interested in the idea, and after writing it up in more detail and discussing its merits relative to the other things we would have been spending the time on, we decided to take it on.
On question three (the forum keeps renumbering my answers to I’m writing the numbers in text):
3.) I like the program plan and a lot of individual projects, but it feels a bit like throwing everything but the kitchen sink, very loosely fit together by theme. There doesn’t seem to be that much rationale for why some projects are taking place and others aren’t. While it’s good to try many things to learn lots fast, it’s also good to focus on a few things to do them well. What thought has CEA given to this tradeoff?
I agree with you that there are a lot of different projects here (and the list used to be much much longer before we had to cut it down to what was more realistic to achieve!) The strategy that we tend to use at CEA is to experiment on a number of different things when we move into a new area and then scale up the things that work well. For example when we created 80,000 Hours we experimented with making it a campaigning movement, an online app, a community, and a lecture series, before settling on the current model of it being a service to help people choose their careers. Without this experimentation it is easy to commit too many resources to sub-optimal projects that we end up pivoting away from. This is why this list does look long, and why we expect it will narrow at the end of this year, and possibly even during the year if one or more of the projects seem particularly bad on closer inspection.
It is also notable that we have also taken one bigger bet, in the books that we are publishing. In including writing time, William MacAskill’s book and marketing campaign will have at least one person-year of time put into it. This is because we were presented with a particularly good publishing deal—pretty much the best deal that it is possible to get as a non-celebrity first-time author.
On question two:
2.) What, if anything, has EA Outreach learned from those who have already done outreach, such as CEA’s own orgs, or others? Didn’t, for example, GWWC already try VIP outreach?
2a. We’ve tried to talk with everyone who we think might have useful insights or learnings we might be able to use on EA Outreach. Kerry Vaughan in particular has been doing a lot of this (as he is coordinating the movement-facing side of our work) and he is regularly Skyping and talking with half a dozen people a day to ask for advice and feedback on things that he is working on. I won’t bore you with a long list of everyone we are currently getting advice from, but I can assure you that it is extensive!
2b. On your questions about learning within CEA, I am fortunate enough to have led on outreach for Giving What We Can, VIP engagement for CEA, and outreach for 80,000 Hours in previous roles I’ve had at CEA, so much of the project plan (http://bit.ly/EAO2015) is built off the back of things I felt I learned while in those roles, and I regularly discuss strategy and learnings with the current teams working on those projects. Finally, at CEA we have ‘training lunches’ which all the teams are invited to, in which someone presents on a topic that they have experience with, or a topic that they have recently been studying, and the group gets to discuss and give feedback. We regularly have these on outreach-related topics, and in fact on Wednesday Steph Crampin from GWWC will be giving one on what she has learned from the marketing diploma that she is in the final stages of getting.
On question one:
1.) What will EA Outreach do, if anything, to coordinate with other people working on marketing EA? Will EA Outreach be transparent, or aim to produce research that is of value to typical EAs? Will there be any attempt to bring forward some “lessons learned”? While I know the Global Priorities Project has done a lot, I feel like there has been incredibly little that an EA can personally use and learn from (though I understand that may not have been the point).
1a. We would like to co-ordinate and collaborate with anyone who is working on marketing EA. Currently the only person we know who is working on this full time is Tyler Alterman from Leverage, and we work so closely with him that he practically feels like part of the team! We will be collaborating closely with LYCS, not least on Peter Singer’s book, and we talk with Giving What We Can on a daily basis. We are teaming up with 80,000 Hours on the EA Fellow’s Programme, and we have been working with CEA to create its own branding that will make it more relevant to the movement as an incubator. We’ve been talking with Tom Ash and looking for ways that we can best collaborate with effectivealtruismhub.org, which hosts many .impact projects. As I mentioned in the plan we have been helping advise FHI on their efforts to make the discussion on AI in the media more accurate. We have also been advising the Norwegian EAs on media strategy, and they’ve been helping us think through movement branding. We’ve been talking with some of the German EAs about their plans to create “superteams” to work on new EA projects. We’ve also been collaborating with the Australian EAs on the EA Forum, and we are currently in conversation with them about their hosting of EA Global. If there are other groups that would like to collaborate with us, I’d love to hear from them!
1b. I won’t speak for the Global Priorities Project (GPP) as I haven’t been working on that project since August and so I’m not so up to date on their current plans. It is worth noting though that Seb Farquhar has been hired from McKinsey to join GPP as its director and project manager, so their plans and outputs may change substantially from January when he starts.
On EA Outreach though, we do indeed plan to write up some of our lessons learned. We have a draft post ready on our learnings from engaging with the media in 2014 that we hope to post soon. You have probably seen my post on what I learned from engaging in policy work earlier this year: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ Writing up these learnings takes quite a lot of time and so we probably won’t be able to share everything we learn, but we try to pass on any particularly useful information to teams that might benefit from it. We love getting questions from different projects and people on their outreach strategies, and I really enjoy talking with all of these projects and helping them think through their work, so if there are people reading this who would be interested in talking through some questions about their EA project then please do get in touch.
Hi Peter,
Great questions, thanks for asking them. I’m going to respond to your different questions in different comments as my response is too long to be accepted as a single comment.
This is an interesting argument and one that I’d like to think about some more. I’ll let Kerry respond in more detail as he is leading on EA Global, but IIRC the main reasons we had in mind were around fostering more of a sense of community, excitement, and illustrating the global scale of the movement. It might also make it easier to use the events to promote the books on EA that are coming out if they are near one of the book launches. Finally, having them simultaneously would make it easier to get pre- and post-event media coverage, especially if we have tie-ins with the books. I know that these sorts of benefits are hard to define, but I think that having the events simultaneously will help foster a sense, both within the movement and among the public, that EA is a rapidly growing, exciting and influential global movement, which I think could be quite helpful to us.
Hi Ben, We can add your donations to the CauseVox page manually. Just let Rob or me know. Thanks, and let me know if you have any additional questions.
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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)
I’d recommend reading the links offered here: http://effectivealtruism.org/resources/#reading They are some useful introductory articles to effective altruism.
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!
Yes, I believe so. Just contact kerry@centreforeffectivealtruism.org and he can let you know the details. Thanks for showing an interest.