Pablo Melchor, co-founder and president at Ayuda Efectiva. Co-founded EA Spain.
pmelchor
Sella, thanks for the post. I think this is a very interesting idea (and I am guessing that other non-US/UK EA groups may think so as well). I see it as doing relative optimization in a much larger space rather than absolute optimization within a small group (people who actually have a chance of going into 80,000 Hours’s highest-impact paths).
In that sense, Probably Good reminds me of what Elijah explained here about what the ImpactMatters team is trying to do under their new roof at Charity Navigator:
Certainly in typical EA terms, many of the nonprofits that are analyzed are not the most cost-effective. But we also know that standard EA nonprofits are a fraction of the $300 bil nonprofit sector, and there is a portion of that money that has high intra-cause elasticity but low inter-cause elasticity. Impact analysis could be a way of shifting that money, yielding very cost-effective returns [...]
Great posts, Joey and Darius!
I’d like to introduce a few considerations as an “older” EA (I am 43 now) :
Scope of measurement: Joey’s post was based on 5 year data. As Joey mentioned, “it would take a long time to get good data”. However, it may well be that expanding the time scope would yield very different results. It is possible that a graph plotting a typical EA’s degree of involvement/commitment with the movement would not look like a horizontal line but rather like a zigzag. I base this on purely anecdotal evidence, but I have seen many people (including myself) recover interests, hobbies, passions, etc. once their children are older. I am quite new to the movement, but there is no way that 10 years ago I would have put in the time I am now devoting to EA. If I had started my involvement in college —supposing EA had been around—, you could have seen a sharp decline during my thirties (and tag that as value drift)… without knowing there would be a sharp increase in my forties.
Expectations: This is related to my previous point. Is it optimal to expect a constant involvement/commitment with the movement? As EAs, we should think of maximizing our lifetime contributions. Keeping the initial engagement levels constant sounds good in theory, but it may not be the best strategy in the long run (e.g. potentially leading to burnout, etc). Maybe we should think of “engagement fluctuations” as something natural and to be expected instead of something dangerous that must be fought against.
EA interaction styles: If and as the median age of the community goes up, we may need to adapt the ways in which we interact (or rather add to the existing ones). It can be much harder for people with full-time jobs and children to attend regular meetings or late afternoon “socials”. How can we make it easier for people that have very strong demands on their time to stay involved without feeling that they are missing out or that they just can’t cope with everything? I don’t have an answer right now, but I think this is worth exploring.
The overall idea here is that instead of fighting an uneven involvement/commitment across time it may be better to actually plan for it and find ways of accommodating it within a “lifetime contribution strategy”. It may well be that there is a minimum threshold below which people completely abandon EA. If that it so I suggest we think of ways of making it easy for people to stay above that threshold at times when other parts of their lives are especially demanding.
I can only describe “It has been a good year” as a massive understatement. You are doing amazing work with minimal resources and Effektiv Spenden is an inspiration for all of us working to promote effective giving. I think supporting your growth should be a no-brainer.
Regarding the contribution of effective giving to the growth of effective altruism, our donor base at Ayuda Efectiva skews even more towards “no previous knowledge”. I think effective giving can be one of the main gateways into effective altruism in high-income, non-English-speaking countries.
For the introduction, I liked and shared Will MacAskill’s text for Norton Introduction to Ethics:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xs22x9UIuvym—MfAUtQsZ-GVqTqXeEs/view
Two notes on existing resources:
Jamie Gittins created this wiki listing EA-alined orgs.
The EA Operations Slack (mentioned here) is doing wonders in terms of resource sharing and mutual help for people working in ops roles.
Jamie, thanks for the list! Can you please add Ayuda Efectiva to the Infrastructure section? Suggested text:
“Ayuda Efectiva promotes effective giving in Spain. Their Global Health Fund routes donations to a selection of GiveWell’s recommended charities, providing tax deductibility for Spanish donors. They plan to launch similar funds for other cause areas in the near future.”
Thanks!
I think there is an 11th reason why someone may want to work on near-term causes: while we may be replaceable by the next generations when it comes to working on the long-term future, we are irreplaceable when it comes to helping people / sentient beings who are alive today. In other words: influencing what may happen 100 years from now can be done by us, our children, our grand-children and so on; however, only we can help say the 700 million people living in extreme poverty today.
I have not come across the counter-arguments for this one: has it been discussed on previous posts or related material? Or maybe it is a basic question in moral philosophy 101 and I am just not knowledgeable enough :-)
Some great points have been made in previous comments, but I think there is some important context missing in GiveDirectly’s post and this discussion.
Disclosure and caveats: At Ayuda Efectiva we rely heavily on GiveWell’s research and will soon incorporate GiveDirectly as a giving option for Spanish donors. We therefore have an ongoing relationship with GiveWell and a just-getting-started one with GiveDirectly. We talk to GiveWell regularly to get a better sense of their thinking but all I write here is my personal understanding (which could be wrong).
Even though GiveWell has been around for more than a decade, it is a fast-growing and fast-changing organization. It seems that one of the current key drivers of change is the success of their Maximum Impact Fund. More and more, donors seem to be choosing to let GiveWell pursue whichever opportunities they think are the most impactful at any given time.
The way I see it, what this means in practice is that GiveWell’s role as a charity recommender is becoming less prominent while their role as a grantmaking organization is expanding. The 40% growth of their incubation grants in 2020 also seems to point in that direction.
Once you see GiveWell in that light, the arguments against the roll over of part of their 2021 let-GiveWell-decide money raised seem to me quite weaker. If there is a strong argument, it should be applicable to any foundation (e.g. Gates, Open Phil, you name it) not giving away all of their available money in cash transfers now.
I do find convincing the argument that GiveWell is still widely seen and represented as just a charity recommender and they do have an important influence on giving decisions (I would say mostly in the EA community and adjacent groups). Their communications can therefore have a big impact and potentially unintended consequences. I have two comments to make on this:
First, GiveWell’s message to donors is not “do not give, hold your money”:
We will continue to raise funds, and our top recommendation to donors continues to be our Maximum Impact Fund, which grants funds on a quarterly basis to the most cost-effective giving opportunities we’ve identified at the time grants are made.
In fact, they expect to cover funding needs in 2022 equivalent to a very large percentage of the money they hope to raise:
Second, I find GiveDirectly’s argument on the potential impact of GiveWell’s announcement rather confusing:
But their decision here tries to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving in isolation from the other 99.9%; when, in reality, growing that 99.9% and allocating it better will mean a lot more for our world than asking those donors to hold out for possible silver bullets down the road.
One possible interpretation is the one in Jaime’s comment. The way I understood it made me think the argument is not very consistent: On the one hand, they say that GiveWell is trying to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving. I don’t know what the exact percentage is but it does seem clear that GiveWell’s money moved and influence is very small in the scheme of things. On the other hand, the post seems to suggest that GiveWell is somehow telling the 99.9% donors it has no influence on to hold their donations.
In any case, I think it is perfectly compatible for GiveWell to announce they will be holding some funds for some time in order to achieve maximum impact (since that is precisely what they set out to do) while other donors decide to give now because they prefer to address the immediate needs that GiveDirectly is focused on. It does not seem like GiveWell’s announcement should have a huge impact on that latter group, even if it is not the messaging that GiveDirectly will want to (and should) emphasize when addressing the 99.9% donors out there.
Thank you, Aaron, you have been a force for good here. Smart hire by Open Phil!
For cause selection (and the INT model), I find this 80K article more accessible and explanatory than most:
Good points. If I were doing a write up on this subject it would be something like this:
“As the years go by, you will likely go through stages during which you cannot commit as much time or other resources to EA. This is natural and you should not interpret lower-commitment stages as failures: the goal is to maximize your lifetime contributions and that will require balancing EA with other goals and demands. However, there is a risk that you may drift away from EA permanently if your engagement is too low for a long period of time. Here are some tools you can use to prevent that from happening:”
Fantastic work! Strongly upvoted.
Yes, thanks for that: I can see the broader strategic implications. I actually think the equivalent to “but actually may lead to more people joining top priority paths in the focus areas of existing career orgs in the long run” may also be true in the effective giving space.
I see this tag is largely unused, while “impact assessment” seems to have been chosen for many posts that could fit here (e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZeFcfCAncT3jPAeht/clean-technology-innovation-as-the-most-cost-effective).
Two questions:
How do you think about when to keep tags separate or when to merge them?
How important is it for you that following a tag will have the expected results? In other words: if you have to choose, do you prioritise preciseness (e.g. two terms are not exactly the same >> let’s create two separate tags) or content discovery (e.g. this is going to relevant for people who click on the tag >> let’s make sure it shows up).
Devon, thanks for the comment!
On that topic, do you or anyone else know of other such national level projects, aside from Effektiv Spenden (where I do some work) in Germany and RC Forward in Canada?
I know of gieffektivt.no in Norway and Effective Altruism Australia.
Although I imagine there are many nuances of each country’s bureaucracy, it could make sense to template out the operational aspects that likely don’t differ from country to country.
Certainly. I had a brief conversation with Basti and Jack Lewars on this. I am very skeptical about large and complex projects like migrating to the same ERP but would be happy to explore more modest opportunities to avoid repeatedly reinventing the wheel :-)
What kind of fixed costs are we talking about, if you don’t mind sharing? If they were too low, I’d be a bit concerned that it could hamper your multiplier. How are you approaching fundraising?
Fair concern and you are right: “the lowest possible fixed costs” can mean anything :-). In our case, we are looking at costs of less than 10K €/month for 2021. The plan is to bootstrap this (which we can afford) until we can show impact. The metric we will be focusing on is what The Life You Can Save calls leverage ratio: money moved expressed as a multiple of operating expenses. If you are interested in getting into the weeds, I’d be happy to chat :-)
I am personally very interested in cause areas like global poverty, so it is great to see more people wanting to discuss the related issues in depth.
Nevertheless, I strongly support the definition of EA as a question (how can we use our resources to help others the most?) and that makes me not want to tag myself as a “[enter category here] EA” (e.g. “near-term EA”, “far-future EA”...).
In practical terms, the above leads me to enjoy my views being challenged by people who have come to different conclusions and I tend to favour a “portfolio approach” to doing good, somewhat along the lines of Open Phil’s “worldview diversification”.
Regarding discussion, there should be great spaces for both the meta topics and the cause-specific ones. Wouldn’t it be ideal if we could host all those discussions under the same roof? Maybe this thread can be used as an input for the upcoming EA Forum 2.0. The feature request would be something like “make it easy to host and find worldview-specific discussions”.
I made a minor edit to clarify a couple of points in “How you can help”.
Thanks! Yes, it is great to see a lot of doers out there :-)
Hi Miguel, Nicole,
I will be hosting this edition of the open forum. It looks like there is a mistake on the upper part of this page since the actual date announced on the GWWC website is tomorrow: Thursday, November 17.
If you see this before today at 8 p.m. CET please do let me know by replying to this comment. If I don’t hear from you, I will log in today as well.Sorry about this!
My experience in business matches two of the points that Catherine makes above:
and
My current view is that:
Consistent usage can be much more relevent for a brand’s success than its intrinsic characteristics. I can imagine the team at early-days Google discussing whether they should rebrand to something easier to write for X-language-speakers and more understandable for the average user.
It is easy to overestimate the potential of an imaginary, shiny new brand and underestimate the value of your current imperfect brand. This may be one of those things that you only notice when it is no longer there (e.g. people leave a company believing that it was “just and empty shell”and that they were what made it valuable… only to find out that it is much harder to get clients when that well-known logo is no longer on your slides).
If anything, I would say that one of the weaknesses of Effective Altruism (purely from a branding perspective) is that its brand landscape is already super-diverse (e.g. there is GiveWell, ACE, Open Phil, Founders Pledge, GWWC, 80,000 Hours, etc., etc. each pushing their own brand). This does make sense since each of the organizations I mention is applying effective altruism to a particular space or situation. However, when it comes to local groups, I tend to think that the EA movement as a whole has much more to gain from consistency.
Ben mentions in his comment how independent brands can reduce brand risk for EA, which is true. However, I think they can also reduce brand potential for EA (this is more of a side note, but I think that whenever we consider minimizing reputational risks we should also consider the opportunity costs of not doing something or doing it in the cautious-but-probably-less-impactful version).
I think that if we want to make the EA brand better (more meaningful, attractive, easily recognizable, etc.), simply using it consistently will go a long way.