At Effective Altruism Wooster we’ve run similar events with great success. As described in this EA Forum post our talks were 1-3 min long. But we’ve also run it with longer talks.
We’ve also done a variation of this with the talks being about particular cause areas and only one, longer talk per event.
Thank you for this. The post by GiveWell is quite relevant. The post deals with the problem of whether an org such as Good Ventures should wait out to make their donations so that they can fill in gaps where needed and not donate to a charity past a point of decreasing returns. I think a platform for conditional donations may improve on Good Venture’s solution of posting their decisions before giving season. Say there is an agreed-upon limit for how much funding a given charity can absorb. The platform could then coordinate donors so that this threshold is never reached. Each person might, for example, have conditions of the kind “donate to A if there are sufficient (conditional) donations to get A to receive in total between $X and $Y, else donate to B...”.
Thanks for the input. I would like to hear better names for this idea.
Yes, the idea is similar to crowdfunding. I think there is an important difference though. I see conditional donations working under some form of a website that directs donations to effective charities. Donors would thus be able to set many conditions for the optimal allocation of a specified lump sum. The main gain that I see is that this allows for more optimization than in a normal crowdfunding implementation, where you might have to split your budget.
1. “Survey of arguments for focusing on suffering reduction”
-I’m particularly interested in arguments from and for the nonexistence of positive mental states.
2.”The case for studying abroad at Oxford”
-Argue, based on personal experience, that students across the world who are interested in EA should seriously consider studying abroad at Oxford and provide advice on how to make the most of that experience.
3.”The case for recruiting for AI safety research in Brazil”
-Lay out the reasons for thinking Brazil is a low hanging fruit for recruiting in AI safety research
People in the EA movement would be a prime target for products created by these organizations, closing the feedback loop and territorializing an entire self-regulating market out of the movement. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, perhaps, but perhaps there is under an EA-certification.
It seems to me that the combination of generating profits to support other EA orgs and having EAs as the target consumers would not be optimal. Because EAs already donate, by profiting off of them, profiting-to-give could, rather than moving more money into the EA movement, just be moving donations from what EAs would choose to what these profiting-to-give orgs would choose. It seems to me, then, that targeting regular consumers would be the best way to maximize the money coming into EA from this strategy.
Edit: it seems to me now that what I described above would only apply if EAs were actually trying to maximize donations through minimizing expenses instead of donating a fixed percentage every year (which I don’t think is usually true).
Thank you very much for this great reply! I’ll certainly check them out once I get back to thinking about population ethics.
I do want to make clear that the approach I took in this paper was one of seeing what views and implications would “flow” from reductionism, rather than one of finding the best theory to accommodate our existing moral intuitions in light of some new fact.