I think the difference in cost per pledge could also be from a large number of existing vegetarians who just wanted the additional information. Also the former vegetarians probably consumed fewer animal foods, which would make converting one to vegetarianism less impactful.
redmoonsoaring
Karma: 151
The lives saved by [sic] AMD occur early in life, so AMF saves about 60 QALYs per life.
I’m not sure why people use this estimate, given that the effect of anti-malarial nets is primarily on avoiding the disease itself, the grief of family members, economic costs, and other downsides of having malaria, rather than on creating more years of happy life. This is because population tends to adjust for the death rate, i.e. “I think the best interpretation of the available evidence is that the impact of life-saving interventions on fertility and population growth varies by context, above all with total fertility, and is rarely greater than 1:1.”
http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/04/16/the-mortality-fertility-link/
I’d say it belongs in the former because it strongly “flatters a large share of readers.” Namely, by saying they are better than most other people =P Of course, that’s a controversial form of flattering, which is why the 79% upvote makes sense.
Another reason this claim could be false (which seems more worrisome to me):
Most of the effective altruism movement’s success to date has involved helping people already inspired to do good effectively to do it somewhat better, especially by providing a community for them. On Facebook, polls have shown most current EAs immediately latched onto the idea, sought it out on their own, and/or were already working to do the most good.
We have a fairly limited track record of convincing people to do EA things when they weren’t otherwise going to do anything close. It’s possible that EA just is a very hard thing to get many more people involved with beyond the low-hanging fruit we’ve already captured or would capture without additional resources put into outreach.
It’s pretty hard to get funding for a new organization, e.g. Spencer and I put a lot of effort into it without much success. The general problem I see is a lack of “angel investing” or its equivalent–the idea of putting money into small, experimental organizations and funding them further as they grow.
I agree with this. Moreover, I think there’s a serious lack of funding in the ‘fringe’ areas of EA like biosecurity, systemic change in global poverty, rationality training, animal rights, or personal development. These areas arguably have the greatest impact, but it’s difficult to attract the major funders.
For example, I think the Swiss EA groups are quite funding-constrained, but they aren’t well-known to the major funders and movement-building lacks robust evidence.
Just to be clear, my comment was disagreeing with this claim:
In addition, veg*nism is associated with strong negative judgements of people.
But to your questions, there’s not very robust evidence in either direction that I know of. And I think there’s an important distinction between defensiveness and negativity. An example to illustrate this is military service. Most people think highly of military people, but would react with great defensiveness if you suggested they had a moral obligation to join the military. If veganism is similar, then we might expect that people would be excited about a high number of military people in EA but would only become defensive if you brought it up as a moral obligation.
More importantly, however, EA brings up a lot of moral obligations. I mean, donating 10% of your income is pretty widespread, as is being willing to reject your current altruistic endeavors if they’re ineffective. I rarely see anyone in EA bring up concerns about these things being offputting, but it comes up almost every time veg*nism is discussed. I think this is an example of motivated reasoning.
It doesn’t seem to me that the proportion of vegans with that approach is higher in communities around EA than in other communities. They don’t seem particularly vocal either. I could be wrong.
In addition, veg*nism is associated with strong negative judgements of people. It prompts massive defensiveness and rationalisation on the part of meat eaters for this reason. To the extent that EA is associated with veg*nism, that’ll bleed over.
Actually, data suggests most people have positive associations of veg*nism. EA actually seems to have some of the most negativity towards veg*nism that I’ve seen.
Since so much luck is involved in start-up success, does that mean we might be too focused on creating better EAs when we should be focused more on just creating more EAs? This could apply more broadly than just start-ups, to things like politics, academia, or other forms of influence. Maybe we just need a shotgun approach.
Thus, I propose we build an epic list of every relevant group at every top university and in the world in general.
This seems like it could be automated. I think I recall Students for Education Reform doing this via mass scraping of emails off websites to create chapters at many universities. I also think I recall THINK (The High Impact Network) did this as well.
It’s worth noting there was also significant domain expertise on the survey team.
we know it included people who said they not heard of the term.
People will say anything on surveys. Many respondents go through clicking randomly. You can write a question that says, “Please answer C,” and >10% of respondents will still click something other than C.
The example projects link is not working. Thanks!
I think they would do this if they had more funding. Not sure if they have enough this year, but maybe next year.
Great comment! Coming from a background of more mainstream altruistic circles, I’ve found appearing confident and avoiding hedging is an important aspect of leadership and inspiring others to join me in my goals.
I think one resolution for this trade-off is to adjust based on the subject matter. When making certain basic claims (e.g. the importance of the far future, giving a public speech about effective altruism), we might want to err on the side of confidence, but when making more tenuous claims (e.g. regarding the effectiveness of Against Malaria Foundation versus the effectiveness of GiveDirectly), we might want to err on the side of hedging.
Another resolution is to try to come off as both confident and hedging. This is easier in person when we can communicate confidence with our tone and body language, but hedge with our language. It seems difficult to pull off online.
I’d be interested in hearing other ways to best handle this tradeoff.
Additionally, we live in a time when we have particularly great influence over the long-term direction of humanity, which is another aspect of this important privilege.
Good to hear this sort of discussion in the effective altruism community. One important privilege/unearned advantage that often goes unrecognized is time. We live in a time of where massive suffering from global poverty and factory farming is coupled with also massive stockpiles of resources, which allows us to be particularly helpful by commandeering these resources for ethical purposes through earning to give, accumulating power and influence, or other means. I greatly admire all who recognize this privilege and take it upon themselves to make use of it.
Relevant, http://effective-altruism.com/ea/xo/givewells_charity_recommendations_require_taking/