I would reply to an email asking something like this about 75% of the time within 1-2 weeks, and suspect the same is true of most other orgs.
Admittedly the answer might be only a few sentences, and might be ‘sorry I don’t know try asking X.’
But it seems worth trying in the first instance. :)
Any forum post absorbs hours of time and attention from the community, so I support there being a norm of getting questions answered by emailing the group that probably knows the answer, where doing so is possible.
“The page itself doesn’t seem to give any indication of that.”
As I pointed out it says at the top:
“N.B. The results from this quiz were last reviewed in 2016 and the ranking may no longer reflect our current views. Your top results should be read as suggestions for further research, not recommendations. … The quiz doesn’t tell you what you should do, but can give you ideas to research further.”
We’ve been working to get it downgraded from the Google search results, but unfortunately we don’t have full control over that.
I’ll just respond to point 3 as it refers to my opinions directly. I don’t think one should read me saying “Wow okay” as an off-the-cuff response to something someone says as much evidence that I’ve changed my mind, let alone that other people should. At that point I haven’t had a chance to scrutinise the research, or reflect on its importance.
I suspect I said ‘wow okay’ because I was surprised by the claimed volatility of food supply in general, not the incremental effect of climate change.
Taking the figures Dave offers at face value, the increase is from 56% to 80% in the remainder of the century, which isn’t surprisingly large to me. Not having looked at it, I’d also take such modelling with a pinch of salt, and worry that it exaggerates things in order to support advocacy on the topic.
There was a UK government study on this that estimated right now, it might be around 1% chance per year, but with the slow climate change… They were getting more like 80% chance of this century that something like that would happen.
N.B. (1-0.99^81 = 56%)
Hi lexande —
Re point 1, as you say the career capital career guide article now has the disclaimer about how our views have changed at the top. We’re working on a site redesign that will make the career guide significantly less prominent, which will help address the fact that it was written in 2016 and is showing its age. We also have an entirely new summary article on career capital in the works—unfortunately this has taken a lot longer to complete than we would like, contributing to the current unfortunate situation.
Re point 2, the “clarifying talent gaps” post and “why focus on talent gaps” article do offer different views as they were published three years apart. We’ve now added a disclaimer linking to the new one.
The “Which jobs help people the most?” career guide piece, taken as a whole, isn’t more positive about earning to give than the other three options it highlights (research, policy and direct work).
I think your characterisation of the process we suggest in the ‘highest impact careers’ article could give readers the wrong impression. Here’s a broader quote:
When it comes to specific options, right now we often recommend the following five key categories, which should produce at least one good option for almost all graduates:
Research in relevant areas
Government and policy relevant to top problem areas
Work at effective non-profits
Apply an unusual strength to a needed niche
Otherwise, earn to give
You say that that article ‘largely contradicts’ the ‘clarifying talent gaps’ post. I agree there’s a shift in emphasis, as the purpose of the second is to make it clearer, among other things, how many people will find it hard to get into a priority path quickly. But ‘largely contradicts’ is an exaggeration in my opinion.
Re point 3, the replaceability blog post from 2012 you link to as contradicting our current position opens with “This post is out-of-date and no longer reflects our views. Read more.”
Our views will continue to evolve as we learn more, just as they have over the last seven years, though more gradually over time. People should take this into account when following our advice and make shifts more gradually and cautiously than if our recommendations were already perfect and fixed forever.
Updating the site is something we’ve been working on, but going back to review old pages trades off directly with writing up our current views and producing content about our priority paths, something that readers also want us to do.
One can make a case for entirely taking down old posts that no longer reflect our views, but for now I’d prefer to continue adding disclaimers at the top linking to our updated views on a question.
If you find other old pages that no longer reflect our views and lack such disclaimers, it would be great if you could email those pages to me directly so that I can add them.
Hi lexande, Habryka, Milan — As you note, the quiz is no longer current content. It has been moved way down in the site structure, and carries this disclaimer:
“N.B. The results from this quiz were last reviewed in 2016 and the ranking may no longer reflect our current views. Your top results should be read as suggestions for further research, not recommendations. … The quiz doesn’t tell you what you should do, but can give you ideas to research further.”
It makes sense as a different way to conceptualise the government’s budget constraint—limited by inflation (or the maximum sustainable level of seignorage) rather than an ability to borrow per se.
I just think analysing matters that way won’t show that the government can spend a significant amount more than it does today, without higher taxes. There isn’t lots of latent productive potential in the economy right now that could be unleashed, if only there were more spending. If that’s correct, that makes it a much less interesting idea.
Wonderful, thank you! :)
This is an interesting issue.
I remember commentators discussing the question of why we didn’t see i) terrorists shooting people at shopping centres, ii) knifing them, iii) running pedestrians over with cars, etc, all the way back in 2001-2005.
I find it surprising that this obvious idea would occur to me and other random journalists and bloggers, but not to people who are actually trying to engage in terrorism. Regardless, pointing out these methods didn’t have any noticeable effect at the time.
An alternative explanation might be that we saw this spate of terrorism—as far as I know all committed by people who are sympathetic to ISIS—because ISIS had a different ideology that regarded these attacks as more worthwhile. My impression is that ISIS was more motivated by pure bloodthirsty religious zealotry, with less of an emphasis on shifting the foreign policy of the US and countries in the Middle-East.
It wouldn’t surprise me if ISIS—with its indiscriminate enthusiasm for all forms of murder—was pushing these methods aggressively, while Al-Qaida and other predecessor groups would have regarded running over a few pedestrians as an insufficient reason for one of its supporters to die. Perhaps because it’s not striking enough, embarrassingly unimpressive compared to 9/11, not focussed on the right symbolic targets, or for some other practical reason.
The copy-cat explanation is also slightly different from giving people ‘ideas’. ISIS supporters may not have been motivated by a blog post mentioning the method—only by seeing someone else actually pull it off. One might think of these methods not only coming to people’s attention, but also becoming ‘fashionable’ among a particular group of fanatics.
ISIS, with its quasi-country status, may also simply have been unusually effective at attracting supporters in Europe or the US, and convincing them to attempt terrorist attacks. We would naturally see more experimentation of all kinds when 1,000 people are actively working to kill their fellow civilians than when only 100 are.
I agree with your conclusion though—saying things that are ‘obvious’ can absolutely speed up how many people notice them. If only because there are many many possible ‘obvious’ thoughts, but with one stream of consciousness, each of us only has time to stumble on a tiny fraction.
This is great. One thing I’d add is ‘Demonstrate’. (Or dare I say.… Show.)
If you think your skills are better than people can currently measure with confidence, you need to find a way to credibly signal how capable you are, while demanding as little time as possible from senior people in the process.
You can do that in a lower level role, or by pulling off some impressive, scrutable and visible project. Or getting a more classic credential. Maybe other things as well.
One reason so many prominent EAs have been writers in the past is not only that it’s a very broadly useful skill. It’s also a skill which is unusually public and easy for others to evaluate you on. It also gives you a chance to demonstrate your general reasoning ability, which is one of the most widely valued characteristics.
Can you put up a plain text version of this? PDFs aren’t absorbed nicely by other software (e.g. Facebook for sharing, Instapaper for saving to read later, etc.)
Do people who try to give huge amounts run the risk of the transaction being rejected by their bank (as fraudulent), and then not giving in time to be matched?
The value NIL is not of type STRING when binding #:HTML-BODY55
I don’t know if it’s more or less reliable than past research suggesting a lower satiation point, but taking the paper Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% increase in income, from $40k to $105k:
In North America, life satisfaction goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on positive affect (effects on positive affect/happiness are always lower and it’s the measure I think is more reliable, which is why we chose the term happiness in that quote). Negative affect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.
Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.
Whether this counts as “extra income continuing to affect happiness quite a bit” or “extra income not affecting happiness that much” I guess is for readers to judge.
For myself, I would regard those gains to be sufficiently small that I would think it irrational for an egoist to focus much of their attention on earning more money at that point, rather than fostering strong relationships, a sense of purpose, or improving their self-talk.
Personally, I also expect even those correlations are overestimates of the actual effect of higher income on happiness, because we know the reverse is also happening: for various reasons happiness itself causes people’s incomes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both happiness and higher incomes, increasing the correlation without increasing the causation. (Though as I describe in my income and happiness article, if you have a different causal diagram in mind, you could also try arguing that it’s an underestimate.)
Thanks, much appreciated Milan! :)
While that piece on income and happiness seems solid, Milan might not like the vibe of this section in our article No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact. I’ve just tinkered with the wording to make it harder for anyone to misunderstand what we’re claiming:
“How much sacrifice will this involve?
Regardless of which career you choose, you can donate 10% of your income.
Normally when we think of doing good with our careers, we think of paths like becoming a teacher or charity worker, which often earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the private sector, and may not align with your skills or interests. In that sense, giving 10% is less of a sacrifice.
Moreover, as we saw in an earlier article, once you start earning more than about $40,000 a year as an individual, any extra income won’t affect your happiness that much, while acts that help others like giving to charity probably do make you happier.
To take just one example, one study found that in 122 of 136 countries, if respondents answered “yes” to the question “did you donate to charity last month?”, their life satisfaction was higher by an amount also associated with a doubling of income.5 In part, this is probably because happier people give more, but we expect some of the effect runs the other way too.
(Not persuaded? Read more on whether giving 10% is better or worse for your happiness than not donating at all.)”
My own view here is:
i) Like Greg I’ve only ever seen the claim that donating some can be better for one’s own welfare, compared to a baseline of not giving at all—not that the EA approach to giving is actually the optimal for happiness (!).
Giving small amounts regularly to a variety of emotionally appealing causes is more likely to be optimal for one’s selfish welfare, at least if you don’t have an EA mindset which would render that dissatisfying. As you say, ‘give 10% once a year to the most effective charity’ is likely worse than that.
ii) Unfortunately I don’t have time to look into whether your source on income satiation points is better than the older one I used in my article. Personally, I think a focus on a ‘satiation point’ at which income yields literally zero further welfare gain is the wrong way to think about this. I am skeptical that the curve ever entirely flattens out, let alone turns back around. Rather I’d expect logarithmic returns (or perhaps something a bit sharper), up into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of income. Given the difficulty of measuring satisfaction, especially in the upper tail of income, I would trust this more common sense model over empirical measurements claiming otherwise. Above ~$100,000, additional gains in welfare are probably just too small for our survey methods to pick up.
For this reason 80,000 Hours use more modest language like “any extra income won’t affect your happiness that much”, rather than claiming the effect is nothing.
Nonetheless, at high levels of income, further raising one’s income gradually becomes a minor issue, before it becomes an entirely unmeasurable one. At that point, many people will better accomplish their life goals by focussing on improving the world—thereby giving themselves more community, higher purpose, sense of accomplishment, and indeed actual accomplishment—rather than eking out what limited returns remain from higher earnings, and this seems important to point out to people.
iii) So, while I say from an egoist perspective ‘give 10% once a year to the most effective charity’ is probably dominated by a ‘fuzzy-hacking’ approach to charity, that’s not completely obvious.
Giving larger amounts, and giving them to the best charities one can find, often becomes a core part of people’s identity, probably raising their sense of purpose / satisfaction with their work at all times, rather than just via a warm glow immediately after they donate a small sum. I don’t think any of the evidence we’ve looked at can address this issue, except the observational studies, which are hopelessly confounded by other things.
Furthermore, being part of effective altruism or Giving What We Can can provide participants with a community of people who they feel some connection to, which many people otherwise lack, and which seems to have a larger effect on happiness than money. Finally, giving to the best charities allows people to show off to themselves about their uncommon intelligence and sophistication as a giver, which can also contribute to a positive self-conception.
We know that involvement in a religious community is correlated with large gains in welfare, and involvement in any philosophical community like effective altruism seems likely to bring with it some—though not all—of the same benefits.
Of course there are downsides too. In the absence of any actual data, I would remain agnostic, and act as though this were more or less a wash for someone’s happiness. I wouldn’t want someone to start being altruistic expecting it to make their life better, but I’d also want to challenge them if they were convinced it would make their life worse.
From this perspective, articles saying that giving or other acts of altruism are not as detrimental to someone’s welfare as one might naïvely anticipate, seem to me to be advancing a reasonable point of view, even if future research may yet show them to be mistaken.
“EA sometimes advocates that giving effectively will increase your happiness. Here’s an 80,000 Hours article (a) to that effect. … This line of argument confuses the effect of donating at all with the effect of donating effectively.”
This article you link to (by me) does not mention giving large amounts, or the effectiveness of charities, or advocate for giving to charity, so it’s hard to see how it could be confusing that issue. I would appreciate if you could edit the article to clarify that.
It also doesn’t claim that giving necessarily makes you happier than spending the money on yourself, only that in a given case it is possible—which it certainly is—and that giving likely provides more satisfaction than not having the money in the first place:
“Giving some money to charity is unlikely to make you less happy, and may well make you happier. … donating money could easily make you happier than spending it on yourself… there’s good reason to think that giving away money will lower your subjective well-being significantly less than not having it in the first place.”
In fact, the article only tangentially discusses donations at all. Nonetheless, I have added some further text to clarify my view.
It’s worth keeping in mind that some of these rows are 10 or 100 times more important than others.
The most important to me personally is Open Phil’s grantmaking. I hadn’t realised that the value of their non-GiveWell grants had declined from 2017 to 2018.
Fortunately if they keep up the pace they’ve set in 2019 so far, they’ll hit a new record of $250m this year. In my personal opinion that alone will probably account for a large fraction of the flow of impact effective altruism is having right now.