I think the biggest bias here is that most donors would like to be able to point to their clear successes and the people they helped. For most folks, this leans them against x-risk because a) you’ll very likely fail to lower x-risk b) even if you succeed, you usually won’t be able to demonstrate it.
On the other hand, it’s also harder to tell if you’ve failed.
Like Ben, I doubt this kind of analysis is going to change people’s minds much one way or the other.
Yes, thanks for this post Tom! As I don’t have dependents, I’m planning to leave my life insurance to charity.
I am already a member, but I am in favour of changing the pledge because I see ‘cause neutrality’ as one of the most valuable and distinctive components of effective altruism.
I agree that EA shouldn’t be defined by any particular conclusions about how to do the most good. But in addition to the question, there is also a methodology that goes along with it:
Impartiality or cosmopolitanism—that is to say, that everyone is (close to) equally important, and non-humans deserve some weight as well
A willingness to consider and compare all options in a open-minded way
Epistemic humility—we shouldn’t assume our conclusions are better than others, and so it is important to...
Use evidence and reason in an attempt to be persuasive to others.
Then we should also be willing to act on the above rather than ignore it. These certainly aren’t new ideas, but rather the application of approaches from the enlightenment, natural sciences and social science (at least when done well) to altruistic endeavours.
I agree that ‘effective altruist’ is an awkward term that is unintentionally self-aggrandising, but I use it for lack of a better alternative. ‘Aspiring effective altruists’, or ‘members of the effective altruist community’, might be better.
I had a much shorter facebook status on this a while back:
“Donating a live kidney extends an average of three developed-country lives by, I will guess, an average of 30 healthy years. It will require you to take two weeks off work and accept a 1/1000 chance of death in the operation. The long-term health impacts are negligible.
For my own case, if I were earning to give, I would earn something like $2,000 from an additional week of work. I could expect to earn something like $8m from the rest of my career, 1/1000th of which is $8,000. So I’m giving up something like $12,000 in expected earnings for 90 years of healthy adult life. Assuming that the Against Malaria Foundation can save infants in the developing world for $2,500, I would have to regard a year of healthy life in the developed world as roughly 2.5x more valuable for the kidney donation to be better than just continuing to work and giving the money to AMF.
If I would dislike the two-week kidney donation process more than doing my job and not spending any of the income on myself, then that number will rise somewhat.
I think it’s plausible to regard a year in Britain as 3x more enjoyable than a life of poverty in e.g. rural India, though I am far from sure.”
https://www.facebook.com/robert.wiblin/posts/600595706275
The resulting comments were interesting too.
As someone who was heavily involved in GWWC over that period, I think the explanation that we got much better at converting staff hours into new members is a large part of the explanation for membership growth suddenly rising much faster from mid-2013.
The package of things we were working on before that wasn’t so effective at getting people all the way to joining.
The other contributing factor is probably a growing general interest in effective altruism (for which GWWC can claim some but certainly not all of the credit).
This is awesome Tom, keep up the good work!
I find receiving downvotes pretty demoralising, in particular when they are given for disagreeing with the conclusion, rather than thinking something is poorly reasoned.
I’ve been thinking of doing a ‘live below the line’ to raise money for MIRI/CFAR, and asking someone at MIRI/CFAR to do the same for CEA in return. The motivation is mostly to have a bit of fun. Does anyone think this is a good or bad idea?
Hey jayd, basically we try to have people working on broad outreach (events, social media, media coverage, chapters) and then someone else working on taking the emails and names we get, and contacting people individually to ask them to become members. This often involves lengthy email exchanges to discuss their reservations. We have found persistence works well, and doesn’t bother almost anyone, as people are more often procrastinating than refusing.
Basically, before mid-2013 we were not systematically doing this personal follow-up, so it is no surprise we weren’t getting many people to sign on the dotted line.
Has anyone actually tried this and gotten blow-back? I worry that this expected reaction might be mostly in our heads.
“”you’re not a real person.”″
Could you expand on this at all? It sounds quite amusing. :)
Great point Ben!
I think the stronger case for being veg*n is that one of our goals is to make other people care more about all other beings. Starting conversations about how farm animals shouldn’t be treated cruelly is one of the most frequent opportunities to broach that issue, both with aspiring effective altruists, and the general public.
The welfare of animals is one of the cases where mainstream morality is most misguided. Being veg*n allows you to discuss important moral issues almost every time you eat with other people. I find this often leads onto other issues as well, like effective charity. If you are good at having these conversations, it could be well worth the inconvenience.
I don’t think of it that way, because usually there are multiple important considerations on both sides of a disagreement.
If someone raised a legitimate reason for their point of view, but I disagreed with their conclusion all things considered, I would not down-vote unless I thought the reason they were focussed on in their comment didn’t make sense. That’s rarely the case here; disagreements are most often about different weight given to different considerations.
You might be interested in this spreadsheet we designed to help estimate regression to the mean:
Owen can explain better than me how it works.
Hey Owen, it’s more a good natural starting point for conversations about how to improve the world that come up because you’re eating. I don’t think it takes time away from talking about effective charity—rather it means you’re less likely to talk about neither.
In practice all of these figures seriously underestimate the full impact because they don’t consider flow-through effects such as:
the people whose lives are saved will have more children themselves, perhaps resulting in hundreds of extra lives over the very long term (I know of people who have 100+ great grandchildren)
people for centuries or millennia into the future will be richer because the country developed economically sooner as a result of having healthier, better educated, and more productive people now (this is a version of ‘astronomical waste’).
If the direct impact is lower, the flow-through effects will also be lower, but ‘$3,000 per life saved’ is still very misleading as an indication of the absolute cost-effectiveness.