“Further, if this pledge serves as an entry point to EA for a student who ends up donating 10% or having a change of career, the ROI is extremely high.”
My personal guess is that the expected value of doing OFTW tabling is dominated by the chance of finding a highly talented student who can take a career in a highly effective cause area. If this is the case, shouldn’t there be a larger focus on selling EA to them as well?
I recognize that, in practice, there is a real and important difference between pro-Trump conservatives and anti-Trump conservatives, and anti-Trump conservatives also may be willing to donate to these political causes. However, I specifically chose not to elaborate on this as part of my piece for two reasons:
Clarity and brevity of writing: The point of my argument is to get my audience to email their family members, and in general, I trust their judgment on who to email. There is no reason for me to outline in depth who might be a good recipient and who might not; that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
An attempt at “apoliticality”: I think it’s important that more people follow through with my proposal, but the EA Forum’s moderation makes explicitly political posts harder to find. By not elaborating on the political aspect of my argument and instead focusing on the action I want taken, I thought I could increase my chances of more people seeing this essay. To communicate my message with as little specificity as possible, I figured that telling people to ask their liberal family members to donate would explain my intention.
I apologize if this made it sound like I thought that conservatives are a wholly evil and homogenous group. I promise that this is not the case.
Thanks for your response! These are thoughtful points.
I’ll need to think more about the marginal impact of being a member of a movement like the vegan one. You raise some good points, and upon reflection, I remember that the vegans in my life have certainly inspired my actions at least a little bit. These are benefits that I am wrong to discount too much.
I think the step in my money pump argument that bothers me the most is choosing to buy a boba over donating to an effective charity, because it doesn’t seem in line with how I make my other decisions. I would really like my preferences to be transitive, as it makes me feel less hypocritical.
2. Veganism doesn’t ask people to do anything extra (like pay more for luxury goods). Instead, it asks people to refrain from doing something they otherwise would have done. This makes it feel different in kind than asking people to donate money, although I’ll admit that this doesn’t seem to make the former any easier unfortunately.
Perhaps the way I think about this is very abstracted away from how real people think about their choices, but I would argue that small charitable donations are less costly to many people than the choice to give up meat. On many restaurant menus, you can find a section that says something along the lines of “add chicken/beef/pork to this for $1.99” or something along those lines. Or maybe a menu will have something like “spaghetti and marinara sauce: $7.99; spaghetti and meatballs: $9.99.” The existence of these items at these prices implies that the value of giving up meat in these circumstances is worth at least $2 to some people (they would rather have the meat than have those $2). So, based on people’s revealed preferences through pricing, I think veganism is probably more costly to people than explicitly spending small amounts of money. Perhaps there is something to be said about the effort of going out of your way to donate, but in my experience, the process is quite painless.
Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
According to Faunalytics’ Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue.
Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.
I would like to know more about the tractability of economic growth research and interventions in low-income nations. It seems like it has the potential to be much more effective than traditional global health interventions, but there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding it.
I’ve done very little research into this, but I would also like to know if economic growth reduces the risk of large-scale anthropogenic violence. Perhaps people living rich and happy lives are much less likely to do things that increase the risk of various global catastrophes occurring. Perhaps the opposite is true.
I see. Thanks for the response!
EA is something like a brand, and you should be somewhat careful about how you communicate about EA in order to not harm the brand (Thinking like this helped me understand why it was not an universally accepted truth that everybody should tell everybody about EA by all means and immediately. I think a lot of new people in EA go through this “tell everyone” phase, because EA can be super exciting.)
Can you elaborate on this a little bit? What should I not be telling people?
Thanks for the lovely comment :) and the feedback/information!