The proposal passed!! Everyone who’s interested should add themselves as a participant on the official wikiproject! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Effective_Altruism
ruthgrace
I think that the greatest value that this post serves is in giving young people some pause when they are relying on CEA-governed resources to try to determine how to live their life. Thank you.
My only disagreements with this post is that
Suspend our support for charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people until we can systematically review the effect of the above moral considerations on the morality of the charities’ interventions.
Would involve involuntary abortion reduction.
I also agree with Denise that if you cared about reducing voluntary abortion or just unwanted pregnancies generally, long acting contraceptives seem the most effective way to do that. But it seems that you’re not sure if unwanted pregnancies are a bad thing.
Finally I know there’s a greater demand for baby adoption than supply in high income countries but I would guess that this isn’t true in low income countries.
I would like to see much more discussion on how the burden of having kids could be spread better over more people (not just mothers but fathers, grandparents, professional caregivers) and also society generally. As it stands, an unwanted pregnancy, and especially a decision to keep the baby, places outsized burden on the mother, and I think that’s part of why this is such a difficult issue. As examples,
Matt Yglesias’ book one billion Americans has lots of ideas on how everything from housing supply to public transportation could be made better to support more people.
I also really like this piece from 99% invisible about how Japan’s city infrastructure is made safe enough that toddlers can run errands by themselves. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
this piece explaining why universal child payments is better than universal childcare is also pretty good. https://criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4
I love GatherTown. It’s awesome to have an effective altruism space to hang out and bump into people and be inspired by chance. As if we were neighbors in real life. Agree that it’s a perfect place to host intro events.
I’m super happy I finally published something substantial! I had gotten a grant to write a paper on philanthropy-driven movement building (how rich people can change public opinion and policy strategically with their money) in February. I’m still working on that paper but I got side tracked in wanting to write a better critique of open philanthropy’s criminal justice reform efforts. It took SO much longer than I thought it would, but I think it turned out well. It’s my first serious research-paper-like publication on this forum. Would love to hear your feedback if you get a chance to read it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7ajePuRKiCo7fA92B/evaluating-large-scale-movement-building-a-better-way-to
Love this post!
In software engineering culture, “forced vacation” is not done so much for the good of the person taking it, but the good of the team to make sure that they are set up to reliably cover the person taking the vacation as practice in case anything happens to that person (they might leave or fall ill). It’s probably easier for software engineers to substitute for each other than for you to figure out all the different people that would need to cover different aspects of your leadership role though.
It’s very cool to hear your and Jeff’s inner thoughts and motivations on how much to give, and how you converge on something that works for you both. Thanks for sharing.
Also I got so much joy from the surprise super adorable baby in the middle of your post!! Congrats!
Hi Michelle, really appreciate you writing this out. I’m also a parent of a 3 year old (and his little brother who’s 1). I hope you’ll indulge me a few questions. Would you be able to say a little more about
Your outside of daycare support, like how much friends or family you have nearby to help with childcare? Or other arrangements?
How you and your partner ended up arranging your parental leave? How long did you have? Did you stagger your leaves? And did you go back to work full time right away at the the end of leave or did you work part time for a while?
If you think your assessment that having children didn’t make any difference to the impact you have over your life time would have changed if you had multiple kids?
As someone who does software and is interning at an established non profit in San Francisco (just doing research, not software engineering), I agree with your points, and I want to get a little bit deeper into the reasons why.
First, I think a lot of the really impactful technical is like, somebody’s working on a report and they need to make a pie chart, and they’re not that good with Google sheets. And the technical volunteer is really good at Google sheets and can finish the task in 10 minutes. But to get to the point where the technical volunteer was connected to this task, they’ve had to attend months of weekly meetings where there weren’t any technical tasks available. And that time is good time spent understanding the context of the work that the organization does, but won’t feel worth it if the technical volunteer’s goal for their involvement is to make technical contributions.
Also, I think it’s really difficult for non-technical people generally to describe the problem they want a technical person to solve, in a way that makes sense. Like, it’s not going to be the way it is at your typical tech job where your manager gives you the specs of the project and you just make it happen the way they asked. People are going to ask you for stuff that isn’t possible or is scoped differently from what they need, and to prevent making something that they aren’t actually going to be able to use, it’s likely that you will spend more time talking to people to learn about their work and how you can best help them than actually coding. And that skill of figuring out how to best help somebody by talking to them is a skill that I think most software engineers don’t actually have, unless they are also entrepreneurs who do that kind of thing regularly.
My recommendation for people who are good at computer stuff generally (doesn’t have to be as deep as software engineering, but if you are handy with WordPress, and Google sheets, you can be really useful already) who want to help out is to make an effort to be part of the community that is working on a problem that you care about. That way, you will get the context of what exactly people are trying to do, and understand the nature of the work, and when it becomes clear that a technical solution would be really helpful, people trust you to do it in a way that will be helpful, and there’s no friction with trying to onboard you because you are already there.
I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it’s possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she’s had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.
There’s a few people in the comments here openly supporting involuntary abortion reduction. I’m curious how far that kind of philosophy goes? If this is you, do you also support involuntary meat consumption reduction in low income countries? How about involuntary appropriation of people’s crypto investments for EA grants...?
I could get on board with “Climate change is not neglected, but humanity is still terrible at dealing with it with pretty severe consequences, so it makes sense for EAs who are interested or have a comparative advantage to work on it”. I’m not sure if I understand the focus on Canadian policy and voters, either. I think it’s because there’s a lot of pieces of the puzzle between voters caring about climate change (and I think most of them do!) and humans being good at reversing climate change. For example, what does good policy look like? Does it exist already or does it need to be made? How can a voter tell what is good? And then zooming out from that: Are the proper industry supports in place to fully reap the benefits of good policy? Are the proper technological research, R&D, entrepreneurial energy, removal of red tape for building things, and investment dollars there to flesh out the industry?
Yes that’s exactly it! Even if a lot of people think that AI is the most important problem to work on, I would expect only a small minority to have a comparative advantage. I worry that students are setting themselves up for burnout and failure by feeling obligated to work on what’s been billed as some as the most pressing/impactful cause area, and I worry that it’s getting in the way of people exploring with different roles and figuring out and building out their actual comparative advantage
I’m pretty sure that in the way that increasing sentence lengths isn’t effective for deterring crime, reducing access to abortion isn’t effective for reducing STD transmission. And I’m pretty sure less family planning is related to more poverty, not less.
I also want to note that there are wide-reaching societal effects of abortion access; this paper makes the case that the legalization of Roe V Wade in the 70s accounted for a 10% decrease in crime in the 90s (a quarter of the total crime decrease that happened in the 90s) https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf
THIS. IS. LIFE. CHANGING. thank you thank you thank you
Right! And I think we need some clarification of terms. We can’t be calling people who are passionate about, say, effective solutions for homelessness in New York City, “non effective altruists”. That’s divisive and also kinda rude.
I think similar to “chocolate milk” and “milk chocolate”, we should have effective altruists, and altruistic rationalists. The second word is the main thing. Anyone who is trying to do any kind of good effectively should be able to call themselves an effective altruist. People who are passionate about doing the most good possible without any bias towards specific people or causes can be called altruistic rationalists. And of course, anyone can do both types of activities, without feeling any shame or guilt.
I totally agree, and I think this is super exciting!! It looks like someone has already provide really great comprehensive feedback on improvements to the main Effective Altruism article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Effective_altruism/GA1
I started working on these. I could use some community input on the definition of Effective Altruism—see my post on the Talk page, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Effective_altruism#Definition_of_Effective_Altruism
I think generally any kind of criticism of people trying to do good without first having built a relationship on common ground leads to “soldier mindset” where people become defensive about their actions. People who donate money or time by default expect to be thanked and feel good about it, in proportion to the amount of money or time that they donated. I suspect it’s always more productive to build a relationship with someone and find out what motivates them to give, and share relevant organizations or articles in line with their motivation, as opposed to approaching with foremost intention to convince people to change. And EAs should definitely have a scout mindset about this—There’s lots of reasons people might not think primarily of effectiveness when donating, and they’re not things we should change about people, but things we can build on. E.g. maybe some people donate to what’s convenient, or what they read about from a specific publisher that they trust, or this organization did a presentation at their church. That’s good to know.
I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.