Software engineer working in philanthropy/crypto. Former co-founder / Head of Tech, Effective Altruism Funds
SamDeere
- SamDeere 14 May 2015 18:35 UTC0 points0 ∶ 0
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- SamDeere 14 May 2015 18:36 UTC3 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: Jon_Behar’s comment on: Please support Giving What We Can this Spring
Thanks for the question Jon.
With regard to the pledged amount, this comes from members’ predictions of their future annual salary, which we think are likely to be underestimates. We also use median wage as a stand-in if we’re missing future salary data, which (given our members are in general likely to earn more than median wage) we also think is conservative. Accordingly, it’s likely that the amount donated will be higher in reality.
We address this in more detail in our fundraising prospectus – see Appendix 2 for the full working.
From page 23 of the prospectus:
This methodology obviously relies on the accuracy of members’ predictions about their future income. In general we have found that these predictions seem conservative, as most people underestimate their future earning potential (1). If members do not estimate their future salary, we use the median salary for their country. We think that is a fairly pessimistic assumption, as our median member has an expected earning potential higher than the median wage (2).
And the footnotes to the above:
(1) For example, many members estimate their future income will be the same as their current income, even though they are at the beginning of their careers—in reality, income typically increases throughout a person’s career (2) For example, many members attend prestigious universities and/or are pursuing careers that have an average salary much higher than the median wage
The final $146m figure is arrived at by multiplying members’ estimates of future salary by the number of years they have left in their careers. It therefore doesn’t take into account any of this growth that you’d expect in reality. As such, it wouldn’t make sense to go back and try to model growth based on the $146 million figure (say, $1.7 million in year one, growing to around $5.6 million/year by year 40, rather than a flat $3.7m per year)*.
Instead, you’d need to apply your model (say, fast wage growth in the first 10-20 years of a career, then slower growth until retirement) to the member estimates first to derive the final figure, and use the yearly amounts in your calculation. Given our assumption that member estimates of future salary err on the low side, this means that both the final pledged amount, and the per-year amounts are likely to be higher, and therefore our effectiveness would in fact be higher, notwithstanding that the discounting/attrition rate would affect the final number more aggressively.
* I’ve tried this calculation, assuming a 4% growth rate for years 1-20 and a 2% growth rate in years 21-40. With a year one pledge of $1.7 million, this grows to $5.6 million by year 40, for a total of ~$147 million donated. This drops the effectiveness estimate down to 44-1 - a significant drop, but still excellent return for a donation to Giving What We Can. To reiterate, I think this would be a significant underestimate of peoples’ future incomes.
- SamDeere 14 May 2015 19:30 UTC0 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: SamDeere’s comment on: Please support Giving What We Can this Spring
Also, sorry if this reply doesn’t exactly address your rephrased question – I wrote it in response to your first comment :)
Here’s a copy of the spreadsheet with the calculations added in as above if you want to play around with it.
Thanks again for the question, let me know if there’s anything else you want clarified.
Thanks for this Denise — would you like to discuss this in person? If so, happy to add you to the Skype.
I’ve updated our impact page to include a spreadsheet that you can use to test our Realistic impact calculation. Find it under the “Spreadsheet” header.
Also, preparing this spreadsheet for public use revealed a minor error in our workings (the original spreadsheet was using an out-of-date figure for Proportion of people who say we’ve affected their choice of charity) — this has been corrected, and the impact ratio has accordingly shifted slightly from 103:1 to 104:1.
- SamDeere 9 Dec 2015 13:51 UTC5 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: kierangreig’s comment on: Giving What We Can needs your help this Christmas!
Hi Kieran,
Michelle is in a better position to answer some of these, but I’ll answer the ones I can. I’d also suggest having a look at the comments section of our last fundraising prospectus, which covered some similar ground and which may provide more detail to some of your questions.
1) This is largely covered in the step Accounting for members donating a different amount than they pledged, which uses data from members who have reported their donations in My Giving, and comparing their actual donations with their pledges. The upper bound estimate in the Giving Review (80% of people keeping their pledge) uses the same dataset, but only takes into account a binary ‘pledge met’ vs. ‘pledge not met’. The ratio of pledges to donations (117%) has more bearing our calculations because it captures both people who donate less than they pledge, and people who donate substantially more. Overall, due to people on average donating more than their pledge, the ratio is actually larger than 1:1 (so, even if only 80% of members hit their pledge amount, the number of people donating more than their pledge means the cohort as a whole donates more than it pledges).
The only quibble that you might have here is whether this cohort (people who report donations in My Giving) donates at a substantially different rate than people who don’t report their donations (after we’ve factored out people who have both gone silent, and stopped donating, as per the earlier Accounting for membership attrition step). We have good reason to think this isn’t the case (we know a lot of people personally who choose not to use My Giving, but who keep their pledges), but if you were more pessimistic about this, you could downweight the Ratio of Actual Donations to Pledged Donations in the spreadsheet (currently 1.17).
2) As above, this was calculated using data from members who have reported their donations in My Giving, and taking the ratio between their pledged amount and their reported donations, averaging over all members. See this section of the impact page for more info.
3) To clarify, are you talking about the impact of changes to members’ income over time, or asking whether we’re accounting for potential changes to donation patterns over time which affect the counterfactual ratio?
We’re currently calculating our counterfactuals based on the amounts members say they would have donated without us — we haven’t modelled behaviour changes into the future, and I’m not sure what we’d base such a model on. Whether it’s conservative or optimistic is unclear, but I’d say that this is probably a wash — it’s hard to know whether people’s predictions of what they would have donated are overall optimistic or pessimistic. In our conversations with members, many people who say that they would have donated 10% without us also tell us that we’re a useful commitment device (indicating that perhaps they wouldn’t stick to their 10% without us, and that our counterfactual impact is actually greater than what we’ve accounted for in the model).
If you’re just talking about the effect of members’ income on the counterfactuals (because the calculations assume they will be static, when in reality income is likely to rise) then we think the calculation is fairly conservative. See the Donations Pledged By Members section of the impact page:
This methodology relies on the accuracy of members’ predictions about their future income. In general we have found that these predictions seem conservative, as most people underestimate their future earning potential[7] . If members do not estimate their future salary, we use the median salary for their country. We think that is a fairly pessimistic assumption, as our median member has an expected earning potential higher than the median wage[8] .
Footnotes 7 and 8 expand on this:
For example, many members estimate their future income will be the same as their current income, even though they are at the beginning of their careers—in reality, income typically increases throughout a person’s career
For example, many members attend prestigious universities and/or are pursuing careers that have an average salary much higher than the median wage
See also this comment made on the last prospectus for some discussion of the effect of modelling changing income over time. Using the same model with the updated figures yields a ratio of between 69:1 (using a fairly arbitrary starting pledged amount of $4,200,000 which produces donations over members’ careers equivalent to the $344 million pledged amount, but accounts for income growth) and 157:1 (assuming that the current pledges correspond to current income levels, and that all members are at the beginning of their careers). You can play with this assumption by editing the figure in cell C2 on the ‘Calculations’ sheet of this spreadsheet, and the income growth rates at the bottom of the column.
5) We’ve taken into account an additional year (2014), where we had strong growth, but where our costs were not significantly higher. Our membership more than doubled (386 in 2009-13 vs 792 in 2009-14) but our costs only went up by around 40% (£238k in 2009-13 vs £332k in 2009-14). The assumptions have remained essentially the same, so the difference in those ratios accounts for most of the difference (with a less significant amount being due to small changes in membership attrition and counterfactual pledge ratios).
As we note in the caveats, we do expect this amount to go down in future as our staff costs increase, and we don’t want people to fixate on it as a predictor of our impact. We see it more as a sanity check of whether we’re a good bet, vs giving money to other effective causes.
The degree to which this will change significantly in future really depends on how strong our member growth vs. costs growth is. If the cost of creating a new member hits diminishing marginal returns soon (not at all unlikely), then it’s likely to drop back fairly quickly. We don’t see this as particularly troubling — so long as our absolute number of members keeps increasing and the ratio is positive, then we’re still a good bet.
We doubled staff numbers over 2015 (3 > 6) and we’re hiring again now (6 > 8 or 9, depending on fundraising), so it’s likely that this will push it back down. We think that maximising future membership growth will be contingent on broadening the skillset of our team (and just having more hands on deck to do outreach work would be a huge help!). Expanding the team, strengthening our organisation, and increasing our growth rate seems very important right now (and much more important than maintaining this ratio at the current level). My guess is that it will settle somewhere between 20:1 and 60:1 — not quite as impressive as 104:1, but still suggestive that we’re making a big difference!
(This difference is similar to the reason that we don’t think that using “overhead” is a good measure of a charity’s effectiveness. In effect, this is our overheads increasing, but so long as this leads to greater (counterfactual) overall member growth and donations to top charities, then we should be happy for the ratio to drop.)
6) Hauke, our Director of Research answers this question here. The short version:
Supplement GiveWell research and find new charities within our comparative area of advantage (global poverty reduction)
Independently check GiveWell recommendations and provide resilience to the effective charity evaluation system
Provide supervision for students/early career researchers who want to focus on effectiveness
Ensure in-house credibility when talking about top charities and fact-checking all of our public-facing material
Hope that helps!
- SamDeere 11 May 2016 11:10 UTC2 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: AndyMorgan’s comment on: Accomplishments Open Thread—May 2016
Hey Andy, I’m currently working on something very similar as an upgrade to Giving What We Can’s My Giving dashboard. Did you want to shoot me an email at sam.deere@givingwhatwecan.org to discuss — either as an opportunity to collaborate or to work out if there’s significant overlap?
Sam
- SamDeere 28 Feb 2017 7:39 UTC4 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA Funds Beta Launch
Thanks for this
There was an issue with refreshing security tokens. I’ve just pushed a fix for this — if you refresh (or failing that, a hard refresh—e.g. Cmd+Shift+R) then the issue should resolve itself. I suspect that it works in incognito because you don’t have any cookies set. If you’re still having issues, try clearing cookies for the page*.
If that doesn’t fix it, it’d be amazing if you could send the log from your Chrome console to tech[at]effectivealtruism[dot]org (open by pressing ‘Cmd+Shift+J’, save by right-clicking on the console background and selecting ’Save as...).
*Help on this if anyone needs it: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
- SamDeere 3 Jul 2017 18:50 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: RandomEA’s comment on: Changes to the EA Forum
Yep, this is already in place! Try going to www.effective-altruism.org
- SamDeere 4 Jul 2017 3:26 UTC3 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Changes to the EA Forum
Short-medium term: some minor UI changes, to bring branding more into line with the rest of effectivealtruism.org
Longer term ideas (caveat — these are just at the thought bubble stage at the moment and it’s not clear whether they’d be valuable changes):
I think there’s appetite for a discussion space that’s both content aggregation as well as original content. This might take the form of getting a more active subreddit (for example) happening, but plausibly this could be something specifically built-for-purpose that either integrates with or complements the existing forum.
We’ve thought about integrating logins between the webapp on EffectiveAltruism.org (what is currently just EA Funds) and the forum to avoid the need to manage multiple accounts when doing various EA things online
We’ve also thought a bit about integrating commenting systems so that discussion that happens on various EA blogs is mirrored on the forum (to avoid splitting discussions when cross-posting).
If there are things that you think would be useful (especially if you’ve been able to give this more thought than I have) that’d be great to know, with the caveat that we’re pretty restricted by developer time on this, and the priority is ensuring ongoing maintenance of the existing infrastructure, rather than building out new features.
[eta spaces between dot points]
- SamDeere 14 Jul 2017 21:00 UTC3 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: Josh Jacobson’s comment on: Changes to the EA Forum
Hey Josh, thanks for the comment and sorry for the wait on a response.
The TL;DR is that I think that the branding changes provide a small amount of upside in terms of consistency, and have low risk of downside, because I don’t expect that they’ll significantly change discoverability, forum composition, or that they’ll counterfactually change people’s impressions of the different parts of the EA online space.
Our primary motivation is to reduce the proliferation of very similar domain names that all correspond to different things (e.g. effective-altruism.com is the Forum, previously effectivealtruism.com was the Doing Good Better site etc). From our perspective it seems useful to consolidate community assets under the same domain, both from the perspective of users seeing them as part of a broadly unified whole, and in the longer term, from a technical perspective (e.g. easier to share logins between different sites on the same domain). I agree that it’s probably good to keep some branding differentiation between the Forum and the front page of EffectiveAltruism.org, however I think it’s disingenuous for us to pretend that there’s no overlap.
Perhaps a good analogy is YCombinator/Hacker News — the front page presents a more welcoming, informative front, whereas Hacker News has a pretty intense community and may not always be welcoming to newcomers. However, I think people are generally pretty good at understanding that the organization and the user-generated content are different things, while understanding them to be part of the same broad sphere.
I wholeheartedly agree that the Forum is a more advanced part of the community, and it’s certainly not our intention to try to dilute the quality of conversation or flood it with newcomers who may lack the context to meaningfully contribute to some of the more in-depth discussions or may find the tone unwelcoming. However, this seems like an issue of discoverability. The Forum is already pretty discoverable (fourth result for ‘effective altruism’ on Google), so if someone totally new is doing a wide survey of what the EA online space is like, they’ll find it (and it already has ‘Effective Altruism’ in the name...). However, we’re not planning on adding additional links to it from the www domain, or changing how we market it in other channels — I don’t expect this change to significantly change the composition of people posting on the forum, nor do I expect that it significantly changes how people will view the broad idea of ‘effective altruism’ (especially not relative to the status quo).
Given that there’s already a strong association between EA and the EA Forum, I don’t think the exact domain matters that much. If we didn’t want there to be any association, we should probably take the words ‘effective altruism’ out of the title and have a completely different domain. This isn’t something we’re currently considering.
I’d prefer to use a subdomain rather than a nested route because it’s a significantly simpler DNS/server setup. I think the SEO point is a bit counter to the other points. I agree that it will have some SEO implications, but if the issue is discoverability, then actually making the Forum less discoverable in a random search seems to work more to your purposes (as above, currently the Forum is the fourth result on Google). In terms of implementation, we’re planning to rewrite the old domain to the new one (using 301 redirects and keeping the old domain active to prevent broken links). I’d also planned to advise Google of the domain change using Search Console. I’d be very happy to hear from you if there are additional steps that you think are important here.
- SamDeere 16 Dec 2017 7:43 UTC3 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: persis’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
It’s not clear to me how a donor lottery would capture all the considerations. Can you elaborate?
In this case, you haven’t found an advisor who you trust to take into account all the things you consider to be relevant. So, instead of relying on a third-party advisor, you do the research yourself. As research is costly for any given individual to undertake, it may not make sense for you to do this with a smaller donations, but with the larger pot, if you win, you’ve got more incentive to undertake whatever research you feel is necessary (i.e. that ‘captures the relevant considerations’).
Does this presume that (some) donors already know where they prefer to donate, rather than offsetting time spent on additional research with a larger donation pool?
It’s just meant to illustrate that the value of the amount that you would be able to grant to a preferred organization is the same in expectation whether you participate in the lottery or donate directly. The lottery then may generate additional upside, potentially increasing the effectiveness of your donation if you do more research, and also giving you access to different funding opportunities (providing seed funding for an organization, donating to organizations that have a minimum donation threshold etc)
Is there an expectation (or requirement) that the winning donor provides a write-up of their research and reasoning for their selected charity?
[updated — see more in the discussion below]
We think that it’s in the spirit of the lottery that someone who does useful research that would be of interest to other donors should publish it (or give permission for CEA to publish their grant recommendation). Also, if they convince others to donate then they’ll be causing additional grants to go to their preferred organization(s). We’ll strongly encourage winners to do so, however, in the interests of keeping the barriers to entry low, we haven’t made it a hard requirement.
- SamDeere 16 Dec 2017 7:46 UTC2 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: brunoparga’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
Yes, we can take donations in cryptocurrency (it’s worth noting that donating appreciated assets can have tax advantages over converting and donating in fiat). We’re in the process of figuring out a solution that allows you to do this directly via the website, but for now if you want to donate in crypto please email lottery[at]effectivealtruism[dot]org and we can discuss
- SamDeere 17 Dec 2017 8:57 UTC2 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
I’m certainly happy with that. I think it’s important to point out the positive externalities to the community/other donors if people make interesting research findings, especially if there’s a relatively high likelihood that people will be investing time and energy into the research. When responding I had in mind that this could be a very minimalistic thing (e.g. the name of the recipient and possibly a couple of sentences explaining the thinking behind the decision), but on reflection I think the words ‘write-up of their research and reasoning’ in the OP imply something much more substantial. In either case, I agree that it’d be bad for this to feel like a cost that stopped people entering, so I’m endorsing your phrasing, and I’ll edit my previous message to point this out.
- SamDeere 17 Dec 2017 9:01 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0
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- SamDeere 17 Dec 2017 9:03 UTC2 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
Agreed — I’ll get this updated early next week
- SamDeere 17 Dec 2017 23:42 UTC5 points0 ∶ 0in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
In practice, CEA technically gets to make the final donation decision. But I can’t see them violating a donor’s choice.
To emphasise this, as CEA is running this lottery for the benefit of the community, it’s important for the community to have confidence that CEA will follow their recommendations (otherwise people might be reticent to participate). So, to be clear, while CEA makes the final call on the grant, unless there’s a good reason not to (see the ‘Caveats and Limitations’ section on the EA.org Lotteries page) we’ll do our best to follow a donor’s recommendation, even if it’s to a recipient that wouldn’t normally be thought of as a strictly EA.
What happens if a non-EA wins?
It’s worth pointing out that one’s motivation to enter the lottery should be to win the lottery, not to put money into a pot that you in fact hope will be won and allocated by someone else better-qualified to do the research than you are. If there are people entering the lottery who you think will make better decisions than you (even in the event that you won), then you should either donate on their behalf (i.e. agree with them in advance that they can research and make the recommendation if you win), or wait for the lottery draw, and then follow their recommendation if they win.
(not implying that this necessarily is your motivation, just that “I’ll donate hoping for someone else to win” is a meme that I’ve noticed comes up a lot when talking about the lottery and I wanted to address it)
- SamDeere 18 Dec 2017 21:42 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: Jess_Riedel’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
An alternative model for variable pot sizes is to have a much larger guarantor (or a pool of guarantors), and then run rolling lotteries. Rather than playing against the pool, you’re just playing against the guarantor, and you could set the pot size you wanted to draw up to (e.g. your $1000 donation could give you a 10% shot at a $10k pot, or a 1% shot at a $100k pot). The pot size should probably be capped (say, at $150k), both for the reasons Paul/Carl outlined re diminishing returns, and to avoid pathological cases (e.g. a donor taking a $100 bet on a billion dollars etc). Because you don’t have to coordinate with other donors, the lottery is always open, and you could draw the lottery as soon as your payment cleared. Rather than getting the guarantor to allocate a losing donation, you could also ‘reinvest’ the donations into the overall lottery pool, so eventually the system is self-sustaining and doesn’t require a third-party guarantor. [update: this model may not be legally possible, so possibly such a scheme would require an ongoing guarantor]
This is more administratively complex (if only because we can’t batch the manual parts of the process to defined times), but there’s a more automated version of this which could be cool to run. At this stage I want validate the process of running the simpler version, and then if it’s something there’s demand for (and we have enough guarantor funds to make it feasible) we can look into running the rolling version sometime next year.
- SamDeere 21 Dec 2017 22:23 UTC1 point0 ∶ 0in reply to: brunoparga’s comment on: Announcing the 2017 donor lottery
An update on this: Cryptocurrency donations are now live on the site, so you can now enter the lottery (or make a regular donation to EA Funds) using BTC, ETH and LTC
Hi Ben—good pickup. I’ve uploaded the latest version of the prospectus with the amended numbers here