CEO & Founder of effektiv-spenden.org
Sebastian Schwiecker
Karma: 1,165
If I get it right you target not only EAs but also “the average donor”. In this case have you ever thought that it might be confusing to offer so many charities and that this could lead to a paradox of choice kind of situation? Eg several charities working on deworming (an intervention “the average donors” probably has never heard of before).
Why do you recommend Oxfam but not The End Fund (recommended by GiveWell)?
Obviously anecdotal evidence but I don’t know anyone who responds faster to email than you do (especially for people with similar responsibilities). Is this a habit that you consciously cultivate? If so, why?
What kind of activities would you like your local group to offer and what is stopping you from implementing these changes (within or even outside of the local group)? This is meant to be an honest question. Maybe other people could help you (from CEA, from other groups, people here in the forum… ).
Thanks for your questions/comments.
With regards to effektiveraltruismus.de we plan to ran it as an independent project with some community input and at least initially oversight from the EAF. The outreach strategies will be different and overall much less active for effektiveraltruismus.de.
With regards to the Media our biggest successes have been to be portrayed in German television several times (see eg https://www.ardmediathek.de/swr/video/Y3JpZDovL3N3ci5kZS9hZXgvbzExODMxMDc or https://www.zdf.de/verbraucher/volle-kanne/richtig-spenden-112.html ). Thischelped to draw a lot of donors. What made it easier for us than for eg the EAF was that we could focus in effective giving and also only highlighted cause areas people are already familiar with (especially development aid and climate change). I think that is much easier than eg talking about X- or even S-Risks or some of the other more abstract aspects of EA. Most talks with journalists were about things like the overhead ratio, potential difference in cost-effectiveness, charity watchdogs vs. charity evaluators or the 2019 winners of the Nobel price in economics (who happen to be the founders the Deworm the World Initiative). The only time I got kind of challenged was when I was asked if I would rather save an expensive painting than a child from a burning building (in order to sell the painting and donate the money). My answer didn’t even survive the final cut though.
Yes, but concerning tax deductibility Austria seems to be one of the hardest countries to get into. You actually have to get on a small list of tax exempt Organizations provided by the Austrian financial authorities which might take years. Therefore it currently is not a priority for us but we might get back to it one day.
Yeah, you are right that although we didn’t emphasize it some journalists asked about EA and made it part of their coverage. I don’t think that this has been negative but one challenge might be not to give the wrong impression that EA is only about donating money (we are at least aware of it).
Thanks for the nice words.
I also think there could me more Unconferences in the future. Every month might be a bit much, but every quarter or every 6 month might work. Currently we (or at least I) have no plans to organize another event but that might change soon. In case you are interested, please feel free to start planning.
One of my most confusing experiences with EA in the last couple of month has been this poll https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/3127490440640625/ where you and your colleauge Magnus stated that one day of extreme suffering (drowning in lava) could not be outweighed by even an (almost) infinite number of days experience extreme happiness (which was the answer with the most upvotes). Some stated in the comments that even a chance of “1 in a gogol probability of 1 minute in lava” could never be outweighed by an (almost) infinite number of days experiencing extreme happiness.
To be honest these sound like extremely strange and unituitive views to me and made me wonder if EAs are different compared to the general population in ways I haven’t much thought about (eg less happy in general). So I have several questions:
1. Do you know about any good articles etc. that make the case for such views?
2. Do you think such or similar views are necessary to prioritize S-Risks?
3. Do you think most people would/should vote in such a way if they had enough time to consider the arguments?
4 For me it seems like people constantly trade happiness for suffering (taking drugs expecting a hangover, eating unhealthy stuff expecting health problems or even just feeling full, finishing that show on Netflix instead of going to sleep… ). Those are reasons for me to believe that most people might not want to compensate suffering through happiness 1:1 , but are also far from expecting 1:10^17 returns or even stating there is no return which potentially could compensate any kind of suffering.Disclaimer: I haven’t spent much time researching S-Risks, so if I got it all wrong (including the poll), just let me know.
Thanks for the reply. With regard to drugs I think it depends on the situation. Many people drink alcohol even if they are in a good mood already to get even more excited (while being fully aware that they might experience at least some kind of suffering the next day and possibly long term). In this case I think one couldn’t say they do it to avoid suffering (unless you declare everything below the best possible experience suffering). There are obviously other cases were people just want to stop thinking about their problems, stop feeling a physical pain etc.
Thanks a lot for the reply and all the links.
Thanks a lot for the reply and the links.
Hi Brian!
There is a breakdown for all individual organizations:
Against Malaria Foundation: 111,147.50 Euro
Deworm the World: 149,701.57 Euro
GiveDirectly: 251,463.61 Euro
Malaria Consortium: 116,394.15 Euro
Clean Air Task Force: 83,174.71 Euro
Coalition for Rainforest Nations: 142,242.56 Euro
ITIF: 62,650.22 Euro
Good Food Institute: 66,687.53 Euro
The Humane League: 43,532.53 Euro
(See https://www.effektiv-spenden.org/fundraiser-2020/#1)
It’s important though that we only offered GiveWell recommended charities for the first 7 month and that most of the press we got also focused on them (and to a lesser degree on climate change). The numbers have been more evenly distributed lately.
I’m also not sure if Germany is leading on climate issues but the work of John Halstead’s and Johannes Ackva (and also Hauke Hillebrandt through Let’s Fund) have been very valuable to the effective giving efforts through effektiv-spenden.org.
Hi Chi!
Thanks for your comments. We’ll most likely start to “gender” once we relaunch the website somewhen in the next couple of quarters. The reason why I’m reluctant to do this is because I’m quite certain that this will decrease the mass appeal of the website. So when we do it we’ll do it with the expectation of decreasing the amount of donations. Reasons are:
- Currently our site is kind of gender neutral already since we don’t just use the male version but male and female versions alternate (see https://blog.zeit.de/glashaus/2018/02/07/gendern-schreibweise-geschlecht-maenner-frauen-ansprache/ for a longer explanation). There are at least some people who care about a gender neutral language who prefer this approach (it was also the new and progressive way to do it when I was at the university).
- The vast majority of Germans don’t use a gender neutral language themselves and I would assume that most don’t want it to be used in general. I don’t have a data source for the latter but the fact that pretty much all newspaper don’t use gender neutral language different to ours seems to be a clear indicator for that. This obviously doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t do it, just that it’s not mainstream yet. Obviously it’s very different with different demographics. Eg when I think of people I’m close with I know several who are kind of actively annoyed with gender neutral language but they are all 40+. It’s not because they are opposed to the concept but because they are used to a different language and it make the language less appealing for them. I tend to agree (I’m also 40+). For me it’s the same as with vegan food. It’s the right thing to do but it’s just not as appealing as the stuff I’m used to. Talking to EAs who attended university during the last ten years I’m sure it will be quite the opposite.
Our own fundraiser was quite successful so we should be covered to pursue our original plans without limitations till at least the beginning of 2021. But since the donation volume in 2020 turned out to be much bigger than expected (at least a 6x increase compared to 2019 according to preliminary numbers) we are in the process of updating our plans and have some ideas how to use additional capital in a promising way (eg internationalization). So I’m happy to talk if you know someone… ;-)
Very rough monthly cost all in (rent, insurance, electricity, heating, cleaning, internet… ) is around 3.500€. In addition we had some upfront costs (mostly furniture) of around 11,000€. We currently also tend to buy a lot of new stuff which adds up to a couple of hundreds of Euros every month (e.g. we got a Microwave today, last week we bought an air purifier… ). Next week we will get some phone booths which will luckily be paid for through a grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund though (around 14,000€ for 4).
So currently we are still subsidizing the office through our main project (or we just pay a relatively high rent ourselves) but we are getting closer for it to be financial self sufficient (probably not if I would honestly calculate the staff time we invested though). Still feels like a really good investment, especially since we started hosting (small) events as well (e.g. EA Berlin Meetup, EA Consulting Network Meetup, AI Lecture… ).
Make sure to visit us if you are ever in Berlin.
We recently started one in Berlin (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnrHvJALEKH4Ykzyt/introducing-teamwork-an-ea-coworking-space-in-berlin). tl:dr I’m very happy with the decision. Happy to chat about details.
Having set up the TEAMWORK EA-Coworking-Space in Berlin I’m very sympathetic to the EA Coworking Spaces at Scale idea (almost applied with something similar).
A couple of question and thoughts on this topic though:
1. It says “The EA community has created several great coworking spaces”. Where are those other spaces?2. It also says they were set up “in an ad hoc way, with large overheads”. In my case I agree with the “ad hoc” part (which I don’t consider particularly bad though) but am not sure with the “large overheads” part. What is this assessment based upon? Probably I spend too much of my own time on it (because of a lack of funding) but I don’t really see how a central international organization would have saved much time or money if the alternative would be to hire and pay someone locally.
3. I kind of doubt that there currently is the demand for up to 100 EA-Coworking-Spaces in the world, at least if you are thinking of them including event space, a library…. The space in Berlin is pretty small (200m2) and we haven’t reached capacity yet. Could be a lack of marketing (and obviously Covid) etc. but my best guess is that there are right now less than 10 cities worldwide where a bigger space would make sense. If the growth of EA accelerates and the BEAHR is unleashed that might change soon though and it could make sense to set up the necessary infrastructure already.
Anyway, if anyone wants to open up an EA-Coworking-Space I’m happy to talk (not sure if I can provide much insight besides adding phone booths from the start but I’ll try).
Mental health (especially in developing countries --> eg a more thorough look at Strong Minds etc.).