CEO & Founder of effektiv-spenden.org
Sebastian Schwiecker
I’m obviously biased but I do see this as another clear sign that instead of worrying about a perceived funding overhang EA should invest heavily in increasing and diversifying its fundraising capabilities.
For what it’s worth some anecdotal evidence from myself (Founder of Effektiv Spenden → effective giving organization working in Germany and Switzerland and in the last three years the main contact for every journalist coming through effektiveraltruismus.de → the by far most frequented German EA website).
I have been in contact with I guess 20 − 30 journalists in the last 3 years. Spoke to everyone and never turned anyone down. Never asked to be off the record (but I usually do ask to see drafts to make sure there are no factual errors → ask ≠ require). So far only positive experiences (100%) including three tv features and even more radio features (including discussions with critics). I’m not saying that I’m happy with every single word of every single article etc. but I’m pretty sure that all features, articles… have been net positive and that my views have been by and large presented correctly.
My situation is (very?) special though: Focus was mostly on giving to neartermist causes which might be easier to explain and less loaded + Germany and Switzerland have a much smaller EA community and far less people know about EA so questions are probably more basic. I might also have been more lucky and/or more talented than I think I am. So what has worked for me might not work for you.
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.
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).
Definitely the case in Germany. Top 3 Google results for “longtermism” are all very negative posts. 2 of them by some of Germany biggest news magazines (ZEIT and Spiegel). As far as I know there is no positive content on Longtermism in German.
Seems like we didn’t articulate clearly enough why we exclusively focus on Germany at the moment.
I totally agree that it’s very unlikely “that Germany is currently the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy”. Indeed we expect that Power for Democracies will mostly (or exclusively) recommend charities not working in Germany in the future. Unfortunately Power for Democracies is currently still in its initial hiring round and probably won’t produce any robust recommendation till 2025. The research that has been done in the last 2 years (and which let to the foundation of Power for Democracies) was mainly based on Germany though. Therefore we currently feel more comfortable recommending giving opportunities in Germany with regards to defending democracy but we try to make it clear that this is temporarily. Also we try to emphasize that the research our democracy donation fund is based on is not as good as the research other cause areas (that’s also the reason we added a “Beta” label to the fund in our donation form).
With regards to your other point we expect to continue to limit ourselves to recommend giving opportunities that are tax exempt in the countries we are working in. E.g. we are also not recommending investment opportunities etc. even if that would potentially be more effective to reach our goals (like investing in AI companies etc.).
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.
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?
Germany so far is probably less polarized than other countries (e.g. the US). Currently there is only one far right party with significant reach (AFD) currently polling around 19% nationally.
The main conservative party (CDU) and the conservative leaning economically liberal party (FDP) are currently clearly and credibly distancing themselves from the AFD. We even embedded an interview from one of the most prominent FDP members (Gerhart Baum) in one of our blog posts about how we think about defending democracy.
So while we still might risk our reputation with up to 20% of the electorate I assume that it’s far less than 20% of the people we might ever reach with the idea of effective giving anyway (especially in cause areas other than global health and development).
On the other side I hope this endeavor will help us introduce many new people to effective giving who would not otherwise have heard about it (because we will show up on the radar of additional journalists, some donors will more actively share our website etc.).
I agree with you that we should stop saying “funding overhang”. I’m also not advocating for Sam or Dustin to sell their stocks and put their money into supposedly safer assets.
What should be done in my opinion is to work harder on diversifying and increasing the amount of money available to EA causes and make sure that GiveWell et al. have to decrease “the bar” faster and more consistently (makes stuff more predictable and therefore probably more effective). One way (out of many) to do so that seems pretty obvious to me would be to put even more money into the effective giving landscape to convince millions of people in the world to give more effectively (again, I’m biased). A decent chunk of that would come from income and not equities. Still correlates with the global markets but much less so.
To a certain extent effective giving organizations are already receiving considerably more money than a couple of years ago but as long as several have a counterfactual multiplier (donations raised / cost of raising donations) of > 10 I think we should be much more aggressive since it kind of pays for itself many times over (and also to hedge against a possible prolonged bear market).
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.
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.
Thanks for your feedback. Just created an anonymous feedback form for people who have spent time at TEAMWORK to get more critical input (will put it on our website, in our handbook etc. as well).
I think some of your concerns could be addressed with more funding. Others probably only if a bigger player like CEA goes all in and opens up its own EA-Coworking/Event-Space in Berlin. As far as I know no such plans exist, but if I’m wrong please let me know. Happy to completely focus on our core business.
Compared to the situation in Berlin before we opened up TEAMWORK I still have a very hard time not seeing our Space as a huge improvement.
Unfortunately not.
With regards to effektiveraltruismus.de: The site has just been transferred to “Effektiver Altruismus Deutschland (EAD) e.V.” (can be seen in the Imprint/Impressum already and will be mentioned in a newsletter that we will probably send later today). Donations will still be managed by Effektiv Spenden (officially knows as “UES – Gemeinnützige GmbH für effektives Spenden”) since EAD can’t do that at the moment (from a legal perspective and also from a technical/operations perspective). We already mention who is handling the donations on top of the donation form though. Happy to consider further clarification on the website (or elsewhere). Other than that I don’t really see why the arrangement should be changed since it would lead to unnecessary overhead but happy to discuss.
Disclaimer: I’m the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Effektiv Spenden.
I’m obviously biased, but wholeheartedly agree with you that EA should invest even more in effective giving (because of the impact the donations will have and also to get more people interested in EA). In the last couple of weeks I have started to become more optimistic that this will happen though (e.g. Open Phil seems to consider supporting this space directly).
With regards to the “pick a fight” strategy you might want to check out some of the very early GiveWell blog posts (2007 − 2009). They definitely didn’t shy away from a fight (just ask Charity Navigator) and I actually think that this was a smart strategy at the time and might still be under some circumstances.
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… ).
I agree that there are some interventions like calling for the banning of a certain party might be net negative, even if they seem appealing at first sight. I also think that it can be possible and laudable to defend the rights of people you strongly disagree with like the ACLU does (or used to do → haven’t really followed them lately)
Might not convince you but afaik the effective giving space (GWWC, TLYCS, Effektiv Spenden and others ) has experienced basically zero or even negative growth in the last 2 years.
AMF is even down more than 50% year over year and in general there are probably few if any markets where effective giving has reached even 0.1% of all donations.
I consider this extremely disappointing and that’s why I’m open to experiments on how to reach (much) more people.
Besides there are many people in EA who believe that money directed at avoiding x-risks will go > 10x further than trying to fight extreme poverty. Might be true but I still don’t think we should get rid of all the GiveWell recommended charities on Effektiv Spenden (probably even for their instrumental value alone).
To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn’t attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).
So I’m wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).