Super nice post. Impressed by the ‘translation into EA language’ from the original post. It’s also a skill I’m working on.
I’d like to ask a little more about your point in “2. Fund rigorous evaluations of participatory allocation”
How does this process respond to participatory grantmaking inherently having a lower statistical verifiability, given that participatory grantmaking is generally much less uniform and traceable using quantitative techniques? There’s no good counterfactual for Extinction Rebellion (funded by Guerilla Foundation), and FundAction’s grantees are tiny and extremely diverse. I’ve seen granters have to give up on statistics in these cases and lean into other ways of knowing e.g. relationships, trust and feelings dreaded by all EAs;)
I think that a vast amount of time and resources will be needed to get a large enough sample size, and I’m not sure that social movement groups will be too happy about that.
Sophie_Davison
A minor maths point but it will be important if you start running these calculations in real contexts.
”Maybe they took a paycut equal to EUR 100 for this life saved, then their “share” of this life in this case would be 100⁄3000 = 3%.”
Actually, here the real cost of the life saved is 3100 EUR, not 3000. If it helps, you can imagine the employee being paid the competitive salary, then donating back the 100 EUR.
I think Malawi’s colonial legacy holds a lot of answers to this question: https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/in-depth/effects-of-colonialism-on-malawi
Thanks very much for all these great hypotheses. I think there is a reasonable chance that these effects will be true, but also that we don’t have strong evidence for any of them yet. I’ve split your comment into the following hypotheses, and tests that can be run to determine whether they are true:
Hypothesis 1: Spread rate will be similar to GWWC 10% pledge, at 10,000 members over 15 years of activity. GWWC currently have 15 employees, with a time averaged number of c. 10 employees. This puts the spread rate per employee at around 0.2 promisers per day, compared to the model’s current estimate of 3. This would lower the QALYs per dollar from 915 to 123.
Test for hypothesis 1: monitor the spread rate per employee
Hypothesis 2: People gaming the system by becoming aware of the promise, but only taking the promise once they are in need, will be a significant effect.
Test A for hypothesis 2: Employees record interactions with potential promisers and indicate what proportion of them seem likely to engage in this behaviour
Test B for hypothesis 2: Monitor the spread rate by employees and by promisers directly, ignoring this intermediate variable
Hypothesis 3: There will be an overwhelming number of promisers without access to food, water, peace and shelter, which will lead to a high defection rate (above the 0.5% per day predicted in the model)
Test A for hypothesis 3: Record the defection rate from the promise by running trials
Test B for hypothesis 3: Observe the ratio of promisers who are able to give and promisers who are making requests for support
If you or anybody else would be interested in supporting the running any of these tests, please let me know.
Could you suggest an alternative title? Maybe you’re thinking something like: “we should set up a pilot charity to formalise the promise—predicted to save 915 QALYs per dollar”?
There is no website as far as I have seen. It is not a formal organisation, but rather a text. There is, because of this, no centralised register of who has taken the promise, though I’m sure that would be welcomed, and could be one of the activities that the created charity does. So far, the promise has been working via word of mouth—if you need help, you ask Promisers that you know, and they ask Promisers that they know.
Cool about the notion page. Maybe you could link it?
Great! What questions do you have? What makes you feel skeptical?
Would anyone be up for reading and responding to this article? I find myself agreeing with a lot of it.
”Effective altruism is a movement that excludes poor people”
Ah thanks for pointing out my mistake! And yes, I read this paragraph in the article, but still couldn’t work out how they could provide such a precise range
3. I really encourage you to read The Divide—it might change your mind
4. I really encourage you to read the linked resources, given that you are not yet familiar with the idea5. Could you say a little more about your views on degrowth? And what do you think about the anti-apartheid movement and LGBT rights movement? Would you agree that these have been successful? How about the overthrowing of various dictators around the world? Most of these movements had small anarchist funders that enabled their growth.
6. I really encourage you to understand the concept before disagreeing with it7. I agree that these conclusions are not obvious from the simple overview I gave. Maybe you would be open to investigating them further? The Guerrilla Foundation’s website have outlines of their relationship-based approach to funding and bringing funders into a movement.
It seems in a lot of cases you have disagreed with concepts before understanding them fully. Would you agree? And if so, why do you think this happened here, where I’m sure that you are great at making evidence-based judgements in other areas?
Thanks for the suggestions in your first three paragraphs! Looking forward to checking these out:)
The types of radical feminism you are mentioning in your first three bullet points are not types that I or the people or organisations I am mentioning would associate with. These groups are often labelled as Trans- or Sex worker- exclusionary radical feminists. It is a shame that they use this label too. They are generally funded by far right groups and instrumentalised to make it seem that they represent the feminist movement as a whole, or women’s interests more broadly. The fourth bullet point I hadn’t heard about, and that Contrapoints video has been on my watch list for a long time now- I should really watch it!
In my experience, people who have radical leftist economic views are generally hostile to the idea of people in high-income countries donating to charities that provide medicine or anti-malarial bednets or cash to poor people in low-income countries. It’s hard for me to imagine much cooperation or overlap between effective altruism and the radical left.
I agree with this, though maybe I would use a less strong word than hostile, such as ‘frustrated’ or ‘confused’. I also think that the frustration and confusion goes both ways. This post series is meant to be an attempt the help each group understand what causes the divide, and to facilitate cooperation and mutual learning. I also plan to share it with feminist groups.
The adrienne maree brown Vampire thing you are referring to is, I believe, from this 2009 blog post. I think that you have overinterpreted a whimsical remark. Or maybe I am missing another source? Either way most movements don’t stand up well to anecdotal ad-hominem attacks.
What is pleasure activism? After reading this, I don’t know. I’m not sure if adrienne marie brown knows, either.
Could you give a little more context on what you don’t understand? I’m not sure I can see the same issues, at least at the moment
But a lot of the radical left, to borrow a bon mot from Noam Chomsky, want to “live in some abstract seminar somewhere”. They have no ideas about how to actually make the world better in specific, actionable ways
This is a super interesting point. I’ll write about it in a future post in this series. The article you link to is really nice. One thing I’ll say for now is that there are certainly parts of the feminist movements that you will strongly disagree with, and that disagreement is welcome. I’d like to remind you that you feel the same about parts of the EA movement, as we have discussed elsewhere.
I agree that authoritarian communism is bad, but I have a lot more belief in degrowth. Could you give some more specifics on what your issues are with it?
Your concluding comments seem like rage-bait and might be an unnecessary addition to your otherwise very thoughtful reply.
This is a very interesting comment. I think a lot of the disagreement relates to a difference in what evidence is regarded as valuable within each field. I think this is a tension that both groups can learn from. I’ll write more about this, but I believe that EA ascribes too low value to non-numerical ways of knowing and radical feminists are reluctant to corroborate qualitative understanding using numbers.
I’d like to hear why you chose to label radical feminism as an ‘extremist group’. This has a lot of negative connotations carried, vs using a term like ‘radical’.
On epistemic sacrifices, this is not something that I have suggested. I suggest being curious about and open to learning from radical feminism. This allows you to discard ideas that you would like to discard, and take in ideas that you would not.
Your final comment indicates that perhaps you are not that familiar with radical feminism, and perhaps such a strongly weighted opinion would be best kept until after a little more research?
I’d love to hear some of your disagreements with radical feminism. Please share!
This post felt more like it argued why radical feminism would benefit from EA
Points 3 through 7 show how feminist tools can be used by EA to further EA’s aims. The post is showing both that cooperation would be mutually beneficial. I’m curious to see why you thought that it shows that radical feminism would benefit from EA?
I agree with a lot of your points here. I think the answer is to have distinct movements which use each other’s tools, and form coalitions. I give a little more detail in my reply to Ozzie’s comment
Thanks for pointing out the vagueness of the word ‘unite’. By this, I mean the following:
EA and radical feminism remain distinct approaches, rather than merging
EA and radical feminism understand each other’s methods, and use each other’s tools where appropriate
EA and radical feminism understand each other’s strategies when working on shared issues, so that their efforts can support rather than oppose each other e.g. reducing incarceration rates in the US
EA and radical feminism reduce competition against each other for funding and donor influence, and rather work together to move funders away from charities that both groups see as ineffective
Both movements recognise which issues their philosophies are well suited to solving, and which issues they are poorly suited to solving. They defer to ‘the expert’ movement in each area.
I’d be interested to hear you disagreements with the Marxist-leaning influences. Could you give a few examples?
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate your apology and adjustment of tone. I hope that this can inform future dialogues in a way that is helpful for you and for the movement.
I’m not sure whether strangers drowning has the answers I’m hoping for. I listened to a podcast about it, and mostly it sounds like the people who face the world in that way end up extremely unhappy.
Your advice about a container is very wise. It’s a useful technique I discovered through therapy and I’m glad that more people know about it, and to have that faith in the idea validated.
I agree with you that the answer to this question will likely be very individual. Sometimes to the extent where it can be quite lonely.
Thanks for the RobCast recommendation. I’ll listen to it. Likewise for Rising Strong. I like D&D but have struggled with most scifi, apart from more feminist sci fi like Ursula LeGuin.
I absolutely agree with your sentiments on the ability of EAs on average for processing these feelings. I’d love to make it a bigger part of EA—I think many people could hugely benefit from it. And also I believe that it makes your ability to do good so much greater—it has for me at least. Both in terms of having energy to take action, and
If you’re looking for recommendations for your own journey on this, I can really recommend reading ‘a field guide to climate anxiety’. It helped me a lot.
I really enjoyed reading your HSS post and think you have some great points in there. I like how you take out some of the vague language of ‘intervening in complex systems’ that is often used to justify unsuccessful top down managerial changes in large organisations. Most complexity theory that I have come across would absolutely
I think the Mulago foundation article has some great points, such as trust and data not being mutually exclusive. Toby Lowe also has a great talk about this. But the article is also is too dismissive of applying non-quantitative funding e.g. to illiterate groups, or groups working on changing cultural values through art. I think the article is written to be clickbaity and controversial, which is a style I don’t find especially constructive.
I think the reason you disagree with point one might be that you are interpreting ‘complex systems’ still in the healthcare service provision field, whereas when it comes to health I would extend it to systems such as air pollution and income inequality, which are highly bound to complex political systems, where interventions are hard to measure using RCTs due to small sample sizes and a lack of counterfactuals. As has become my catch phrase, most disagreement is a result of miscommunication.
Interested to hear your thoughts
Your comment relates to interventions that directly target improving patient health, and I think that Toby’s paper applies well to these examples. My difficulty is rather with using it to analyse charities outside of global health, or charities that create less measurable forms of change, as highlighted in the end of Cody’s paper.
p.s. I’m Sophie Davison on LinkedIn