It might be a good per hour return but there’s a high per hour potential cost: each core relationship is worth a lot and people can feel used unless you do this tactfully. Charity Science’s web page has some absolutely fantastic suggestions of how to fundraise if you didn’t want to rinse your network.
tomstocker
Karma: 183
Some feedback/experience on the wedding idea. We asked people for donations to SCI instead of gifts in 2011. We saw only £240 go to the charity + some money for ourselves (less than this). If we’d asked for money to set up a home / stuff instead we could have avoided costs exceeding that in the future. To put it in perspective, a few hours fundraising in Oxford highstreet got £280. I think the values etc. of your wedding invitees and what they think they’re there for on the day are very important to take into account. Further, if you do a fundraiser among your friends / family for one thing once they’re much less likely to give to that cause again a second time??
I think there are also a lot of non-selfish reasons for not wanting to breed a load of rats and protect insects that even entemologists think don’t have a concept of suffering / pain that’s in any way equivalent to what we consider morally valuable.
e.g questions of the good life, where things go wrong how to resolve, how to stay focused on what matters etc. - complicating the EA worldview a little
WHat about what EAs can learn from FBOs?
I’d kill these sentences “Deciding what to do and where to give to have the biggest impact is not easy. But we think the best answers come from being open to new evidence and part of a community of likeminded individuals asking the same questions.”
don’t know why like minded is valued.
Also, your definition is too loose—literally millions of people have done this that will never identify as effective altruists. It might better differentiate if you said that an EA also identified with a community of people trying to evangelise the above 1 and 2 primarily through that community. But that isn’t as positive a descriptor.
lots of excitement, little in the way of new or surprising successes.
From my point of view, I can’t tell that EA wont be a distraction from already altruist and effective people in all cases, especially now as there are more people than direct-enough projects.
Which is I think why actually doing some cool stuff would be attractive for people / demostrate that we aren’t just a cultish group of people that tithe/give in a slightly different way to several billion people doing it already.
Yes. It applies. But they were also asking for what you were asking for.
I say little avail—but I had CAP / agricultural policies in mind. Debt cancellations have happened a lot, and have been partly the result of campaigning. Also, aid has increased, and although the lines are harder to draw / for me to see, this might also have been helped by NGO type lobbying.
Sound roughly like the manifesto that brought about the seattle demonstrations. Lots of work’s been tried here by the NGO communities but to little avail. The vested interests are large, I wouldn’t underestimate getting some of the fine tuning of the policy right or the amount of effort it would take to get these things through + keep them there.
Those quotes aren’t real quotes right? I recognize the offensive one about ‘autistic white nerds’ from a wierd article by one of the Vox founders but I would have bet against much of the others being said by someone?
External validity stuff / information hazard definitely only applies to a subset of the things you’ve explored currently, but I expect you to find fundraising strategies that do draw on non-EA resources more heavily and at more scale, and when that happens its a matter of time before that strategy is a victim of its own success?
One option you have already probably thought of, is for people wanting to read it to either give a significant donation through your site to a givewell rec or whatever, or demonstrate in some other way their commitment. If they’re giving regularly anyway this wont be an issue.
One option you have already probably thought of, is for people wanting to read it to either give a significant donation through your site to a givewell rec or whatever, or demonstrate in some other way their committment. If they’re giving regularly anyway this wont be an issue. The fear I have is that once it gets known about among fundraising industry you can’t claw it back + advantage is gone, all the hard work you’ve done gone. But I’m sure you have a much better view of all this than I do sat at a computer across the Atlantic! Keep up the good work, its really interesting reading!
There’s been a recent legal update here making it even harder to leave a legacy in a particular way in the UK woman wins inheritance from estranged mother
Sorry—its really clear on the website. Like the layout!
How do you think about the information hazard of publishing your results (that they’ll become the new chugger method for less effective orgs) against the benefits of making them publicly available?
looks like you’re doing fantastic work! Very interested to see what comes out of the legacy exploration.
In terms of ‘the thing that we think is most effective to fund to generate funds for givewell recs that is scalable’ at the moment—what is your view? Or is the answer ‘charity science’? Is there option for funders to give to one particularly effective scalable activity within your portfolio?
Sorry, using suffering losely. The quality of suffering largely determines its value in my eyes. I ve seen entemologists argue there is no possible way insects can feel suffering. I don’t necessarily go along with that, we deny suffering at every opportunity: Black people in apartheid denied pain killers, animals thought mot to feel pain, fish, mentally illetc etc but really, a little system of chemicals resembling something simpler than electronic systems we’ve built? The point in trying to make is that this seems like a rabbit hole. Get out of it and wake up to what really matters. There are litrrally millions of things anyone can be getting on with that are more pressing than the imaginary plight of insects.