What do people think of: buying a property that you will live in?
It has the advantages of giving later—as you can always sell the property—but has other advantages like significantly reducing living costs so that you could concentrate on entrepreneurial endeavours or EA entrepreneurial endeavours with a degree of financial stability and without eating through your savings etc.
Hi Uri, Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to your question. As you suggest the answer might vary from person to person or situation to situation and be skewed by effects with small probabilities but huge impacts.
The only thing that I would say however is to disagree with your comment that “work on an outreach program ..[will] require significant time and effort”.
It requires as much or as little time and effort as you are willing to put in.
For example just creating a Facebook group in London and creating a social event every month has helped grow the movement in London. Organising the occasional evening with EAs has shown to be not too much more effort than organising a evening with friends. Happy to give you some tips on growing EA in minimal time—feel free to message me!
Great job guys! Someone recently suggested hosting fundraising campaigns, like this one, but doing them jointly with a non-EA friend in order to attract friends of friends who may not come across this stuff otherwise.
I have not had much of this problem think we had this problem a little bit before it was on Meetup. I think we have slightly more insular groups now that meetings are more regular. Based in part on this experience, the advice I would give would be:
• Advertise more (be on Meetup etc)
• Have less frequent but bigger events rather than more frequent smaller events. At bigger events people can find people they get on with and the regulars can sit in the corner doing regular talk. Also regulars will come more frequently so bigger events will dilute the numbers of regulars somewhat.
• Actively encourage people to be more welcoming to new folk.
• You could split up the events into an event for regulars and and event for new folk. I have never done this but it could be worth trying and if you do this let me know how it goes!
Hi Claire, sorry if the post and the title were unclear. (I will edit to make it clearer). I can totally see why this is misleading as I did not count the time spent at events.
I think the very basic principle I wanted to get across here is that the only thing the organiser NEEDS to do on an ongoing basis is to take the responsibility to choose a time and place and post an event online, somewhere where a group of members can grow, once every month or every other month, and this does not take long.
I personally do not consider the events as work. Almost all the events are socials so there is very little to do to host the event (be nice and make sure people can find us) and I would attend the events anyway if someone else was doing the organising.
Also I have not even attended all of the events that I have organised and have on occasion asked others to host.
I hope that helps. Thanks for the feedback on my post.
Hi. Thanks for the feedback.
EVENTS—To clarify, most of our events are just social events. People turn up at a pub and discuss whatever takes their fancy often including effective altruism. This is low effort but seems to be working.
FACEBOOK—My cop out answer to this is just—this is what I did and it worked for me. (This post is an awkward mix of writing up what I did in a way that could be posted to the EA wiki so that others could edit it and add their advice.) That said the “copy event” feature does make it very very easy to create repeat events with minimal effort until you get round to starting an actual facebook group.
PS. Also I wanted to add that if you are putting in and can put in more than 30 min a month (+ time at events) of organising events that are better than just social events then that is amazing and you should keep doing that. Running a group on a very minimal basis is not ideal—but, in London at least, it can be done when needed—and such a group can grow!
Even when our events are not in pubs we do not really attract many (if any) under 18s so I suspect the negative impacts of people not being able to turn up because of age are minimal. (But we do have a few 18-21 year olds so if the UK had a higher drinking age that could be problematic.)
I have asked people for their success stories here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/EALondon/permalink/776410502448627/
I have had a few success stories of people becoming more involved and donating more effectively and I think someone recently told me that they took the GWWC pledge. We have also had people with very high impact jobs turn up. But it is hard to take the various counterfactuals into account.
I do not have any tips for generating success in only 30 min a month. But if you had extra time to put in on top of the 30 min a month you could run extra events to promote people actively doing something. Eg A pledge panel where people talk about taking the GWWC pledge and there is a panel of pledgees who have taken the pledge in the past and can answer questions. Or a volunteer-a-thon like: https://www.facebook.com/events/1066695483346249
I think one of the biggest impacts of starting a chapter (in a city) is the small probability of outreaching to someone with a very large opportunity to do a lot of good—whether they are indepently wealth, in politics, work for a philanthropic fund, etc.
Suggestions:
The simplest thing to do is be public about your donations. Tell people / post on facebook about how much you donate and where it goes.
If you socialise with or engage with or help run a local EA group or community then this too helps.
Also if you have an active interest in EA topics such as charity evaluation research or international development then this will come up in conversation
If it helps a good start for me is “So effective altruism is really awesome, basically it means applying evidence and reason and the scientific method and so on to the goal of doing good in the world. Makes sense right? So a really simple example of this is doing research to assess charities to . . .”
Is anyone working on adapting this guide to EA startups to supply meetups with a default agenda? This should lower the frictional costs associated with organizers who may have access to a venue not knowing what to do.
This has been done to death, but perhaps under advertised. See the list of various EA chapter guides at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/a6/outreaching_effective_altruism_locally_resources/
. . . but very few people with questions . . .
On finding people with questions. If I think I could find people who wanted to talk about EA stuff who should they be put in touch with? Is there a clear contact for this? What if I am fairly sure that the conversation would be of low value?
As someone who runs an EA chapter if I get messages from people reasonably often. In the past I have offered to meet people to talk about EA stuff one-on-one and have had this offer taken up. I no longer make this offer due to lack of time. But having someone (ideally someone local) who could meet people could help outreach in London.
Get engaged on the “small things” We’ve previously compiled a list of small things people can do. People’s identities are reinforced by taking action, so doing small actions can lead to people doing larger actions in the future. Moreover, these actions are quite valuable in their own right. We should update the list, think of what more we could add to it, think about how to make it more digestible, and then try to publish it widely (such as prominently on effectivealtruism.org).
I am keen to work on this. I have made a post about it in .impact at https://www.facebook.com/groups/dotimpact/permalink/430648037102852/ So if anyone else is keen on helping with this project then feel free to get in touch on facebook or add thoughts to the Hackpad at https://impact.hackpad.com/.impact-and-Solving-the-EA-Funnel-hoSefyU3Sti#:h=Step-#2:-Figure-out-the-“small
I agree that increasing evidence based policy and also transparency of policy making decisions is one of the most important political areas to focus on. (Based on my first hand experience of working in policy making.)
Hi Ryan, Can you clarify why you would rather see a charity get recommended by the Open Philanthropy Project than by GiveWell classic?
I am about 85% vegetarian. I suspect telling people that I am “reducing my meat consumption because I think trying to eat less meat is a good thing” probably has a greater signalling impact on my meat eating friends than telling them I am vegetarian. Reducing meat consumption comes across as an easy thing that anyone can do.
(The rule I follow is not to ever eat meat except if it it is convenient, or cheaper, or I am offered it, or I feel like it etc. Also to aim for higher welfare stuff)
There are lots of ways you could improve policy making, for example:
campaigning for more better regulation policy
campaigning for increased transparency of policy decisions
going into politics
choosing a particular well evidenced policy and campaigning for it.
a global focus encouraging particular policies to be introduced, rather than a US focus.
What you are doing looks great. Yet I am curious as to why and how you settled on the the path you are going down, of commenting on regulations in US policy making.
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
I am sceptical to the outreach benefit of finding effective ‘at home’ charities. However I do not think I am a good person to judge as to me the ‘charity begins at home’ idea seems highly irrational, tantamount to racism. This makes me wonder why it is so common. As little though experiment I have considered why people might believe this and how telling them there is a more effective charity may or may not help.
- Defensiveness. One of the most difficult things to do is to persuade people to stop giving to a cause that they currently give to. No-one wants to feel that they have been doing the wrong thing for years, or to be told that their actions are lacking morality that they believed their actions had. Criticising someone’s current giving pushes people into a corner and makes the defensive. I wonder to what extent the ‘well charity begins at home’ response or the ‘people should give to causes close to their heart’ line is used by people in an attempt to justify their current charitable giving. I suspect for these people telling them a different ‘at home’ charity is highly effective may occasionally have a some positive effect, but could just increase defensiveness.
- Social norm to give at home. For these people it is perhaps more important to persuade them that it is a social norm to give effectively.
- Self-interest. Make the society they live in nicer. Perhaps you could persuade these people to give to a more effective ‘at home’ charity. However unless you persuade them to act instead in the interest of others, this change to an effective charity will not be a first step to being more EA, although it may be a foot in the door.
- They have a particular cause they feel strongly about In this case you may want to recommend a charity that deals with that cause more effectively, as a foot in the door, but it is unlikely that a different at home charity would interest them.
CONCLUSION: I think research into at home charities would have a very limited effect at making conversation easier or helping spread EA ideas
(NOTE: - I have no evidence to base any of this on, just speculation - My conclusion maths my intuition which I admit is bias as I do not understand ‘giving at home well’. This may be a reason to doubt me. - It may be worth clarifying that I doubt making someone change from one ‘at home’ charity to the most effective ‘at home’ charity (that is relatively normal, so not like x-risk etc) another would be an effective use of EA time as I doubt this charity would be anywhere near as effective as any of the charities that EAs support. Others may disagree.)