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Yay for me: I have found that I can increase my donations in way that seems long-term sustainable in terms of finances and emotional engagement. I have also found that a moderate engagement with the movement is the best way for me to maintain an interest, while avoiding getting depressed by the state of the world.
Sometimes when I see people writing about opposition to the death penalty I get the urge to mention Effective Altruism to them, and suggest it is borderline insane to think opposition to capital punishment in the US is where a humanitarian should focus their energies. (Other political causes don't cause me to react in the same way because people's desire to campaign for things like lower taxes, feminism or more school spending seems tied up with self-interest to a much larger degree, so the question if it is the most pressing issue seems irrelevant.) I always refrain from mentioning EA because I think it would do more harm then good, so I will just vent my irrational frustation here.
I endorse using Shortform posts to vent! I think you're right that mentioning EA would be likely to do more harm than good in those cases, but your feelings are reasonable and I'm glad this can be a place to express them.
Some object-level thoughts not meant to interfere with your venting:
I don't feel the same way about people who oppose the death penalty, I think largely because I have a strong natural sense that justice is very important and injustice is very especially extra-bad. This doesn't influence my giving, but I definitely feel worse about the stories "innocent person is killed by the state" or "guilty person who is now wholly reformed is killed by the state" than I do the story "innocent child dies of malaria", despite knowing logically that the last of these is likely the saddest (because many more years were lost). I can understand how someone who feels similarly to me would end up spending a lot of energy opposing capital punishment.
The death penalty also has a hint of self-interest in that it is funded by tax money. I can imagine people being exceptionally angry that they are paying even the most minute fraction of the cost of executing someone. Similarly, the documentary "Life in a Day" briefly features someone who deliberately earns a very low income so they can pay no taxes and thus ensure that none of their money goes toward "war".
Sometimes the concern is raised that caring about wild animal welfare is seen as unituitive and will bring conflict with the environmental movement. I do not think large-scale efforts to help wild animals should be an EA cause at the moment, but in the long-term I don't think environmentalist concerns will be a limiting factor. Rather, I think environmentalist concerns are partially taken as seriously as they are because people see it as helping wild animals as well. (In some perhaps not fully thought out way.) I do not think it is a coindince that the extinction of animals gets more press than the extinction of plants.
I also note that bird-feeding is common and attracts little criticism from environmental groups. Indeed, during a cold spell this winter I saw recommendations from environmental groups to do it.
To add to this, Animal Ethics has done some research on attitudes towards helping wild animals:
- https://www.animal-ethics.org/survey-helping-wild-animals-scientists-students/
- https://www.animal-ethics.org/scientists-attitudes-animals-wild-qualitative/ (another summary by Faunalytics)
From the first link, which looked at attitudes among scholars and students in life sciences towards helping wild animals in urban settings, with vaccinations and for weather events:
Responses were mostly favorable in all cases. Levels of support and perceived support by others ranged, depending on the question, from over 60% to over 90%. Students and scholars tended to give similar responses. The level of support was highest in almost all cases for the second project, Urban Ecology. The first project, Vaccination, also received substantial support. It was ranked second except in one very important category – expected support at university departments, in which it was ranked third. The third project, Weather Effects, was ranked first in this category. The results showed no substantial conflict between the perceptions and attitudes among scholars and students.
I do not think large-scale efforts to help wild animals should be an EA cause at the moment, but in the long-term I don't think environmentalist concerns will be a limiting factor.
For what it's worth, I think the current focus is primarily research, advocacy for wild animals and field building, not the implementation or promotion of specific direct interventions.
The current conflict with Russia has increased my estimate of the importance of democratization. I think a democratic Russia would be unlikely to go to war with brother country like Ukraine. Many efforts to spread democracy seem pretty unsuccesful.
I wonder whether democratic countries sometimes could make deals with dictators to allow a gradual change to democracy, only finishing when the dictator dies or decides to retire. Assuming the dicator cares somewhat about his country's long-term future he might be persuaded that democracy is best way of ensuring peace and prosperity for it long-term.
I was thinking the same in this case.
Also I've wondered (maybe people have explored)
"Rewarding dictators who give up their power (with a cash prize)"
"Setting up a safe, secure and comfortable place for them to live out their days".
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I expect the main objections to be:
- This would also incentivize the long-game of 'becoming a bad dictator and then bailing out'
- This would contradict international law ... how could you actually protect them from the Hague court?
Scott Aaronsson has received a grant to redistribute and is asking for charity recommendations. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6232 Note that he indicates AI-risk and other rationalist-flavored organisations are disfavored, but the blog post might still be of some interest.
I was recently looking for a page with donation advice to link to. I found one, but it struck me that some general EA-organisations could start their homepages more focused on effective donation. (As opposed to getting people involved in other ways.) Most people are not looking to join an organistion or change jobs to more altruistically effective ones, but probably donate something to charity and could repriotize those donations. Having a "hook" which is about what to donate to might be more helpful.
The Giving What We Can donate page is easily the best overall resource for this that I know of — not perfect, but very comprehensive.
I'm not sure how many "general EA organizations" exist, though. All the ones I could think of that are meant for a general audience — EA.org, GWWC, Charity Science Outreach — make it pretty easy to find advice on donating.
Meanwhile, both GiveWell and GWWC (as well as Future Perfect) come up on the front page when I Google "best charity" from an incognito window.
Are there specific organizations that you think should provide easier access to donation advice? (Keep in mind that most "EA orgs" have a specific mission and will want to tell people about their work, not the broader movement.)
From animal EAs in the US there is talk about upcoming Supreme court case where California import restrictions on pork produced to lower standards are likely to be overturned. A sad turn of events if it happens. Also find it annoying that some activists are trying to ally it with larger left-wing cause, and warn it will lead to general race to bottom when it comes to regulations. As someone who is more right-wing on many issues I am not very worried about race to bottom when it comes to labor market regulation. I also don't see how it is tactically smart to tie defense of animal welfare standards to larger project of ending domestic free trade in US. SC is never going to write an opinion that would allow Californa to ban import from states with lower minimum wage, and that would also be a step much too far for the Biden adminstration and most Democrats, yet animal-friendly lawyers on Twitter seem completely unconcerned to suggest that this is the principle they want.
Been reading about cryptocurrencies and block-chain. Cool technologies, but the valuation of current cryptocurrencies seems like a bubble that must crash, and the people who are "investing" in crypto right now are gambling, and I worry they do not know they are gambling.
I hope current EA-aligned people in crypto manage to cash out, and that there is no reputational harm for the movement from the fact that some well-known proponents work in the field.
Gresham College is hosting an event with the title "Does Philanthropy do the Public Good?" by Professor David King. It can be watched afterwards here https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/good-philanthropy.
It might be interesting, or alternatively it might be terrible but relevant for EAs to know what views are put out in the public debate.
Definitely worrying about WW3 or nuclear holocaust at the moment. I gave an extra donation to long-terminst causes this month. Don't usually donate to them, but the argument that some long-term thinking should be promoted seemed convincing now.
I hope, but have no real reason to believe, that western leaders know how far they can support Ukraine without causing the war to spread.
Professor Abigail Marsh writes in NYT that individualism promotes altruism: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/opinion/individualism-united-states-altruism.html?smid=tw-share
I have not made any attempt to vet the study, and for studies of this kind you don't expect one study to be more than a small piece of evidence but it is clearly an interesting research question.
There is a well-known argument that rule utilatarianism actually collapses into act utilatarianism. I wonder if rule utilitarians are not getting at the notion of dynamic inconsistency. If might be better if utilitarians can pre-commit to following certain rules, because of the effect that has on society, even if after one has adopted the rules there are circumstances where a utilitarian would be tempted to make exceptions.
I think there might be some interest among the EA community in recent social media discussions about Scott Alexander and SlateStarCodex. My impression is that among some committed leftists the movement will face suspiscion rooted in its support from rich people, its current demographic profile, because some leftists are suspiscious of rationality itself and because the movement might detract from the idea that the causes popular now among leftists are also objectively the most important issues facing the world.
On 80000 hours webpage they have a profile on factory farming, where they say they estimate ending factory farming would increase the expected value of the future of humanity by between 0.01% and 0.1%. I realize one cannot hope for precision in these things but I am still curious if anyone knows anything more about the reasoning process that went into making that estimate.
I think it's basically that moral circle expansion is an approach to reduce s-risks (mostly related to artificial sentience), and ending factory farming advances moral circle expansion. Those links have posts on the topic, but the most specific tag is probably Non-humans and the long-term future. From a recent paper on the topic:
The fact that there are over 100 billion animals on factory farms is partly why we consider them one of the most important frontiers of today’s moral circle (K. Anthis & J. R. Anthis, 2019).
I think Sentience Institute and the Center for Reducing Suffering are doing the most research on this these days.
Note: I don't work for 80,000 Hours, and I don't know how closely the people who wrote that article/produced their "scale" table would agree with me.
For that particular number, I don't think there was an especially rigorous reasoning process. As they say when explaining the table in their scale metric, "the tradeoffs across the columns are extremely uncertain".
That is, I don't think that there's an obvious chain of logic from "factory farming ends" to "the future is 0.01% better". Figuring out what constitutes "the value of the future" is too big a problem to solve right now.
However, there are some columns in the table that do seem easier to compare to animal welfare. For example, you can see that a scale of "10" (what factory farming gets) means that roughly 10 million QALYs are saved each year.
So a scale of "10" means (roughly) that something happens each year which is as good as 10 million people living for another year in perfect health, instead of dying.
Does it seem reasonable that the annual impact of factory farming is as bad as 10 million people losing a healthy year of their lives?
If you think that does sound reasonable, then a scale score of "10" for ending factory farming should be fine. But you might also think that one of those two things -- the QALYs, or factory farming -- is much more important than the other. That might lead you to assign a different scale score to one of them when you try to prioritize between causes.
Of course, these comparisons are far from perfectly empirical. But at some point, you have to say "okay, outcome A seems about as good/bad as outcome B" in order to set priorities.
Should you hope that you are doing good? Perhaps not. For a number of cause areas you should probably hope that you are achieving nothing, or actually doing harm. Eg, if you are working on x-risk reduction you should hope what you are doing is not neccessary, in which case you are probably doing harm by reducing growth.
Curated and popular this week
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Or on the types of prioritization, their strengths, pitfalls, and how EA should balance them
The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the first in a series of posts examining the state of cause prioritization and proposing strategies for moving forward.
Executive Summary
* Performing prioritization work has been one of the main tasks, and arguably achievements, of EA.
* We highlight three types of prioritization: Cause Prioritization, Within-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization, and Cross-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization.
* We ask how much of EA prioritization work falls in each of these categories:
* Our estimates suggest that, for the organizations we investigated, the current split is 89% within-cause work, 2% cross-cause, and 9% cause prioritization.
* We then explore strengths and potential pitfalls of each level:
* Cause prioritization offers a big-picture view for identifying pressing problems but can fail to capture the practical nuances that often determine real-world success.
* Within-cause prioritization focuses on a narrower set of interventions with deeper more specialised analysis but risks missing higher-impact alternatives elsewhere.
* Cross-cause prioritization broadens the scope to find synergies and the potential for greater impact, yet demands complex assumptions and compromises on measurement.
* See the Summary Table below to view the considerations.
* We encourage reflection and future work on what the best ways of prioritizing are and how EA should allocate resources between the three types.
* With this in mind, we outline eight cruxes that sketch what factors could favor some types over others.
* We also suggest some potential next steps aimed at refining our approach to prioritization by exploring variance, value of information, tractability, and the
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community.
Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5.
While this might seem like a minor limit for many, for someone like me — a student without a steady income or job, $5 is a significant amount.
To provide some context:
According to Numbeo, the average monthly income of a Nigerian worker is around $130–$150, and students often rely on even less — sometimes just $20–$50 per month for all expenses. For many students here, having $5 "lying around" isn't common at all; it could represent a week's worth of meals or transportation.
I personally want to make small, one-time donations whenever I can, rather than commit to a recurring pledge like the 10% Giving What We Can pledge, which isn't feasible for me right now. I also want to encourage members of my local EA group, who are in similar financial situations, to practice giving through small but meaningful donations.
In light of this, I would like to:
* Recommend that Giving What We Can (and similar platforms) consider allowing smaller minimum donation amounts to make giving more accessible to students and people in lower-income countries.
* Suggest that more organizations be added to the platform, to give donors a wider range of causes they can support with their small contributions.
Uncertainties:
* Are there alternative platforms or methods that allow very small one-time donations to EA-aligned charities?
* Is there a reason behind the $5 minimum that I'm unaware of, and could it be adjusted to be more inclusive?
I strongly believe that cultivating a habit of giving, even with small amounts, helps build a long-term culture of altruism — and it would
That is not a possibility in this case, because SBF was was interested in EA for 5+ years before this fraud, and was raised as a utilitarian since childhood.