Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
I wish it was more mainstream!
EA is basically a group of weirdos caring about very weird, abstract things. I think that's great and we need weird people pursuing weird passion projects, because that's how a lot of important shit has gotten done throughout history. But I also wish there was a more mainstream version of EA.
What I have in mind here is not an EA movement trying to get John Q Donor to give money to things like AI-alignment, or animal welfare studies, or any of the generally very weird and off-putting stuff that EA often focuses on. I'd like a Main Street Friendly version that instead focused on 'Popular Charity Inc should change to do X instead of Y' or 'Donate to Popular Cause A instead of Popular Cause B', where all of the suggestions are very mainstream and easily understandable (but efficient versions of that mainstream thing).
Most people are going to get turned off by abstract calculations, anything they see as weird, etc. They just want to do some good and not think too hard about it. Improving how those people donate - not by making them optimal, but by making them moderately better - seems to be an area where lots of good could be done.
To use a food analogy - EAs are very often like people examining tens of thousands of obscure recipes, trying to identify the optimal, perfect dish. Something like beluga caviar over the world's most expensive wagyu cooked by a Michelin chef. Normal people just select a food and cook it and eat it - here's some mac and cheese from a box, yum. Rather than trying to recruit more weirdos in the search for the ultra-perfect dish, there should be more focus on giving normal people tips to improve their mac and cheese. That would do more to increase the average culinary level of the population (and I'd expect any successful mass appeal strategy to recruit more weirdos than a weirdo-recruiting strategy would anyways).
One thing that I do is try to convince regular people who like to donate to charity to donate some portion (a quarter to a half, depending on how receptive they are) internationally. In the US only about 6% of charitable giving goes overseas, and money donated in the developing world is usually far more impactful. I don't try to lecture them or explain the most optimal thing to do, just nudge them in the right direction. I often use explicitly the same thing they're already doing - if they donate to cancer stuff here, I find an effect cancer charity in a poor country. If they donate to schools here, I find a good place to fund education in the third world. It's an easy win and I have a pretty high success rate with this.