This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
Bentham’s Bulldog recently argued that AI won’t definitely make factory farms obsolete. I agree, but I’d go further and argue that by default AI won’t make factory farms obsolete. However, I think it’s possible (though not guaranteed) that AI could make factory farms a lot more humane.
He throws out an 80% chance of cultivated meat being developed, and a 70% chance of it displacing factory far...
I wonder how sensitive these fundraisers are to the identity of the organization. I would rather fundraise for GiveWell or CEA than deworming (obviously MIRI, FHI, etc. would be infeasible), but I imagine that would be a less popular choice for donations, since those organizations don't read as "charity" in the same way.
I agree that you'd raise considerably less money for these organisations. You need to sell people on the end charities like GiveDirectly first, and only once they're on board with these move to less widely accepted causes. A birthday or Christmas fundraiser doesn't afford much scope to persuade people of novel charities (compared with, say, an in depth personal conversation). So it's probably not the best venue for them.
That makes sense.
But there's another perspective where people donate wherever you want because it's about helping you and the abstract "charity" (as in "I'm donating to charity"). Gina was able to raise $500 for her animal rights org, Jacy has moved money from his friends to ACE, and Kaj raised $500 for poverty, animal rights, and MIRI. (...Though I'd still have to check whether they appealed mainly to people already in the AR/MIRI/EA sphere or not, and I agree my argument is wrong if they didn't.)
As a separate point, I'm not sure what % of unrestricted donations to GiveWell go to its own operations as opposed to being granted to its recommended charities.
You could try to convince someone who normally gives to SCI to give say $500 to CEA on condition that you'll try really hard at running an SCI-fundraiser.
It feels more honest making the amount constant instead of depending on the total amount raised so that each marginal dollar donated results in $2 going to SCI (including matching).
I don't know if this approach can be considered cheaty though.