Why don't we have a kind of "Effective Thesis Prize"?
I know there have been prizes on particular subjects, such as the philosophy quarterly essay prize in 2016 (who won it?). But has anyone tried an open general prize, accepting applicants from any area, anywhere? Would it be too expensive? (I don't think so: the $$ could be little, since phd candidates don't need additional incentives to improve their thesis)
Would it it hard to organize? (Maybe a little bit, but there would be time...)
Pros: it'd be a simple way to propagate EA ideas and the Effective thesis tool. It'd be useful to elicit information, and maybe to find significative new contributions...
Actually, I think there are many more pros, and I'm considering to try something like that in Brazil (where EA movement is just beginning). So I'd really appreciate some tips about possible CONS.
I've been toying around with the following:
My impression FWIW is that the 'giving makes you happier' point wasn't/isn't advanced to claim that the optimal portfolio for one's personal happiness would include (e.g.) 10% of charitable donations (to effective causes), but that doing so isn't such a 'hit' to one's personal fulfilment as it appears at first glance. This is usually advanced in conjunction with the evidence on diminishing returns to money (i.e. even if you just lost - say - 10% of your income, if you're a middle class person in a rich country, this isn't a huge loss to your welfare - and given this evidence on the wellbeing benefits to giving, the impact is likely to be reduced further).
E.g. (and with apologies to the reader for inflicting my juvenilia upon them):
There are diminishing returns to money buying happiness, but it looks like they set in after pretty high incomes (starting at $95,000, and even higher if you live in a wealthy area).
So donating more on the margin when your total income is less than $95,000 USD seems to trade off directly against your happiness.
One can probably realize a lot of the egotistic benefit of donating by giving small amounts, e.g. $30 / month to GiveDirectly.
Update: published an expanded version of this as a standalone post. Includes arguments from survey data as to not be entirely composed of armchair philosophizing.
I would love to see a canonical post making this argument, conflating EA with the benefits of maxing out personal warm fuzzies is one of my pet peeves.
Usually I would agree with you, but I think within the EA community people have strong egoistic motivation to make "effective" donations. Your reputation is related to giving effectively.
Huh, I feel like reputation within EA is mediated more by things like how insightful one seems in forums & how active one is in organizing community events.
I don't know how much most EAs I know give. (I basically only know about people who published donation reports.)
Also there's this effect where people who are doing a lot of work on the ground tend to accrue less reputation than people who are very active in community building, just by the nature of their work. e.g. compare New Incentives to 80k.
I definitely except that there are people who will lose out on happiness from donating.
Making it a bit more complicated, though, and moving out of the area where it's easy to do research, there are probably happiness benefits of stuff like 'being in a community' and 'living with purpose'. Giving 10 % per year and adopting the role 'earning to give', for example, might enable you to associate life-saving with every hour you spend on your job, which could be pretty positive (I think that feeling that your job is meaningful is associated with happiness). My intuition is that the difference between 10 % and 1 % could be important to be able to adopt this identity, but I might be wrong. And a lot of the gains from high incomes probably comes from increased status, which donating money is a way to get.
I'd be surprised if donating lots of money was the optimal thing to do if you wanted to maximise your own happiness. But I don't think there's a clear case that it's worse than the average person's spending.
Makes sense, though I think you can realize most of the "being in a community" benefit without making large donations.
I'll consider making this rigorous enough to be a standalone post if there's sufficient interest.