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DavidNash

Co-Director @ Effective Altruism UK
4311 karmaJoined Dec 2014Working (6-15 years)

Bio

How others can help me

I'm happy talking to anyone, don't hesitate to reach out. Specific things we may want to chat about include;

  • How fast/slow and where should EA grow as a movement?
  • What lessons can we learn from other movements?
  • How much should we focus on people in the core of EA vs on the fringe?
  • Do you have a new idea for a cause or project related to EA?

Topics I have been thinking about for a while but still enjoy chatting about:-

  • Movement building & strategy
  • Meta EA
  • Networks vs connections
  • New cause areas/interventions

How I can help others

If you're thinking about being a community organiser or are currently organising an EA related group then I'd be happy to share ideas on strategy and community building. Especially for people working on cause specific work or in neglected regions of the world.

I've been an organiser with EA UK since 2015, working part time since 2017 and full time since 2019. I've also had conversations with people setting up groups around the world and also career, cause, interest and workplace related groups.

I have also had quite a few career conversations with people and could be a good sounding board if you had career/project questions.

Comments
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Topic contributions
1

Could the main difference be that TBP is a simple process change with reduced costs, while EA-style giving would fundamentally alter grant evaluation requiring more overhead from the funder.

I also think EA would involve extra costs to existing grantees, they will have to provide more evidence of their effectiveness or lose out to orgs that have those systems in place.

 

Separately I think it will be very hard to get existing foundations to shift to use more EA frameworks unless their main donors become interested in it. There is probably more to be gained by finding and helping the UHNW people/orgs that are inclined towards EA already.

There is a post about this (although it was written in 2015).

There are some good reasons for why large donors would want to not give too much money to a charity at once:

  1. Avoiding excessive reserves: Because of the opportunity costs (other charities could use money productively sooner), it is undesirable to have a charity having excessive reserves. Ideally, they would be promised a steady stream of funding if they meet specific targets over many years in order for them to be able to plan ahead.
  2. Risk diversification: Funds should be distributed to several high impact organisations in order to diversify the risk of one of them not performing well.
  3. Incentivizing others to join the cause area:
    1. Countries: By restricting funding to a particular country, one incentivizes the country to invest in very effective health interventions themselves and use their (often very limited) domestic resources to close the funding gap between donations and the full cost of delivering effective health interventions. Poorer, low-income countries (such as Ethiopia) are less able to do this than low-to-middle income countries (such as India).
    2. Charities: By restricting funding to charities, they’re being kept on their toes, so that they do not rely on a particular foundation or big grant giver exclusively and apply for other grants. For instance, in the past, the Gates foundation has heavily funded the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. However, Gates later discontinued SCI’s funding not because of too little effectiveness, but because, since their effectiveness had been established, other funders would more readily fund them.
    3. Other donors: By restricting funding to particular charities, other donors are incentivized to also invest in the effective charities. For instance, the Against Malaria foundation has a broader appeal to small private donors than more high-expected-value interventions. Thus, even though theoretically, the Gates foundation, which is the largest private foundation in the world with an endowment of US$42.9 billion[4], could buy every person in Africa a bednet every two years (population of Africa (1 Billion) * Cost of Bednet (5 Dollars) = 5 Billion dollars) that would rapidly deplete their limited resources and then they could not spend their money on other very effective causes. They might reason that (small) more risk-averse donors (who want to be certain that their money will have an impact) will close the funding gap of very effective and established interventions and that they can instead spend more money on riskier, high expected value areas.
  4. Technological Innovation: New technological innovations—such as a very effective malaria vaccine—might be discovered, and these might be more cost-effective.
  5. High risk, high reward project:

CGD has a different take on this type of migration.

"Between the start of 2021 and 2022, the number of Nigerian-born nurses joining the UK nursing register more than quadrupled, an increase of 2,325. Becker’s human capital theory would suggest that this increase in the potential wages earned by Nigerian-trained nurses should lead to an increase in Nigerians choosing to train as nurses. So what happened? Between late 2021 and 2022, the number of successful national nursing exam candidates increased by 2,982—that is, more than enough to replace those who had left for the UK."

"To fully realise these benefits, Nigeria would need to embrace emigration, realising that nurses are likely going to leave anyway and doing everything they can to reap the benefits. Yet, they appear to be doing the opposite. New guidelines announced on 7 February 2024 state that nurses must work for two and half years before being allowed to work overseas, a move nurses contest. This policy is far from optimal; restrictions on emigration are inefficient, inequitable, and unethical. Indeed, Ghana had a similar scheme, but ended up scrapping it because they were unable to employ all of their nurse trainees at home."

I remember the 'subforums' being more like chat rooms in their user design than actual sub forums which you can navigate through from a front page.

It doesn't seem that great an opportunity as they've randomly selected 10,000 people out of 7.5 million adults. It then looks like you have to come to a consensus with the 50 participants otherwise the money goes back to her.

I found the Global Skills Partnerships from CGD interesting but I don't know how active it still is/if you can fund it specifically.

As far as I know they weren't funded by donated money, they received a grant from the S&F Fund and a smaller one from Open Phil (I don't think either org take donations). The rest was self funded, more details in the original post.

I think it depends on how you define 'narrow EA', if you focus on getting 1% of the population to give effectively, that's different to helping 100 people make impactful career switches but both could be defined as narrow in different ways.

One being narrow as it focuses on a small number of people, one being narrow as it spreads a subset of EA ideas.

 

Taking the Dutch Existential Risk Initiative example, it will be narrow in terms of cause focus but the strategy could still vary between focusing on top academics or a mass media campaign.

'Narrow EA' and having >1% of the population fitting the above description aren't opposite strategies.

Maybe it's similar to someone interested in animal welfare thinking alt protein coordination should focus on scientists, entrepreneurs, funders and policy makers but also thinking it would be good for there to be lots of people interested in veganism.

There are a lot of private sector community roles, some with salaries up to $180k - Here are some examples from a community manager job board.

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