All of Aron_Vallinder's Comments + Replies
Thanks for the suggestion to use reversed statements. As I said in my response to Larks, I share this concern, so if we run further iterations of the survey, I'll include something along these lines.
I look forward to seeing Sanjay's report!
Thanks for this. I basically share the concern that you and David express, and it would be good to revise the statements accordingly if we run further versions of the survey. But even if the extent of agreement is inflated, it seems reasonable to think that the ordinal ranking should remain the same (so that people agree more strongly with the first text than the second, and believe more strongly that people on the other side of the planet matter just as much than that those in the distant future do).
Yes, those seem right to me. My impression is that most social movements will inevitably have to adapt if they are to survive for longer periods of time. Of course, there's a trade-off here: to adapt one will likely have to compromise on some of the movement's initial values. But at the moment I think that adapting too little is probably a more plausible failure mode than adapting too much.
I don't know where to report technical issues with the site, so I'll just post this here for now. (Please let me know if there's a particular procedure.)
Under 'Nearest Meetups' (I'm in London), there are two events listed, one Super fun EA London Pub Social Meetup on 19 April 2016 and one Petrov Day Meetup on 26 September 2015. The first is presumably a mistake; it doesn't make much sense to include meetups that far into the future, and the second has a broken link. (Incidentally, the error page for the second links to Less Wrong rather than the Effective Altruism Forum.)
I'm not sure I follow your solution. If I do, here's a possible worry:
Suppose that the group of EA donors agree to match donations to all the n charities at m :1 (up to some limit). Given your setup, many individual members of the group may end up donating their $X to charity B instead of their preferred charity A. For this to be worth it for them, they must presumably think that a donation of $(1+1/m)X to B is better than a donation of $X to charity A, but I suspect that this would often not be the case.
Is that right, or did I misunderstand your proposal?
This GiveWell blog post by Holden Karnofsky is critical of donation matching, for the same reason that you mention:
We’ve discussed whether we might be able to provide “true” donation matching – finding a donor who would give to our top charities only on condition that others did – but not surprisingly, everyone we could think of who would be open to making a large gift to our top charities would be open to this whether or not we could match them up with smaller donors. Ultimately, the only match we can offer is illusory matching.
Thanks, this is a good point. From looking at the qualitative answers that people provided in response to this question, it doesn't appear to have been much of an issue in practice, however.