All of Danny Lipsitz's Comments + Replies

Thanks, Luke. When I have some more time I might brainstorm next steps on this including how to put together a team. If so, I'll reach out!

Thanks for the feedback. The way I envision it, it wouldn't require any profound change of anyone's attitude. There are so many businesses doing round-up for charity around the world. If someone were to sleuth around and put in the time, surely they could identify the low-hanging-fruit of businesses that are happy to change their round-up charity at the credit card reader without much convincing. 

Of all the people in the position to change the setting on the credit card reader at their small business (if that's even how it works) some of them may be r... (read more)

Thanks for posting. I've been trying to find the best place to donate in blindness prevention for a few giving cycles now.

Intuitively, it feels like interventions without the direct goal of mortality prevention, like preventing blindness, could achieve nearly as much good over the years as preventing deaths.

For me the ironic thing about critiquing current practices of EA is that it is, in itself, an act of EA.

The same can't necessarily be said for critiquing the underlying premise of EA.

Hey Aaron -- really want to sit down and read this thoroughly when I have a moment. Someone sent me the link to your post, otherwise, I haven't been on EA Forum for a minute.

That said, I did a talk on just this topic back at the EA Global "Unconference" over the summer. Would love to maybe be in touch about this idea...the link to my talk is here:

1
Aaron Boddy
3y
I loved watching this talk, thanks for sharing! It would be great to talk further about this idea (though based on your talk, it would seem you have already given way more thought to it than I have)

Ah, okay. So tractability is built into the term "most important"?

I thought they were two separate concepts: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/importance-neglectedness-tractability/

I agree that all that really matters is how effective a particular intervention will be in reducing suffering for the amount of money you plan to donate. Other metrics (especially neglectedness) are just heuristics.

2
MichaelStJules
3y
I think it's unfortunate we used the word "importance" for one of the factors, since it could also be understood to mean overall how valuable it is to work on something. I think many use the word "scale" now instead for the factor. If you prioritized by scale only, then you can make a problem arbitrarily large in scale, to the point of uselessness, e.g. "prevent all future suffering". Presumably wild animal suffering is also much greater in scale than factory farming (or at least the suffering of the farmed animals, setting other effects aside), but it receives much less support since, in part, so far, it seems much less tractable. (Wild animal welfare is still a legitimate cause, though, and it does get support. Wild Animal Initiative was just recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.)

Kind of unrelated, but I've wondered about these first two considerations that people use to pick a charity, as listed above: 

1) which cause is most important
2) which interventions in the cause are most effective

Couldn't there be a cause that is extremely important but just that don't have any good interventions? Maybe there is a "most effective" intervention for this cause, but it's still not that good, and donating to that intervention doesn't really result in much. 

0
MichaelStJules
3y
If there aren't any good interventions (including researching the problem further to identify good direct interventions), then presumably the cause isn't so important; it would rate low on the tractability scale. Maybe a weird corner case is saving/investing to donate to the cause later? I think 1) and 2) are basically backwards. You should support whichever interventions are most effective, regardless of cause, and if these happen to fall into one cause, then that's the most important cause.

I hate to admit it, but I think there does exist a utilitarian trade-off between marketability and accuracy. Although I'm thrilled that the EA movement prides itself on being as factually accurate as possible and I believe the core EA movement absolutely needs to stick with that, there is a case to be made that an exaggerated truth may be an important teaching tool in helping non-EAs understand why EAs do what they do.

It seems likely that Peter Singer's example has  had a net-positive impact, despite the inaccuracies. Even I was originally drawn to EA... (read more)

My video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0AiIMeyxWk

All the Unconference videos are in a playlist, above!

Thanks, Michael! I would definitely love to have the talk linked from EA Hub. Cafelow, is that a possibility?

I have definitely checked out SHIC and skimmed through their materials. My initial concept for teaching in schools has a notable distinction from them. Before considering the idea of internal vs. external movement building, my concept was to do a single lesson, spark a lightbulb moment with a student or two who might be EA-inclined, give them a copy of "Doing Good Better," and then move on. Coming back for more lessons with the same class ... (read more)

2
MichaelA
4y
I have some vague thoughts on this sort of thing, but I only ran my EA-based club for about 6 months, and didn't do any follow-up measurements. So I don't think any of those thoughts would add much value relative to the High School EA Outreach post, the post SHIC Will Suspend Outreach Operations, and what you've already said/thought. So instead, here's a grab bag of links that came to mind as potentially relevant and useful, if you hadn't seen them already. (Though I'd guess that the collection of resources cafelow linked to may be more relevant and useful.) * https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-funnel-model/ * https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/the-concentric-circles-model * https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/a-three-factor-model-of-community-building/ * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/S6QHRyi7joCWN9dkv/community-vs-network * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HCbfyHnsebJ9pDtWS/focusing-on-career-and-cause-movement-building Only tangentially relevant: * https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/hard-to-reverse-decisions-destroy-option-value * Collection of EA analyses of how social social movements rise, fall, can be influential, etc. * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EdAHNdbkGR6ndAPJD/memetic-downside-risks-how-ideas-can-evolve-and-cause-harm (I'd normally also mention the fidelity model in the context, but your talk suggests you're already familiar with that.)

Thanks Thomas. Just sent you a message.

Thank you. This is definitely at least part of what I was remembering! Was there a separate one then involving arguments for EA remaining apolitcal? (I know there's may be small mentions of that on several episodes.)

Sounds good! Yes, please stay in touch!

Glad you are doing this, thank you! It's peripherally related but I'm curious if you have any insight on the effectiveness of giving money to political campaigns, especially for races that might be on the fence between two very different candidates.

1
RachelAtcheson
4y
Absolutely have insight and would love to discuss it more!

Sounds interesting! I'm curious what circling actually entails. Could you describe what happens in one of the sessions?

1
Daniel Tabakman
4y
I will share what happens in the talk.

I think this is a great idea. There's definitely an ideal of what it means to be EA that is set by the demands of moral philosophy and by EA superstars. However, there is a limit to what most people (even the superstars) can reasonably accomplish. It could be helpful to highlight the struggle between the ideal and the practical, and what each guest is doing to try to improve.

I have professional experience in audio engineering so let me know if you have any questions on that front, and would love to be a guest at some point (you can see my project on this page.)

1
M_Allcock
4y
Thanks for the comment. I REALLY like the way you put it in the first paragraph. You've put the idea into better words than I could have done. If it goes down well at the unconference, I'll be in touch. It will be helpful to chat to an audio engineer.

Whoa, cool. I did not know about this, thank you.

2
MichaelA
4y
I just watched this talk, and thought it was really great! Two things came to mind (both of which may already be covered, seeing as cafelow commented here already): * Is there a place where this talk could be linked to from the EA Hub site? I suspect the talk would be useful for other people wanting to learn about communicating about EA. * Danny, are you aware of https://shicschools.org/ ? They've got a bunch of cool materials I used last year when I ran an EA-based club at my school (I was a teacher then). * See also the post High School EA Outreach

I like your idea that the applicability of EA concepts in daily life decision-making can be used to show EA as a powerful tool. I haven't specifically done that yet but have considered it.

I had expected to get pushback when I first started teaching about prioritizing causes and was careful about how I introduced it. However, students don't really push back on it, and when we work through examples, they do understand why an EA might prioritize, for example, schistosomiasis charities over cancer ones. That said, based on post-lesson surveys, that ... (read more)

Thanks! I'm 100% with you on the idea that real-world examples can help people to understand the importance of EA. Peter Singer does it well, and I start off my presentation for high school/college students by giving them a hypothetical amount of money and working through a decision about where to donate.

Sometimes I use an example of a firefighter in a burning building. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the firefighter will be able to save everyone so some tough decisions have to be made in order to save the most people in a finite amount of time.

I think the more people working on good ways to promote EA ideas, the better; I'd love to hear about whatever you work on.

1
sky
4y
Definitely, I think for many people, the donations example works. And I like the firefighter example too, especially if someone has had first responder experience or has been in an emergency. I'm curious what happens if one starts with a toy problem that arises from or feels directly applicable to a true conundrum in the listener's own daily life, to illustrate that prioritization between pressing problems is something we are always doing, because we are finite beings who often have pressing problems! I think when I started learning about EA via donation examples, I made the error of categorizing EA as only useful for special cases, such as when someone has 'extra' resources to donate. So, GiveWell sounded like a useful source of the 'the right answer' on a narrow problem like finding recommended charities, which gave me a limited view of what EA was for and didn't grab me much. I came to EA via GiveWell rather than reading any of the philosophy, which probably would have helped me understand the basis for what they were doing better :). When I was faced with real life trade-offs that I really did not want to make but knew that I must, and someone walked me through an EA analysis of it, EA suddenly seemed much more legible and useful to me. Have you seen your students pick up on the prioritization ideas right away, or find it useful to use EA analysis on problems in their own life?

Thanks for the comment! I've definitely had to choose my battles when making my "elevator pitch" to non EA people who may have limited time or interest. It's an interesting idea to go the next level: not just what and how should we tell people about EA in general, but very literally, what and how should we tell people about EA when given certain real-world time constraints.

Some form of importance, as you mentioned, and ease of explaining, should be factors, I agree. I'd say those are similar but not entirely the same as these two o... (read more)

Discussing EA with Non-EA People | External Movement-Building

Premise

When I first started calling myself an Effective Altruist, it was hard to talk about EA to other people. If it came up, I would find myself backed into a corner, ultimately trying to defend utilitarianism to someone who didn’t want to be convinced. These conversations didn’t feel productive. So for a while, I kept EA to myself.

Eventually I looked for carefully-worded, clear ways to explain EA concepts that are non-contentious but still retain fidelity to the heart and values ... (read more)

1
Ramiro
4y
Where can we get the video?
2
Thomas Kwa
4y
I thought this talk was brilliant, not least in the specific terms you mentioned. I often talk to my EA friends about "counterfactual impact", leverage, and "comparative advantage" and often have a hard time switching gears to talk to non-EAs, but I can imagine this slight shift in terminology to "cause-and-effect evidence", leverage, and "personal advantage" to hit close to the core ideas and sound much friendlier. Most of the talk was immediately actionable as well. Thank you for making it.
8
sky
4y
I'm excited about this! I actually came here to see if someone had already covered this or if I should ☺️. I'd love to see a teacher walk through this. Here's an idea I'd been curious to try out talking or teaching about EA, but haven't yet. I'd be curious if you've tried it or want to (very happy to see someone else take the idea off my hands). I think we often skim over a key idea too fast -- that we each have finite resources and so does humanity. That's what makes prioritization and willingness to name the trade offs we're going to make such an important tool. I know I personally nodded along at the idea of finite resources at first, but it's easy to carry along with the S1 sense that there will be more X somewhere that could solve hard trade-offs we don't want to make. I wonder if starting the conversation there would work better for many people than e.g. starting with cost-effectiveness. Common sense examples like having limited hours in the day or a finite family budget and needing to choose between things that are really important to you but don't all fit is an idea that I think makes sense to many people, and starting with this familiar building block could be a better foundation for understanding or attempting their own EA analysis.
5
Prabhat Soni
4y
This looks exciting! Since there's a limited time that someone may want to listen to us, it's important to prioritize concepts. Perhaps, we could use a {neglectedness - importance - ease of explaining} [or similar] framework to rank EA concepts? Some similar ideas are discussed by Will MacASkill in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCpFsvYI-7Y [30:40]

I'm happy to have read this! This is a well-articulated post about something I've been thinking about for a while.

I definitely intuit that it's more important to reduce suffering than to increase pleasure. I wonder how much of my suffering-focused viewpoint is due to a bias: hearing stories about other people suffering makes me quite sad, but hearing about other people being extremely happy doesn't tend to make me that happy unless it's someone I know personally, or maybe someone who has a relatable backstory.

Maybe our sense of em... (read more)