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DavidNash

Co-Director @ Effective Altruism UK
4592 karmaJoined Working (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
305

Topic contributions
1

Thanks for this, do you know what process AMF uses to verify the number of people in a house? And if there are any incentives to under/over report.

I have heard anecdotally that there is the opposite problem in Uganda and Burkina Faso. 
 

In Burkina Faso the issue was that GDP per capita numbers were calculated from industrial output divided by population estimates so in order to look good, local government had an incentive to underestimate population so they seemed richer.

I'm not sure having a "bigger EA tent" leads to more funding/interest, if anything, people may be less likely to fund/support/be interested in a group that supports many different areas rather than the cause they mainly care about. At least it seems like cause specific orgs get much more funding than multi-cause/EA orgs.

I think this is outside the scope of the book, the example of Operation Desert Storm wasn't that the general was trying to do the most good, but was given an objective by people higher up (who maybe made mistakes with their own strategic thinking).

I'm not even sure the book would suggest you ignore these externalities if that was the goal you were aiming for, it's about providing a framework and some tools to help come up with better strategies.

There is a post here that looks into this question. (Although almost 10 years ago).

"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:
   a - 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).
   b - 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.
   c - 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:
For these reasons, one needs to come up with short-term room for more funding estimates.

Crucially, many room-for-more-funding numbers do not include scale-up and seem to be an estimate of how much money the charities can use to fund projects in the short-term (i.e. in the next couple of years). In other words, these estimates do not take into account potential mid-term scale-up of their interventions into other countries or into more projects (see for instance[5],[6]). For instance, Givewell reports that AMF’s room for more funding in the next year is $25 Million, which translates to roughly 5 million bednets. Because AMF has reported to be constricted in terms of funding in the short-term, they had not been actively reaching out to other countries to discuss new net programs in the beginning of 2015[7]. AMF also has more leverage with regards to national malaria control programs agreeing to implement their strict and rigid monitoring and evaluation process, when they agree to give governments millions as opposed to thousands of bednets[8].

Because these room for more funding estimates do not include scale up, the Gates foundation cannot simply close the funding gap for bednets."

Also if there was a way of automating this work, I'd be interested in chatting about that.

You may find other sources from the links I include in these newsletters.

Monthly Overload of EA

Global Development & EA

I think people can be heavily involved in something without having to take the identity of that thing. For example, if someone worked 15 years at Google, they wouldn't have to describe themselves as a 'googler' even if the P&C team calls everyone a googler with a shared Google identity.

Self identification makes most sense to me. 

For example "at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as "effective altruists". "

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