All of ethai's Comments + Replies

yeah not sure unfortunately!

TLYCS's own pledge is progressive with income, for what it's worth https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/take-the-pledge/ 

https://www.powerfordemocracies.org/research/our-recommendations/ !!

omg I have already left my EA comms job but I would be down to hang out and yap in there if that's welcome!!!

as far as I can tell the answer to this type of question is always that someone did a napkin calculation 10 years ago and decided that either (a) lots of funding within an arbitrarily-defined "cause area" means everything within that cause isn't neglected, or (b) affecting a large pool of funding isn't tractable enough and therefore not worth spending EA resources on, and then because of path dependency in the development of EA as a community of practice it's now just hard to gain traction or interest in cause areas outside of the EA canon

1000000% this is the messaging that resonates best for Giving Green donors, also precisely for the reasons you named. We did a bit of qualitative user research and persona work a few years ago on this, and it still continues to be a core theme with new donors (who range from EA-adjacent to classic environmentalist).  I don't have anything useful to add, just here to corroborate!

edit: ok I have one useful thing to add, which is that, especially because of the type of work we fund, we explicitly don't use "certain impact" or "best charity" framing. but "certainty in giving" is different from "certainty in impact"!

I once saw on the Forum that someone had scraped the 990s from a bunch of EA and AI safety* orgs and put all the salaries in a spreadsheet, with names - it wouldn't be that hard to go from that to at least an estimate of what you're looking for, for the highest-paid employees. I can't find a link to the post anymore, and want to respect that they might have taken it down with good reason, but given it's public information, if some enterprising data-wrangling Forum-poster wants to dm me for it I'm not opposed to sharing the link...

*I do have a loose intuition that besides the grantmaker/grantee divide, the AI/not-AI divide within EA is driving some of the bizarre funding and salary dynamics

When early digital experiments don’t show ROI, many orgs seem to conclude that the channel itself is misaligned, rather than that execution, resourcing, or the evaluation window were insufficient. Given small budgets and high standards of proof, it’s not surprising those early attempts fail — but that doesn’t tell us much about the counterfactual of sustained investment.

yeah I basically think this is the problem, and agree that some level of investment would yield a return, but small orgs can't just keep putting in time and money for hypothetical return at... (read more)

hm this is super interesting. I started Giving Green's comms/growth function, and at the time I remember talking to a bunch of EAs in comms and marketing functions for advice (RIP, EA comms slack!) - almost everyone said: digital marketing hasn't worked for us, what's worked is earned media and relationship-building. I don't really know whether that's due to underinvestment in good digital marketing, or the broader nonprofit fundraising environment, or the FTX collapse, or something else. But I think it's worth noting that a lot of us have experimented wit... (read more)

I think there are many cause-agnostic donor communities but not ideology-agnostic donor communities, if that makes sense, and I don't know of any donor networks with an EA ideology. Maybe EA city groups and the funding circles in the comments have some of the same functions?

there was a post about this last year: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oFcLqTETnC8rajxeg/advisors-for-smaller-major-donors

tl;dr is (1) a lot of evaluators will do this for their cause area (can't speak to every one but Giving Green is happy to advise donors of any size, just shoot us an email); (2) look into giving circles inside or outside EA

I'd add that it's probably worth seeking a financial advisor for the tax law and will writing type questions -- a lot of EA advisories offer free initial services, but I've been told that total assets >10... (read more)

Thank you for this! I had promised a couple of friends that I'd write up something for their upcoming spinouts and I'm very glad that someone who knows more than me has done it instead :D 

Two caveats I'd suggest to future nonprofit-starters, just because they're currently a giant headache for me:

• Decide early on what your physical address will be for any use cases that don't accept virtual mailboxes, knowing that said physical address might be something you need to share -- for example we need a physical address on file with our bank, they didn't accep

I love that High Impact Engineers is back and I generally like a forum-style place over Slack, but I want to push back specifically on "many engineers have a GitHub account" -- especially since your goal is to be welcoming to non-software-engineers, I wouldn't make this assumption! I was a materials engineering undergrad and none of my classes/internships/research projects used GitHub. Maybe it's really taken over in the last 10 years or something, but if not, you might want to consider being a bit more 101-level with the GitHub stuff, e.g. not using jargon like 'pull' or 'repo' without explanation -- when I see that kind of thing, at least personally my immediate reaction is "oh, this is a space for software engineers".

in addition to everything already said, I think this can be bad from an organizational sustainability perspective—if you decide to leave / get hit by a truck / etc, the organization now doesn't have the budget to hire someone new to do the work, meaning that some commitments will need to be dropped. Some funders will see this type of thing as a bad signal about the management of the organization.

Another way of leveraging your relative class privilege could be taking a part-time job and doing impactful volunteer work!

interestingly i've talked to a couple of other asian women in EA who have sort of an opposite experience—we (including myself here) feel like EA ideas and communities fundamentally don't capture things that are important to us as asian women, and so that actually forces us to be more balanced and draw our values from multiple places, rather than holding ourselves to a standard of being a more-optimized EA. one very literal example someone mentioned to me is that western cultures and traditions of thought emphasize breaking down systems into discrete parts ... (read more)

the most commonly soundbited research on this is Chenoweth's 3.5% rule if you want a place to start

Hmm. I think once we get into the territory of "plan to use", though, you end up with the same types of criticisms that apply to carbon credits and RECs, no? I really think that a nonzero price is not a good enough signal here! Polluters don't have perfect information about future climate regulations, future technologies, future market demand for their products, or even necessarily the future of the cap per Ville's point below. I read Making Climate Policy Work recently, which is a really thorough critique of the compliance markets; could be useful to see ... (read more)

I think people should keep re-releasing this idea because this community dynamic very much still exists! I've also seen extremely smart and motivated friends engage with and then "bounce off" EA because of this.

Gotcha. Since you're already in the UChicago network I think it's definitely worth getting in touch with someone about Climate Vault, as in the early days they were aiming at permanent retirement - I don't know the specifics of why they pivoted away from that model but I imagine you'll learn something useful. 

Giving Green briefly looked into some brokers with similar models here as well; ultimately we're pretty skeptical. Even if your marginal additionality is 1 for small purchases, it's inherently not a scalable model. If the core of what you're doin... (read more)

Inside baseball comment here but what's the relationship between Ultra Civic and Climate Vault? Assuming that as a recent UChicago econ grad you're familiar with them. (I used to work for Levitt, my team briefly explored working with Greenstone on Climate Vault when the model was purely about retiring allowances, before they pivoted to combining this with removal tons)

suggestion along the same lines: Fight for the Future has been sounding the alarm about consolidated corporate control of communication spaces and the risks that poses, especially to pro-democracy movements and to queer & trans folks. Haven't done a deep dive but have followed them for a while and they seem to be consistently ahead of the curve (alongside EFF) on the wonky things like Section 230, ID checks, net neutrality

hi sarah! yeah i think that's true as well. i think in my head it was already obvious and therefore not realization-worthy that engaged EAs believe AW is underfunded, but i also probably talk to people with this belief disproportionately often due to the climate/AW funding overlap bc i am learning elsewhere on the internet that people think this is weird

hahaha no I know, more seriously I just don't want to vote for a marginal funding post that I wrote! feels like it's not the point of the endeavor, I'd rather support other orgs in the community in a small way~

hmm not sure it's fair to make claims about what "consensus EA" believes based on the donation election honestly

• "consensus EA" seems like it is likely to be something other than "people who are on the Forum between Nov 18 and Dec 3"
  • I only pay attention to climate, but as a cause area it tends to be more prominent in "EA-wide" surveys/giving than it is among the most highly-engaged EAs (Forum readers)^[1]
• people are literally voting based on what OP is not funding

1. ^{^}

   I didn't even vote for GG bc I know it won't win, but it does warm my cold dead heart that four

I think Siobhan (hi! correct me if I'm wrong!) is primarily trying to say that the assumption of a given set of resources doesn't really hold anymore, and that acting like it does, at least from a comms perspective, can be harmful: i.e. EAs spending a lot of energy criticizing donations to food pantries is causing potential donors to be turned off from EA and therefore not give effectively or not give at all, regardless of whether the criticism is correct or not^[1].

This feels to me like part of the broader growing pains of "EA in a world where people actua... (read more)

not speaking for my employer but as someone who engages a lot with this donor segment both in my paid work and in my volunteer time: (a) I do not think such a thing exists for cause-agnostic lightweight advising (but if it does I would love to hear about it); (b) this is part of the gap Giving Green tries to fill on climate, and maybe there are parallel cause-specific advisories that have the flexibility to advise smaller donors?; (c) I think the most doable thing here for an individual small major donor is to join a community of donors giving at around th... (read more)

this could be true, i don't have a good sense of who's most prestigious in EA aside from the obvious* - my claim is more that i've seen this happen in examples and that it would be bad if that was happening all the time, but i am not attuned enough to broad EA social dynamics to know if that is happening all the time

*the obvious ones are the ones who are prestigious because they Did Something a long time ago, which I think doesn't really count as a counterexample to the critical tendency as it manifests now

an observation I've had recently across a few examples* is that

• criticizers acquire more social capital than doers (or celebraters of the doers)
• criticizers tend to not pay attention to their social capital relative to the thing they are criticizing - criticizers with social status can easily shut down small or new doers, less so for established doers
• criticizers gain enough social capital that they themselves become above (meaningful) criticism*

I get the idea that all arguments should be taken on their merits in a place like this, but in practice, it's not ... (read more)

I suppose I'm skeptical that quant scores in an auto-sent email will actually give you a nuanced sense - but I do see how, e.g., if over time you realize it's always your interview or always your quant question that scores poorly, that is a good signal

I do think being kind is an underrated part of hiring!

Quantitative scoring doesn't really give you that, though!

(I run hiring rounds with ~100-1000 applicants) agree with Jamie here. However, if someone was close to a cutoff, I do specifically include "encourage you to apply to future roles" in my rejection email. I also always respond when somebody asks for feedback proactively.

Is revealing scores useful to candidates for some other reason not covered by that? It seems to me the primary reason (since it sounds like you aren't asking for qualitative feedback to also be provided) would be to inform candidates as to whether applying for future similar roles is worth the effort.

James this is great! I really like your framing of donations as in line with other personal actions; I've seen the FP graph but never actually interpreted it in the way you have. 

Semi-related ramble, I've been workshopping this idea of giving as a way of expressing agency—especially when it comes to climate, I think a lot of people turn to plastic bags etc. because they want to feel like they're directly responsible for a Good Thing. People want to see and feel the impact of their actions, and donations don't often provide that sense of "I did this, a... (read more)

strong upvoted, I think it's good to encourage non-EAs to give more effectively and I think it's good to broaden what we think of as "evidence" and consider its pros and cons.

I work with a community in my city that gives primarily locally (leaving aside my judgment on that), and I find that many people think that they're not giving based on any idea of effectiveness: e.g. they'll say they're giving based on community need, or trust in a relationship they have, or values-alignment. But usually there's an implicit sense of "what is effective" underneath that... (read more)

Yeah, strong agree with this. [I used to work in VC and frequently diligenced ARPA-E grantees.] I don't think the cited study supports the claim that all externalities are priced in in the US, let alone globally. 

I would also guess that the valuation of the 26 exited companies is an underestimation of overall impact for other reasons - top of mind: impact of non-exited companies, learning benefit to the field of a company that "fails" and exits at a very low valuation.

@charrin thanks for writing this, as a below commenter said it's nice to see an EA-style investigation of a potentially impactful career path outside the community! 

Thank you for sharing that!

For what it's worth, I think "discussions of DEI end up becoming discussions about women" is pretty common - not to say it's excusable, but I don't think that's unique to EA.

Thanks, I realize this is a tricky thing to talk about publicly (certainly trickier for you, as someone whose name people actually know, than for me, who can say whatever I want!). I'm coming in with a stronger prior from "the outside world", where I've seen multiple friends ignored/disbelieved/attacked for telling their stories of sexual violence, so maybe I need to better calibrate for intra-EA-community response. I agree/hope that our goals shouldn't be at odds, and that's what I was trying to say that maybe did not come across: I didn't want people to ... (read more)

Thank you, this is clarifying for me and I hope for others.

Responses to me, including yours, have helped me update my thinking on how the EA community handles gendered violence. I wasn't aware of these cases and am glad, and hope that other women seeing this might also feel more supported within EA knowing this. I realize there are obvious reasons why these things aren't very public, but I hope that somehow we can make it clearer to women that Kathy's case, and the community's response, was an outlier.

I would still push back against the gender-reversal fal... (read more)

Thank you, yeah I think I may be overindexing on a few public examples (not being privy to the private examples that you and others in thread have brought up). Glad to hear that there are plenty of examples of the community responding well to protect victims/survivors.

I still also don't think everything's fine, but unsure to what extent EA is worse than the rest of the world, where things are also not fine on this front.

Yeah, this is very fair and I agree that transparency is not always the right call. To clarify, I'll say that my stance here, medium confidence, is: (1) in instances which the victim/survivor has already made their accusations public,  or in instances where it's already necessarily something that isn't interpersonal [e.g. hotness ranking], the process of accountability or repair, or at least the fact that one exists, should be public; (2) it should be transparent what kind of process a victim can expect when harm happens.

There's some literature around... (read more)

edit: after discussion below & other comments on this post, I feel less strongly about the claim "EA community is bad at addressing harm", but stand by / am clarifying my general point, which is that the veracity of Kathy's claims doesn't detract from any of the other valid points that Maya makes and I don't think people should discount the rest of these points.

A suggestion to people who are approaching this from a "was Kathy lying?" lens: I think it's also important to understand this post in the context of the broader movement around sexual assault a... (read more)

thanks for pointing this out - I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion "like normal people", because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not  really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed i... (read more)

Thanks for writing this - this resonates a lot with my experience, as I was also exposed to and very put off from EA in college! But have eventually, slowly, made my way back here :)

I want to add that many of the "disconcerting" tactics community builders use are pretty well-established among community organizers (and larger student groups, like Greek life). So my sense is that the key problem lies in EA using well-proven community building tactics, but implementing them poorly. Having a scripted 1:1, a CRM, intro talks; making leadership asks of younger a... (read more)

I do community building with a (non-student, non-religious, non-EA) group that talks a lot about pretty sensitive topics, and we explicitly ask for permission to record things in the CRM. We don't ask "can we put you in our database?"; we phrase it as "hey, I'd love to connect you with XYZ folks in the chapter who have ABC in common with you, would you mind if I take some notes on what we talked about today, so I can share with them later?" But we take pretty seriously the importance of consent and privacy in the work that we're doing.

Also, as someone who ... (read more)

I think that's precisely what I'm saying - people have different preferences, but that doesn't negate the existence of broader dynamics of privilege, i.e. John's earlier comment, and doesn't negate that the facts of the matter are shaped by intersecting oppressions. 

Assuming that we take as true that systemic oppression is a real thing, the distinction is this: I don't consider myself to have a dating "advantage", but I do think that I have a larger dating pool than the average Asian man because of the ways in which Asian women sit at the intersection... (read more)

Ah, I apologize, I think I've phrased my first comment poorly. I believe that the difference in desirability is due to both fetishization of women and emasculation of men. My initial comment did not make that clear due to the word "mostly", which was the wrong word to use. I meant simply to highlight that desirability as an Asian woman is not without its downsides. 

Re: 

It doesn't predict that being a member of two "oppressed" classes can result in an intersectional "privilege"... In any case, there are disadvantages associated with fetishization,

I've been thinking about the (perceived or actual) tension between intersectionality and effective giving for a while now and haven't had the words to think through it productively, so thank you for providing those words and sparking this discussion!

One thing I would add that is relevant to EAs thinking about this:

Being both a part of the wealthy global elite and people of colour, they feel a special obligation to help people within their own communities who are not blessed with the same advantages. Whether or not this feeling of obligation cashes out in c

To weigh in here as someone who had to read some race studies literature in college: 

the idea that privileged white men find it easier to take a universalising, impartial approach to doing good seems intuitively plausible

I think that's probably true - the theory I've read is based on the idea that white straight men are positioned as the "norm" under racial/gender hierarchy in Western society. Everyone else is othered and seen in relation to that norm. Some oversimplified examples: 

• "Unisex" sizing is actually men's sizing.
• Fresh Off The Boat is ma