Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

All of EricFriedman's Comments + Replies

Rethink Grants: an evaluation of Donational’s Corporate Ambassador Program
EricFriedman5y7
0
0

It took me a while to finish reading this report, so I know I’m joining this comment thread late. There were lots of good thoughts shared in other comments, so I’ll try to focus my thoughts are areas that are different:

---There could be a donor coordination problem for this particular opportunity. Donational might not be able to do a pilot with less than $40k, and anything over $40k would be more than needed. How do donors know if they are fully funded?

---Have you seen the write-ups of ImpactMatters (https://www.impactmatters.org/)? If not, it may be worth

... (read more)
Reply
3
Tee
5y
Hey Eric, we appreciate the kind words and thank you for taking the time to bring some of these things to our attention. Great question - were RG to continue on, the idea was for us to be quite involved in the fundraising process for recommended projects. If Donational were interested in continuing with the CAP, we would likely engage in a joint fundraising effort where we would take special care to keep key funders and the wider public in the loop regarding fundraising milestones and progress. This could even take the form of a public fundraising campaign in certain cases. We have! In fact, Luisa Rodriguez, one of the Rethink Priorities analysts on this report, is a former ImpactMatters research analyst. ImpactMatters was also among the organizations that we drew inspiration from for Our Process. This could certainly be helpful. I think a lot more could be done to better highlight key reasoning within future potential evaluations, including detailed notes on criteria that were important in the VOI, for example. That’s correct, and now that you mention it, future reports could expand more on all the possible intervention points that RG would consider for improving the overall quality of projects.I cover quite a bit of that in this reply in a different thread. As an example from this report, in the Potential Issues section, we mention pretty large plan changes from presenting the founder with a BOTEC that we came up with based on a handful of parameters that we considered crucial. Having this all mapped out onto one place would certainly be better.
Should effective altruists work on taxation of the very rich?
EricFriedman8y0
0
0

Interesting post. It seems to intertwine multiple issues:

  1. Should the tax structure be changed so the wealthy pay a different share of taxes, or pay them in different ways?
  2. Should the overall level of taxes be changed?
  3. Should the distribution of government spending be changed?

The three questions above should be addressed separately, then brought together into a more coherent view. I wish a presidential candidate would actually do that and relate it to their policy preferences, but I doubt most will.

I'm cautious about arguments to simply increase t... (read more)

Reply
1
Robert_Wiblin
8y
I was happy to mix 1 and 2 - I didn't intend to do more than allude to question 3 here. I don't have a strong view on the answers - the question is whether they are important, neglected and tractable enough to be worth specialising in. It's reasonable to be cautious about the distortions created by some taxes, but no reason to assume the costs exceed the benefits before checking. Creating a less distortionary tax mix is part of the project.
Marketing Effective Altruism: What can we expect from book sales?
EricFriedman9y1
0
0

Good post. It is consistent with my experience in publishing. One other thing EAs can do to help promote these books is review them on Amazon. The star ratings influence purchasing decisions of many people, so maintaining a high rating for these books can boost sales.

Reply
Where I'm giving and why: Eric Friedman
EricFriedman10y0
0
0

Peter and Holden, thanks for sharing your feedback. I’ll provide some additional thoughts to address your comments.

Peter, regarding your comments about possibly over-diversifying, that is an issue I considered. My giving this year is more spread out than in the past several years. I wasn’t trying to optimize on a single dimension of giving (e.g. giving to learn, maximizing expected immediate impact, etc), but to balance multiple factors. When weighing everything, I was unable to come up with one charity that I viewed as clearly standing out above th... (read more)

Reply