My sense is that this is absolutely true:

election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor

However, I also get the sense that it's quite hard, in a way that (for example) following GiveWell recommendations isn't. Politics is highly anti-inductive and it's really hard to know how and where to give, and even in retrospect it can often be hard to tell if one's donations made a difference.

Personally I stay away from political donations just because I feel like I don't understand it well, and getting that understanding is really quite difficult. It's hard to have true beliefs about politics for a variety of reasons.

I think the claim is that while this intervention wasn’t as cost effective as we thought, it’s still more cost effective than most interventions. The belief regarding the cost effectiveness (about a third as good as we thought) is itself supported by evidence, so if you think the best options are 10× as good as the average ones, you would still expect this one to be “above average”. Not sure about 90th percentile but I do think there’s a fair amount of NGO work whose effectiveness is statist indistinguishable from zero, and a minority that’s arguable actively harmful.

Did you produce this podcast? Can you share a link?

“Monitoring and Evaluation”, as I understand it.

Is it possible that subgroups within EA have sexual harrassment rates that are significantly above or below baseline? For example, maybe AI related spaces or SF Bay Area spaces have higher levels of sexual harrassment. Then people who are generally in those spaces would subjectively observe that the level of sexual harrassment is high, even though it might not be if you were to average across all of EA.

If there are parts of EA that have lower than average levels of sexual harrassment, I would not expect anyone to speak up and say, "man, this animal welfare community sure doesn't have much sexual harrassment". So there is a bias in terms of who is moved to share their experience.

At the risk of being too curmudgeonly, I'd say the main take is to stay away from the news cycle.

I would argue that MacKenzie Scott’s giving is pretty close to direct indexing and … pretty not great. Though it does have the one advantage that apparently nobody will criticize you for taking this approach.

Maybe instead of indexing one should do something like, spend 5 minutes upfront to decide what your default option will be, be it GiveDirectly, GiveWell, or something else (even unicef!). And then send whatever you haven’t granted there.

My understanding is that there is an extensive body of evidence that people become more rational and put in more cognitive effort when there are real-money stakes involved; but I would welcome commentary from someone more familiar with the literature.

Among EAs, it has become de facto or even obligatory to “buy” Longtermism.

I don't really agree with this, there are plenty of shorttermist EAs and the majority of EA funding goes to shorttermist causes.

Thanks for this thoughtful piece.

One thing that I worry about when communicating on LinkedIn about EA affiliations is do-gooder derogation. Currently I am in a position where I don't have to worry about that as much, but I can easily imagine that employers might feel they can make a lowball offer to someone who is "just going to give it to charity anyway" (versus spend it on private school or whatever). For this reason I set my EA group affiliations on LinkedIn to private.