All of jayd's Comments + Replies
I think the key story here is that Open Phil has ramped up donations from $30m to over $120m (4-fold growth in a year), and is expected to increase that several times more in the next few years, but this would be easy to miss in the presentation above.
That's not EA as a movement though.
Do you have any of your research to date on this written up in a form that you can share and people can comment on?
This is an interesting discussion, people listing high earning careers which're comparatively easy to get: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1002743319782025/
I haven't had an easy way of linking to that opinion before; now I do. So as an 80k donor I'm glad they also see the value of distancing themselves from the 'it's all good as long as you donate' position.
To be clear, you think it's worth spending a few hundred quid apiece for linkable resources like this? (I.e. you'd pay others a similar amount in an impact purchase if they did so.)
you run the risk of discounting the impact of any project in which multiple actors were involved unless you have a precise break down of the causal power of each. That would essentially mean that it never looked worthwhile to engage with governments
If you look at what I said, you'll see it doesn't imply that - it's simply saying we should do our best job at estimating the impact of GPP, with a spelt out justification of this, and that without this the reallocation of the £2.5bn shouldn't be relied upon as a tangible result.
Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did - which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it!
I have to admit I skimmed over that as I was reading it. It does make it especially unegregious, and I tried to be clear that I didn't think you were doing anything wrong! I believe it was easy to skim over because it wasn't flagged as a qualification to the claim that this was a tangible result, but as I said I understand you can't really make qualifications explicit when needing to raise money.
(And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
That's entirely true.
Here are the relevant comments from one of the posts:
"The development of ODA five year strategies at Dfid and elsewhere are the result of an enormous number of factors and the interventions of hundreds of experts and even more interventions by NGOs in developing countries. I could name 50 or more groups in regular relationship with Dfid who, along with folks from the GPP could and will be taking a share of the credit."
"Yes, it's great that GPP got to have some input, but I agree with Frances to remember all the vast number of others having i...
This is not especially egregious in a fundraising post, and I understand that in these you have to adopt the persona of a marketer and can't add too many qualifications and doubts. So I don't think it's necessarily bad that you said this. But, as an intellectual matter, I don't think it's quite fair to count "[DFID] reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work" as one of your "tangible results so far". This was discussed plenty on the Facebook gro...
No, it sounds as if https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app (specifically the README.md shown at the bottom of it) will be the place you keep updated featuring information about the project and links to this. Thank you.
Thanks for putting the work in to generate these hard numbers, that kind of work is always helpful.
William MacAskill and his ex-wife recently published a high profile article on wild animal suffering, using Cecil the Lion as a hook to argue that (given he was a predator) his death may have been a good thing, and that we should perhaps kill all lions: http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/
What did people think of this? I fear it may have done more harm than good, and I don't understand the choice to publish something so controversial now, with a book to promote and a...
spending a few bucks on recreation is not likely to move the needle in terms of your overall impact
Why is that? Do you mean that someone spending $500 less on entertainment over the year and donating it instead will result in less rather than more money going to help people, due to damage to sustainability and marketability?
Size, in terms of staff, would be one measure. Another is their budget: GiveWell’s revenue and expenses were in the area of $2–3 million in 2014; Animal Charity Evaluators’ is about one order of magnitude lower.
Those are both surely factors to take into account in evaluating how neglected something is, but other factors include how important and tractable the work (or the marginal work is). All of this lets you calculate out the value of marginal dollars.
...The Fundraising Prospectus 2015 (page 16–17) talks about fundraising £150,000 for the rest of 2015
What ACE is doing reminds me a lot of what Open Phil is doing in terms of how hard it is for them to quantify the impact of the charities. This doesn’t seem to be so much in the nature of the cause areas – as with prioritizing research or existential risk – but rather the result of the neglect of the area, so that ACE has only little and poor-quality prior research to draw on.
This seems correct.
...Evidence Action and SCI are top contenders, but I think the evidentiary basis for the effectiveness of deworming, while sizable, is more ambiguous than that fo
Unfortunately, we could only track website visitors as far as clicking a "donate" button on TLYCS "Where To Donate" page (http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/Where-to-Donate). After clicking the button they are directed to the individual charity website, so we don't have visibility into if they actually followed through with making a donation, or how much that donation was.
Does LYCS have any estimates which speak to that, even tangentially, for instance for it's general impact evaluations?
We are considering a/b testing some new questions, and would love suggestions on different phrasing.
How about using different questions from the EA Census? There was already a big community discussion on what suggestions to include on that, on this forum I think.
This is especiall useful and practical compared with other posts in your series so far - a lot of what you say about individuals and institutions is plausible.
I like the multiple targets way of fundraising - it helps bring clarity to thinking about the effect of my possible donations.
The key question with hierarchies is whether the people at the top are thoughtful and competent people. I feel like the EA movement has been pretty lucky in this regard.
Not sure if I agree with this - it seems like that's the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who've just been funnelling more and more of the cult's money to themselves. More of an "outside view" would be helpful.
I've seen people get very embarrassed by this but perhaps that's irrational on there part and due to social oversensitivity out of proportion to the actual social costs (hardly unheard of)
Effective Altruism isn't an organisation though; it's some combination of:
- An attitude (or a question), and the collection or community of people who share it
- A movement
- A cause, or collection of causes
We don't normally see a strong top-down hierarchy in these except in some religious movements new and old:
- Take the attitude of scepticism towards religious claims, or of asking the question which position on religion has the strongest evidence. Richard Dawkins is the closest person to being a leader of this, but isn't very close (fortunately, if you ask
Does this mainly just require knowing CSS? Or can you do mockups in a graphics program and leave the CSS to someone else?
What sort of technical skills does this require? Is it mainly testing out a few plugins for MediaWiki (or WordPress or whatever)?
In extremis, presumably the prestige costs of being totally uninformed about the news are worth avoiding?
That reply:
Ok this is all fair. I think, however, that a big fraction of the historical impact is due to on-going activity, of the kind that could continue, rather than being all due to the 'set up' generating the stream. And that would mean the historical ratio is a reasonable guide to the future.
...This can be hard to see from the outside, but if you look at where new pledgers are coming from, it's often new press coverage or student group activity. Many also only take the pledge after being nudged by someone in person, even if they had heard about GWW
To expand on this, the difference between core GWWC (and various layers of the core) and marginal GWWC appears to be a fundamental issue here. In response to a long thread in the other post were people were worrying about GWWC's expansion at some point hitting lower than 1:1 fundraising ratios, Peter put it succinctly:
...I agree that GWWC's ratio is probably above 1 with a good deal of confidence (though I haven't done the formal math to evaluate how extreme that statement is). But I think the more compelling argument is that expansion funding on the margin
Yes, there's a huge, huge difference between the impact of GWWC existing as a place where people who wanted to pledge 10% of their income to help those living in global poverty could join others in publicly doing so, and the impact of its marginal funded activities now. GWWC existed as that place before The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded around it as an organisation with donors and a budget supporting paid employees. If minimal resources were spent on creating the basic infrastructure, and I don't know if that's so, but if so, then it had a mega...
I understand The Centre for Effective Altruism (TGPP, GWWC, e.t.c.) does and has done a lot of philosophical and methodological research, so you might want to talk to them.
Good idea. Indeed, doesn't taking the Life You Can Save pledge seems like a pretty good candidate for a High ask?
Do vegan leafleters ever try to target groups they think'd be responsive? Does anyone (e.g. Peter Hurford) know what conversion rate do they get from those, on average?
Or indeed many times less than 0.1% - it seems like you have a quite good sense of what the conversion rate is pegged to be, but don't some people think vegan-creation leafleting can healthily be treated as not working for practical purposes?
In addition, politics may be unusually friendly to EA-morality, or at least to consequentialism. Compare discussions of government house utilitarianism.
I would guesstimate at least around 70% were full time or "low income" by this measure.
Is this is a typo? Do you mean "not full time" or not working or "full time students"?
Thanks, I look forwards to reading that. I've heard that GiveWell have said that they haven't found AdWords very worthwhile however - does that fit with your impression?
A late thank you!