All of Jack Lewars's Comments + Replies

This is an absolutely staggering challenge - anyone who has ever run even a half marathon will know how long that feels, and this is tens of them back to back!

I also know as a former colleague how much effort Emma puts into training, getting up at 5am every day so she can be at her desk ready to go for 9am.

This may not be the type of fundraising EA usually does but a pledge of even $1 per mile could help to crowd in new donors who wouldn't give on a recurring basis to New Incentives. I really encourage promoting this campaign as HIA trials campaign fundraising through sport as a way to widen the base of effective donors.

Thank you!

Thanks mate, this is really lovely to read. Will you be at EAG London?

One for the World has had the Double The Donation widget for a couple of years. Unfortunately, it is about to become considerably more expensive, as they are upgrading everyone to a service called Match365. The plus side of this is that it will search your database for people who could be getting matching and email them proactively, and try to smooth the process of them getting matching. The downside is that it's fairly expensive (~$4k/year), but I think it'd still be positive ROI, at least in the first year (probably with diminishing returns after that).

O... (read more)

I believe GWWC do include 'income you have sacrificed to do direct work' in their pledge. (Correct me if I'm wrong, GWWC folks.)

Although, of course, your main argument (which I endorse) would still be true - you'd almost certainly still be earning substantially above the minimum wage in your region, and could most probably still give up 10% of your income, without materially affecting your wellbeing. So it's a bit debatable if you should then feel like you've "fulfilled a pledge" by doing direct work at a lower salary.

Thanks for clarifying, Lizka. Just for clarity on what follows - I absolutely don't think you're thinking this through in bad faith, so I don't want to come across as suggesting that. I do wonder if there might be some blind spots in your reasoning though, so I'm testing out the following to shine a light into those grey areas.

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On your point 1 - what if was just "before my expected natural death/in my will"? I guess my point is: would you accept that it's reasonable to pledge to give away financial resources that you ultimately didn't need, after they had ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this - it definitely makes sense to me and resonates with another discussion we had in the Berlin EA office recently on what counts as "disposable income".

I would just note three things:

1. If you are not pledging in order to build up financial security, would you consider pledging to donate these funds later in life if it turns out you don't need them? A lot of your reasoning seems to be about self-insurance, which makes sense, but in the event that you don't need the insurance (e.g. because you stay impactfully employed largely without a

Thanks, I agree with your clarification on the point I was trying to make

Thanks, this also made me pause. I can imagine some occasions where you might encourage employees to break the law (although this still seems super ethically fraught) - for example, some direct action in e.g. animal welfare. However, the examples here are 'to gain recreational and productivity drugs' and to drive around doing menial tasks'.

So if you're saying "it isn't always unambiguously ethically wrong to encourage employees to commit crimes" then I guess yes, in some very limited cases I can see that.

But if you're saying "in these instances it was honest, honourable and conscientious to encourage employees to break the law" then I very strongly disagree.

I'm particularly interested in whether or not they were encouraged to break the law for people who had financial and professional power over them, which seems less nuanced than 'how threatening is or isn't this WhatsApp exchange'.

This gave me pause for thought, so thank you for writing it. I also respect that you likely won't engage with this response to protect your own wellbeing.

I just want to raise, however, that I think you have almost completely failed to address a) the power dynamics involved; and b) the apparently uncontroversial claim that people were asked to break laws by people who had professional and financial power over them.

It seems impossible to square the latter with being "honest, honourable and conscientious".

I understand that you are using this as an example of something you think is untrue and to demonstrate the asymmetrical burden of refuting a lot of claims.

However, if you're prioritising, I would be most interested in whether it is true that you a) encouraged someone who you had financial and professional power over to drive without a driving licence; and b) encouraged someone in the same situation to smuggle drugs across international borders for you.

Whether or not they are formally an employee, encouraging people you have financial and professional power... (read more)

Beautifully written, thank you for writing it

Thank you for writing this and for the honest self evaluation.

Yes, good point

Can I reserve two of these for me and my wife (not on the forum and so not under 'Going' above)? If not, I can book my own

Ah great! I'll dm you my email

Hey Lynn - so OFTW probably isn't best-placed for a national group, as our page would look something like this: https://donational.org/oftw-uk

However, Giving What We Can might be able to offer something a bit better.

What country are you based in?

Thanks for engaging so positively here.

A couple of quick reactions:

much more cost-effectively that GiveWell's top charities, whose sign of impact is unclear to me

This is a very bold claim, made quite casually! Especially in light of:

There is a sense in which feedback loops are short.

I would evaluate these options through the GiveWell criteria - evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and room for more funding.

For the GiveWell charities, they score very highly on each metric. For example, they are each supported by multiple randomised control trials. ... (read more)

Finally, I think you acknowledge but probably underweight the importance of giving more weight to recent performance. For many organisations, the 'revenue curve' of donations will start out low but then grow rapidly. So the relevant thing for me is the direction of travel of Ayuda Efectiva, not its performance as an average of its first three years. You can see the value of looking at the direction of travel if you look at the performance of Effektiv Spenden and, to some extent, Giving What We Can (although GWWC had significant 'unfair advantages' in its early years). In each case, their performance has improved substantially over time.

In contrast, 11 % and 15 % of GWWC’s pledge and non-pledge donations went towards the area of creating a better future, which I think is much more effective. I do not think this corresponds to an extreme position.

I don't think this position is "extreme" but it is certainly highly debatable. Longtermist giving has fewer donation opportunities; can absorb less extra funding and deploy it effectively; and has very long feedback loops, which are hard to measure and have untested theories of change. In the case of AI safety, it also seems to have... (read more)

Thanks for this Vasco - always a useful exercise to look at cost-effectiveness, especially in an area like effective giving, where the money-moved is quite easily measured.

Some thoughts on this, which I'll split into different comments for ease of discussion:

"Nevertheless, the counterfactual marginal multipliers adjusted for cost-effectiveness and indirect impacts should ideally be equal. In other words, donating to any effective giving organisation should be similarly effective taking into account all effects."

This seems very unlikely to be true in p... (read more)

Thanks for publishing this Ollie - really interesting, and definitely great 'truth-seeking'.

I think I'd highlight some of your caveats (although this could be a case of me prioritising intuition over data and being misled by that).

My experience as a full-time ED within EA is that retreats are substantially more valuable than EAGs/EAGxs/EAGxVirtuals. For example, I would skip every conference to go to the Effective Giving Summit; and I felt that this summit was roughly 10x more valuable than what I would otherwise have spent the time on. I expect this relat... (read more)

I think the application process is spelt out in the application pack, which is still live here: https://1fortheworld.org/jobs-at-oftw

We did an initial screen on the application form, then 3 people reviewed the remaining candidates in more depth to form a longlist, and now 10 people are having three 30-min 'informal chats' with me and two Board members. Finally, our recommendations will go to the whole Board. In each round, we had three opinions and the other two were Board members.

Grayden and the EA Good Governance Project will advise you to keep the ED ou... (read more)

Yes, this is more what I meant (although not sure this defuses the criticisms/disagreement)

This was basically my thinking. I think it is reasonable to keep an emergency fund to cover things like (in particular) unexpected healthcare bills, and that giving away 10% would make this hard to do. My anecdotal experience of high cost of living cities in the US is that it would be challenging to live there on $35k of take home salary.

Of course, in a strictly utilitarian sense, I guess it isn't "reasonable", because it's not more "reasonable" than protecting someone from a deadly case of malaria - but then none of us lives out that maximalist thinking i... (read more)

100%. Very happy to share our onboarding flow for anyone who is interested

Great question. Our two main sources were targeted messages to potential candidates using LinkedIn searches; and 80k, which has such a big reach that it bought in a lot of people who wouldn't consider themselves 'part of EA' (obviously you could argue that they are if they are on 80k's newsletter, but I think that is a low bar).

We are also a bit unusual in having a Board almost entirely composed of people who are 'EA adjacent but not core EA', and so that helped to spread the word to people within their networks but still able to offer an outside view.

I think two

Risks/objections/exemptions:

1. Bigger Boards are unwieldy - yes, they can be. This is really a question of Board process though. A good chairperson and CEO can keep meetings on track, prevent grandstanding etc.

2. Board members can interfere and slow things down - yes, bad Board members can, but you can manage this (especially with a competent chairperson). Imagine an employee told you that they won't accept having a manager, because managers can interfere and slow things down. I imagine the response would be 'yes, bad managers do that; but you don't get to... (read more)

Thanks for this Sjir. Unsurprisingly, I agree with almost all of it.

I think you make this point overall but just want to emphasise: I don't think giving 10% is feasible for the median American in their twenties (for example). So I think I would phrase this as something like 'giving effectively should be normal for those with disposable income in high income countries; and it should be normal to give significantly according to your means.'

You may be right that 10% is in fact feasible for most people within EA, but that is a function of EA attracting a lot of people with unusual financial security.

I'm interested to know if you think there could be a problem with attracting people where remuneration is the biggest decision-making factor.

I am somewhat sceptical of this argument (I have seen it used to say "we should pay minimum wage because if you really care you'll take the job anyway") - but I also wonder if we can sustain a bidding war against e.g. DeepMind for talent, and if a better approach might be something like GiveWell's ('salary shouldn't be the primary reason people leave GiveWell, but also not the primary reason that they join').

What do you think?

Thank you, this is helpful

Thanks so much for writing this.

In the specific instance that someone challenges you over using QALYs/DALYs at all, what would you say in response?

It seems to me that you do at some point have to bite the bullet and believe that 'some disabilities are more life limiting than others'; and 'there are many disabilities that I would choose to avoid'. But then I feel like I'm implicitly saying something about valuing some people's lives less than others, or saying that I would ultimately choose to divert resources from one person's suffering to another's.

This actually came up in a corporate talk that I did and I fudged the answer, incidentally.

You might enjoy the book 'Thanks for the Feedback', which basically emphasises this point a lot.

I guess any of the following might be examples (emphasis on might):

• it seems bad to buy expensive historic buildings, which don't seem fit-for-purpose for the proposed use case and have really high running costs - but the people involved are really smart, so...

• it seems bad to fly people to the Bahamas to do coworking and collaboration, and like this is being driven by a billionaire's desire for company and personal convenience. It seems like this wouldn't be the method you would choose if you were starting from a point of maximising impact and cost-ef

I agree with your second point wholeheartedly.

Could you give some examples of the panics over minor incidents?

Thanks Tristan. I outlined these briefly above but I think they are things like:

• anyone in a relationship with anyone else is recused from all professional decision-making affecting that person. They can't hire or fire them, they can't conduct performance reviews, they can't promote them, they can't set their pay. They definitely shouldn't be the decision-maker on these things, but ideally shouldn't have input either - they just are not able to be impartial, and any process they fed into could easily be challenged as unfair (by their partner if they don't

Thanks for posting this.

Just to check my understand - did the participants actually donate their own money? Or were they asked how many frictional units of money they would theoretically donate?

This is my intuition as well - the phrasing of the 'strong demandingness' seemed quite jarring compared to the usual language of donation page copy.

I'm very surprised that you think a 3 person Board is less brittle than a bigger Board with varying levels of value alignment. How do 3 person Boards deal with all the things you list that can affect Board make up? They can't, because the Board becomes instantly non-quorate.

It seems intuitive that your chances of ending up in a one off weird situation are reduced if you have people who understand the risks properly in advance. I think a lot of what people with technical expertise do on Boards is reduce blind spots.

Hi Robin - thanks for this and I see your point. I think Jason put it perfectly above - alignment is often about the median Board member, where expertise is about the best Board member in a given context. So you can have both.

I have also seen a lot of trustees learn about the mission of the charity as part of the recruitment process and we shouldn't assume the only aligned people are people who already identify as EAs.

The downsides of prioritising alignment almost to the exclusion of all else are pretty clear, I think, and harder to mitigate than the downsides or lacking technical expertise, which takes years to develop.

Isn't part of this considering whether Will's comparative advantage is as a Board member? It seems very unlikely to me that it is, versus being a world class philosopher and communicator.

So I agree with your general point that leaders who make mistakes might not need to resign, but in the specific case I can't see how Will is most impactful by being a Board member at really any org, as opposed to e.g. a philosophical or grant-making advisor.

Thanks for making the case. I'm not qualified to say how good a Board member Nick is, but want to pick up on something you said which is widely believed and which I'm highly confident is false.

Namely - it isn't hard to find competent Board members. There are literally thousands of them out there, and charities outside EA appoint thousands of qualified, diligent Board members every year. I've recruited ~20 very good Board members in my career and have never run an open process that didn't find at least some qualified, diligent people, who did a good job.

EA ... (read more)

Great post, thanks.

I might elaborate on your last category to include a) well-intentioned high competence people accidentally creating bad systems; and b) well-intentioned high competence people put into bad systems by leadership (so not just leaders but e.g. a community health team trying to deal with sexual harassment by one of their own Board members).

I think your section header covers this, but the body focuses specifically on CEOs and Boards. Lots of people in EA, not just leadership, can end up making mistakes because the systems/policies they work within aren't fit for purpose.

Hard agree with this. It's why I think healthy handling of relationships at work is so important as a stepping stone to a healthy community overall.

Thanks for writing this Amber. I pretty firmly disagree, but I'm upvoting it anyway because I think we need to discuss these issues in the open, and you've put across your point of view in a measured, reasonable way. I hope to draft a response soon with some alternative suggestions.

(Also, as usual, @Peter Wildeford has made most of my points in his comment.)

I think my main disagreement is that this is taking on a straw man argument. I'm not aware of anyone suggesting that we should "prevent people from forming relationships with whom they want", at least n... (read more)

I think the word "probably" in this quotation is quite concerning - you should 100%, definitely, in every case and without question not let someone manage someone they are dating. It's an unresolvable conflict of interest and totally unprofessional.

But also, to Quinn's point, if it's a small org, even making this change might not really mitigate the problem. Imagine a 5 person team, where the CEO and one of the staff are dating, so then you change the reporting line for the junior person in the relationship. It seems highly probable that the new manager is going to be influenced by the fact that their boss is dating their subordinate.

I'm going to write a longer comment on how I think you can manage this below.