All of number42's Comments + Replies

Animal Charity Evaluators started as an 80,000 Hours project

More precisely, it was started by a student who came to volunteer in Oxford one summer, had the idea and then created it over that summer and afterwards as his brainchild, fundraising to start it as a staffed-up charity, etc. CEA hosted a number of students who came to do volunteer work over summers and other free periods. So while it was labelled an 80,000 Hours project, it's appropriate to use it as an example of someone with little relevant experience starting a charity.

Yeah, I'd make it more visible, and flag it more earlier - it's a good idea which could use more responses.

For the same reasons that race was included in the 2017 survey, it could be useful to ask about parental education (as a proxy for socioeconomic background).

Clever idea, seconded.

Oh, no one reads this. We're all bots.

Wouldn't even as small a donation as a few hundred dollars translate into more bandwidth?

I might give to a portfolio in a particular cause area like meta. I'd only be giving a small portion of my pledge to that though, perhaps about £100 a month - would that even be worth it for the admin hassle for you?

As the help text below it says, that's specifically for EA Profiles (which are the profiles at that link). It'll only accept a link to one of those; if you don't already have one, you should create one!

To explain why I downvoted, I don't like this general kind of response (i.e. "shouldn't this be part of large organisation X?"):

• It discourages people from actually doing things, for several reasons.
• Dealing with a large organisation before starting the work takes time and is offputting, and many ideas will peter out or run into the ground if people are pressured to always do this.
• It's quite a negative response to give to someone trying to start something.
• It can involve unhealthy deference to or hero worship of large organisations.
• There are r

No, all your thoughts seems very sensible. The benefits of different organisations sticking to their own distinct, clear focuses are often overlooked, to their cost.

What are the ways that we can spread EA to others? Is there a list, and are there some outreach methods that are particularly good?

Great introduction for non-EAs; it's worth mentioning that EAs likely won't learn anything new about it.

The EA Wiki would be a better place to put this, among other reasons because then everyone could keep it updated: http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/

More concretely, GWWC staff right now pursue several channels to growth that wouldn't happen without them:

Speaking to interested people one-on-one (few join just from written content alone; being made 'the ask' is really important) Fostering chapters (e.g. giving them materials, arranging pledge drives, encouraging them, doing events) - most of this wouldn't happen otherwise. Seeking press attention to get new people involved - ditto, mostly wouldn't happen otherwise.

Does GWWC have rough estimates of how many members each of these channels lead to? Or could you or other CEA staff hazard a guess, even rough?

To clarify, is your total 2016 budget £1.7 million (roughly $2.7 milllion), ie the total of the figures you gave?

What would count as taking Effective Altruist frugalness too far, and what are the arguments against it? I'm torn as to whether I should keep eating out or buying first hand clothes, but these do bring time savings and other benefits.

Is the defence of the global poverty cause that Tom Ash and Peter Hurford were writing coming? I was looking forwards to that.

Ben Clifford ran local London meetup for developers to work on tech projects

Was that a regular thing?

Unfortunately, the measurement and metrics around EA are quite weak and have not yet been brought together. We do not, for example, have numbers around how many people are EAs (no matter what definitions we use), any understanding of total exposure, etc.

We could improve this by getting as many people as possible to take at least a first page of questions or two on the annual EA census. Among other things that helps establish a lower bound number of people who are EA's by some definition and their basic characteristics. I remember that around the time th... (read more)

To clarify a little more, they're totally separate codebases I believe.

Who would some natural candidates for receiving funding be? I'll spare you from having to name yourself and do so for you! But are there actually any others? Maybe not?

Thanks. I would be interested to know if any analagous groups have had success with public access channels.

Tying this into the EA census sounds like a good idea as it'd provide a helpful additional subsample, at least for some subset of questions.

Isn't Charity Science Canadian? Organisations like that and GBS in Switzerland seem to have an advantage in that (domestic) donors often have to give through them, whereas in their home countries the charities strongly prefer donors to give directly to them. That's not particular replibable though, though donation matches are more so.

I completely agree.

Surely anyone save an absolutist non-EA (non-consequentialist) libertarian would grant that; but equally, surely it does make sense to move lots of medications down a notch on the restriction scale. See Slate Star Codex on the FDA, 23 and me, meds with tiny chances of huge harms compared to antidepressants with high chances of libido reduction, etc.

Are there equivalentsto this in other countires?

Formatting needs fixing

I worry that people will be offended if I reply to emails days late, but suspect that in this I might be being a little paranoid.