All of rossaokod's Comments + Replies

Thanks for all of the hard work on this, Howie (and presumably many others), over the last few months and (presumably) in the coming months

I think I would describe him as generally supportive of global health and wellbeing focused EA / effective giving. As others note above, he's been aware of the community since roughly around the time it started and in many ways has been 'practicing' EA since long before then (e.g. founded IPA in 2002,  wrote 'more than good intentions').  He's also engaged directly with the community in various ways - e.g. has been on the board of TLYCS for a long time (and advised them on charity selection for a while). He set up ImpactMatters, which evaluated and recommended a much broader range of charities than GiveWell. Overall, I think this is an extremely exciting appointment and I think he'll do a huge amount of good in the role!

+1 as a vote for more summaries and thanks a lot for doing these! I'll check in with Sven (who's been organising our paper summaries) and we'll get in touch soon

P.S. I've also just seen Joan's write-up of the Focus University groups in the comments below, which suggests that there is already some decent self-evaluation, experimentation and feedback loops happening as part of these programmes' designs. So it is very possible that there is a good amount of this going on that I (as a very casual observer) am just not aware of!

I completely agree that it is far easier to suggest an analysis than to execute one! I personally won't have the capacity to do this in the next 12-18 months, but would be happy to give feedback on a proposal and/or the research as it develops if someone else is willing and able to take up the mantle. 

I do think that this analysis is more likely to be done (and in a high quality way) if it was either done by, commissioned by, or executed with significant buy-in from CEA and other key stakeholders involved in community building and running local g... (read more)

It's bugged me for a while that EA has ~13 years of community building efforts but (AFAIK) not much by way of "strong" evidence of the impact of various types of community building / outreach, in particular local/student groups. I'd like to see more by way of baking self-evaluation into the design of community building efforts, and think we'd be in a much better epistemic place if this was at the forefront of efforts to professionalise community building efforts 5+ years ago. 

By "strong" I mean a serious attempt at causal evaluation using experimental... (read more)

Yes please - that would be great! The easiest way is probably to just fill out the form and just clearly note somewhere that you'd be happy to be a mentor. Thanks!

Yep, there's no requirement to have EA-related research ideas yet (and I'd expect that to be the case for a decent number of EA-interested and aligned people who participate in the mentoring programme)

Thanks a lot for sharing the syllabus, David, and for posting guidelines about using it. I think and hope this will serve as a really useful reference for people interested in pursuing (a career in) economics GPR. As you note, this is a bit broader than GPI's current research focus (which is fairly narrowly focused on longtermism and associated questions for the time being), but I think there is valuable GPR to be done in these other areas too. As you also note, GPI is currently refreshing its research agenda to account for some of the exploration research we've done in economics over the last ~18 months - hopefully we'll have a new and improved version out in the next 2-3 months.

I just wanted to explicitly add to this post that valuable GPR can, does, and should happen outside of an academic setting. I think this is implied in this post (e.g. the mention of OpenPhil and the link to the GPR roles on the 80k website), but is not quite explicit, so I just wanted to flag it. Researchers outside of academia face a different set of incentives to academics, and can sometimes have more freedom to work on questions that are more practically relevant but less 'publishable' in academic journals. The point is made quite nicely on t... (read more)

This is a great post - thanks a lot for writing it. I work at GPI, so want to add a bit of context on a couple of points, and add some of my own thoughts. Standard disclaimer that these are my personal views and not those of GPI though. 

First, on GPI's research agenda, and our progress in econ:

"(One economics student told me that when reading the GPI research agenda, the economics parts read like it was written by philosophers. Maybe this contributes to the lack of headway on their economics research plans.)"

I think this is accurate and... (read more)

Thanks, Aaron. Just to add to Steve's response below:

1) We think that part of the reason for the large increase in people pledging ~1% of their income this academic year is due to (a) better training and messaging (largely because we now have a full time staff member doing this), and (b) our improved donation platform. (b) has allowed us to set different defaults for different chapters, and for donors to set their start date further in the future, so it coincides with graduation. Before that, our donation defaults were targeted at MBAs, so undergrads... (read more)

Is this scheme still running? This page suggests the scheme is closed (https://eahub.org/actions/shopping/intro). Should we therefore all be using Amazon Smile instead?

Either way, it would be nice to see a short update, in particular how much this scheme moved to top charities (and how much effort it was to set up). Thanks!

This is useful feedback, and I've heard one or two similar sentiments before, though (in my experience) this type of "dismissive cynicism" has been quite rare.

We are quite careful in our messaging of the 1% figure, and try not to be self-congratulatory about giving this relatively small amount (but as you point out there is a tradeoff with trying to create a positive vibe vs being a bit more stoic about a small amount). For example, we often use the figure that Americans give 2.6% on average, to try to anchor people higher than 1% and show how n... (read more)

This is a really good and important point - thanks, Eli_Nathan. I don't feel confident in having an 'answer' to this potential tradeoff (focusing on raising money vs deepening engagement), but a few thoughts:

1)

It seems that 1FTW attracts similar types of people that the GWWC pledge would, but at higher quantities due to the lower barrier. However, I'm skeptical that this lower barrier is necessarily a positive thing, because it would seem that, on average, these individuals are less likely to further engage with the EA community at large.

I think this ... (read more)

Yeah, pretty much MBA students and Law students to a lesser extent. To be honest, when I was first approached by Josh and Kate (the founders) to join OFTW, I was fairly skeptical that it would catch on in the Wharton MBA class, but was impressed by the amount of market research and thought they'd put into the concept, the messaging and branding etc. One of the lessons I've learned over time is that the stereotype of a 'typical' MBA student caring more about money and a career than charities and doing good may not be (entirely!) fair - most people want to g... (read more)

I'm cross posting answers to some questions on the EA group organisers Facebook group below:

Have you found this to be significantly more successful than the 1% student version of GWWC?

In my personal experience, in terms of number of pledges, I would say yes. I've helped run Gwwc groups in Oxford (2011-2012) and Penn (2014-2017) and over those years I think we probably 'caused' 10-20 Gwwc pledges at Penn and <10 in my year at Oxford. The most established Oftw chapters seem capable of bringing in ~60-100+ each year. This compares favourably to the Gw... (read more)

Thanks Peter, Josh.

Personally, I see oftw as complementary to existing EA outreach, in particular local EA groups. I think Oftw can be very effective in 'broadening the funnel' of engagement with EA and raising money, then a general EA group provides a platform for those who become most engaged in EA, particularly in non-poverty cause areas. I think a OFTW pledge drive can help with engagement too, by giving concrete, tangible actions for members to work on.

In terms of how this works in practice, there are a couple of cases that have taken different approa... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up! I think this type of research is very important in the animal advocacy movement.

One thing I would like to see in one of these studies is using food purchase data instead of relying on surveys. This might be possible in colleges/universities where a large proportion of students have some sort of meal plan, and pay for their food using their student ID or some other similar card. In some places the students just pay to enter a food hall, and so you wouldn't know what food they ate, but in other places I think each item is scanned ... (read more)

This is really excellent Jess - thanks for writing it up! I think I have been thinking about things in a very similar way, and strongly identify with pretty much everything you say!

I started trying out a transition to being (mostly) vegan in September last year, as I thought a move to being 100% vegan straight away would be very difficult (I think most of the costs are 'transition' costs and decrease as you form new habits and learn more about stuff to buy). I have been surprised at how painless it has been, but have not yet tried being 100% vegan.

At the... (read more)

This Economics paper find a significant positive effect of celebrity endorsements on book sales - just some more evidence that this works!

Garthwaite, Craig L. 2014. "Demand Spillovers, Combative Advertising, and Celebrity Endorsements." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 6(2): 76-104