All of Sebastian Schwiecker's Comments + Replies

Just to make sure I understand you correctly: Where or how exactly do you think we "arbitrarily limit" ourselves or our fund (besides planning to continue to comply with the applicable non-profit laws in the countries we are working in)?

I agree that there are some interventions like calling for the banning of a certain party might be net negative, even if they seem appealing at first sight. I also think that it can be possible and laudable to defend the rights of people you strongly disagree with like the ACLU does (or used to do -> haven't really followed them lately)

I'm not in the lead with regard to the research but one advantage of the fund is that we can take room for more funding into account. E.g. we think very highly of CORRECTIV but since they recently got a lot of (well deserved) attention their room to use additional funds might be limited very soon (might already be the case).

Might not convince you but afaik the effective giving space (GWWC, TLYCS, Effektiv Spenden and others ) has experienced basically zero or even negative growth in the last 2 years.

AMF is even down more than 50% year over year and in general there are probably few if any markets where effective giving has reached even 0.1% of all donations.

I consider this extremely disappointing and that's why I'm open to experiments on how to reach (much) more people.

Besides there are many people in EA who believe that money directed at avoiding x-risks will go > 10x fur... (read more)

I didn't do the research and I don't want to speculate to much, but I think most if not all charity evaluators initially had some kind of bias towards organizations based in the same country as their research staff. One obvious reason is that it's just easier because you don't have to start completely from scratch (especially relevant if resources are very limited).

Future research of Power for Democracies will be less funding restrained and can therefore be more ambitious.

Seems like we didn't articulate clearly enough why we exclusively focus on Germany at the moment.

I totally agree that it's very unlikely "that Germany is currently the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy". Indeed we expect that Power for Democracies will mostly (or exclusively) recommend charities not working in Germany in the future. Unfortunately Power for Democracies is currently still in its initial hiring round and probably won't produce any robust recommendation till 2025. The research that has been done in the las... (read more)

Germany so far is probably less polarized than other countries (e.g. the US). Currently there is only one far right party with significant reach (AFD) currently polling around 19% nationally.

The main conservative party (CDU) and the conservative leaning economically liberal party (FDP) are currently clearly and credibly distancing themselves from the AFD. We even embedded an interview from one of the most prominent FDP members (Gerhart Baum) in one of our blog posts about how we think about defending democracy.

So while we still might risk our rep... (read more)

Totally agree. We are currently supporting Charity Entrepreneurship (and others like GWWC) in this endeavour (see e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4ihqRojjuhprejm/effective-giving-incubation-apply-to-ce-and-gwwc-s-new). Belgium is definitely on the list.

As Jason wrote, legally it's a non-binding recommendation by the person who receives the voucher + if we don't receive such a recommendation within 12 month after the code was created the money (donation) goes to GiveWells All Grants Fund. So it's not a DAF (which don't exist in Germany anyway). If you really want to donate now but decide where the money should go (much) later we have a different product: https://effektiv-spenden.org/blog/effektiv-spenden-depot/ (also not a real DAF though).

Thanks for the reply.

I get why EAGs are not optimized for parents (still unfortunate in my case). What surprises me even more though is that at least my reading of your comment suggests that for most EAG attendees EA is still a side hustle (otherwise it would be part of their jobs or studies to attend an EA conference).

To add my 2 cents: For me as a father of two children the cost of spending a whole weekend working is a huge and potentially prohibitive cost and one of the reasons I didn't attend EAG London this year (for me much more relevant than 200US$ more or less).

So I'm wondering why you have decided not to do EAGs during the week? My assumption is that especially more senior people would be more willing to come. Maybe even if that would include travel (to a cheaper location).

Unfortunately not.

With regards to effektiveraltruismus.de: The site has just been transferred to "Effektiver Altruismus Deutschland (EAD) e.V." (can be seen in the Imprint/Impressum already and will be mentioned in a newsletter that we will probably send later today). Donations will still be managed by Effektiv Spenden (officially knows as "UES – Gemeinnützige GmbH für effektives Spenden") since EAD can't do that at the moment (from a legal perspective and also from a technical/operations perspective). We already mention who is handling the donations on top of the donation... (read more)

For what it’s worth some anecdotal evidence from myself (Founder of Effektiv Spenden → effective giving organization working in Germany and Switzerland and in the last three years the main contact for every journalist coming through effektiveraltruismus.de → the by far most frequented German EA website).

I have been in contact with I guess 20 - 30 journalists in the last 3 years. Spoke to everyone and never turned anyone down. Never asked to be off the record (but I usually do ask to see drafts to make sure there are no factual errors → ask ... (read more)

I'm obviously biased, but wholeheartedly agree with you that EA should invest even more in effective giving (because of the impact the donations will have and also to get more people interested in EA). In the last couple of weeks I have started to become more optimistic that this will happen though (e.g. Open Phil seems to consider supporting this space directly).

With regards to the "pick a fight" strategy you might want to check out some of the very early GiveWell blog posts (2007 - 2009). They definitely didn't shy away from a fight (just ask Charity Nav... (read more)

Thanks for the feedback. I'm kind of with you, but having a nice office in a really central location would increase the price at least 3x (+ significant setup costs). In addition some of the regulars are living pretty close so it wouldn't be an improvement for everybody. Nevertheless, if someone would be willing to commit €500,000+ I'm very happy to talk and/or help.

I agree with you that we should stop saying “funding overhang”. I’m also not advocating for Sam or Dustin to sell their stocks and put their money into supposedly safer assets.

What should be done in my opinion is to work harder on diversifying and increasing the amount of money available to EA causes and make sure that GiveWell et al. have to decrease “the bar” faster and more consistently (makes stuff more predictable and therefore probably more effective). One way (out of many) to do so that seems pretty obvious to me would be to put even more money into... (read more)

I’m obviously biased but I do see this as another clear sign that instead of worrying about a perceived funding overhang EA should invest heavily in increasing and diversifying its fundraising capabilities.

Thank Konstantin for you pushing the idea (translate/create great German EA content).

In case other people reading this are confused: Konstantin and I are in close contact and are convinced that more than one person should work on this for the foreseeable future (especially if you also want to make sure that this content can be found easily via SEO etc.).

Thanks for your feedback. Just created an anonymous feedback form for people who have spent time at TEAMWORK to get more critical input (will put it on our website, in our handbook etc. as well).

I think some of your concerns could be addressed with more funding. Others probably only if a bigger player like CEA goes all in and opens up its own EA-Coworking/Event-Space in Berlin. As far as I know no such plans exist, but if I’m wrong please let me know. Happy to completely focus on our core business.

Compared to the situation in Berlin before we opened up TE... (read more)

We didn't but heard from other philanthropic advisors (mostly from outside the EA community) that it can sometimes be very challenging to nudge major donors to give effectively and be open minded (actually some of us experienced that first hand in former jobs).

Thanks a lot for this. Hope GiveWell will speed up there process (will contact them directly as well).

Edit: Removed broken link.

I think so. Not sure where to donate though.

Definitely the case in Germany. Top 3 Google results for "longtermism" are all very negative posts. 2 of them by some of Germany biggest news magazines (ZEIT and Spiegel). As far as I know there is no positive content on Longtermism in German.

Having set up the TEAMWORK EA-Coworking-Space in Berlin I’m very sympathetic to the EA Coworking Spaces at Scale idea (almost applied with something similar).

A couple of question and thoughts on this topic though:

1. It says “The EA community has created several great coworking spaces”. Where are those other spaces?

2. It also says they were set up “in an ad hoc way, with large overheads”. In my case I agree with the “ad hoc” part (which I don’t consider particularly bad though) but am not sure with the “large overheads” part. What is this assessment based u... (read more)

We recently started one in Berlin (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NnrHvJALEKH4Ykzyt/introducing-teamwork-an-ea-coworking-space-in-berlin). tl:dr I'm very happy with the decision. Happy to chat about details.

Very rough monthly cost all in (rent, insurance, electricity, heating, cleaning, internet... ) is around 3.500€. In addition we had some upfront costs (mostly furniture) of around 11,000€. We currently also tend to buy a lot of new stuff which adds up to a couple of hundreds of Euros every month (e.g. we got a Microwave today, last week we bought an air purifier... ). Next week we will get some phone booths which will luckily be paid for through a grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund though (around 14,000€ for 4).

So currently we are still subsidizing the ... (read more)

Our own fundraiser was quite successful so we should be covered to pursue our original plans without limitations till at least the beginning of 2021. But since the donation volume in 2020 turned out to be much bigger than expected (at least a 6x increase compared to 2019 according to preliminary numbers) we are in the process of updating our plans and have some ideas how to use additional capital in a promising way (eg internationalization). So I'm happy to talk if you know someone... ;-)

Hi Chi!

Thanks for your comments. We'll most likely start to "gender" once we relaunch the website somewhen in the next couple of quarters. The reason why I'm reluctant to do this is because I'm quite certain that this will decrease the mass appeal of the website. So when we do it we'll do it with the expectation of decreasing the amount of donations. Reasons are: 

- Currently our site is kind of gender neutral already since we don't just use the male version but male and female versions alternate (see https://blog.zeit.de/glashaus/2018/02/07/gendern-sc... (read more)

I'm also not sure if Germany is leading on climate issues but the work of John Halstead's and Johannes Ackva (and also Hauke Hillebrandt through Let's Fund) have been very valuable to the effective giving efforts through effektiv-spenden.org.

Hi Brian!

There is a breakdown for all individual organizations:

Against Malaria Foundation: 111,147.50 Euro
Deworm the World: 149,701.57 Euro
GiveDirectly: 251,463.61 Euro
Malaria Consortium: 116,394.15 Euro 

Clean Air Task Force: 83,174.71 Euro
Coalition for Rainforest Nations: 142,242.56 Euro
ITIF: 62,650.22 Euro 

Good Food Institute: 66,687.53 Euro
The Humane League: 43,532.53 Euro

(See https://www.effektiv-spenden.org/fundraiser-2020/#1)

It's important though that we only offered GiveWell recommended charities for the first 7 month and that most of the ... (read more)

Thanks a lot for the reply and the links.

Thanks a lot for the reply and all the links.

Thanks for the reply. With regard to drugs I think it depends on the situation. Many people drink alcohol even if they are in a good mood already to get even more excited (while being fully aware that they might experience at least some kind of suffering the next day and possibly long term). In this case I think one couldn't say they do it to avoid suffering (unless you declare everything below the best possible experience suffering). There are obviously other cases were people just want to stop thinking about their problems, stop feeling a physical pain etc.

One of my most confusing experiences with EA in the last couple of month has been this poll https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/3127490440640625/ where you and your colleauge Magnus stated that one day of extreme suffering (drowning in lava) could not be outweighed by even an (almost) infinite number of days experience extreme happiness (which was the answer with the most upvotes). Some stated in the comments that even a chance of “1 in a gogol probability of 1 minute in lava” could never be outweighed by an (almost)... (read more)

Thanks for the nice words.

I also think there could me more Unconferences in the future. Every month might be a bit much, but every quarter or every 6 month might work. Currently we (or at least I) have no plans to organize another event but that might change soon. In case you are interested, please feel free to start planning.

Yeah, you are right that although we didn't emphasize it some journalists asked about EA and made it part of their coverage. I don't think that this has been negative but one challenge might be not to give the wrong impression that EA is only about donating money (we are at least aware of it).

Yes, but concerning tax deductibility Austria seems to be one of the hardest countries to get into. You actually have to get on a small list of tax exempt Organizations provided by the Austrian financial authorities which might take years. Therefore it currently is not a priority for us but we might get back to it one day.

Thanks for your questions/comments.

With regards to effektiveraltruismus.de we plan to ran it as an independent project with some community input and at least initially oversight from the EAF. The outreach strategies will be different and overall much less active for effektiveraltruismus.de.

With regards to the Media our biggest successes have been to be portrayed in German television several times (see eg https://www.ardmediathek.de/swr/video/Y3JpZDovL3N3ci5kZS9hZXgvbzExODMxMDc or https://www.zdf.de/verbraucher/volle-kanne/richtig-spenden-112.html ). Thisc... (read more)

What kind of activities would you like your local group to offer and what is stopping you from implementing these changes (within or even outside of the local group)? This is meant to be an honest question. Maybe other people could help you (from CEA, from other groups, people here in the forum... ).

Obviously anecdotal evidence but I don't know anyone who responds faster to email than you do (especially for people with similar responsibilities). Is this a habit that you consciously cultivate? If so, why?

Why do you recommend Oxfam but not The End Fund (recommended by GiveWell)?

If I get it right you target not only EAs but also "the average donor". In this case have you ever thought that it might be confusing to offer so many charities and that this could lead to a paradox of choice kind of situation? Eg several charities working on deworming (an intervention "the average donors" probably has never heard of before).

Mental health (especially in developing countries --> eg a more thorough look at Strong Minds etc.).