User Comment Replies

Flooding is not a promising cause area - shallow investigation

Hey Oscar, I am indeed reading this! (albeit a bit late)

First, I really appreciate you looking into this and writing this. I'm excited to see people explore more cause areas and give rough estimates of how promising they are.

There are quite a few details in the cost-effectiveness analysis that I think are inaccurate, and I've mentioned a few at the bottom of the comment in case it is of interest. However, I still think this is a good and valuable shallow investigation. If there weren't discrepancies between the conclusions from 50 hours of investigation an... (read more)

OscarD

Hi Sela, thanks for the long and thoughtful comment, and for your kind words. That is reassuring that you also do not feel this is a key area for GiveWell/OP to expand into. Really interesting re EMDAT possibly being off by ~10x, I was aware that longer-term harms are a lot harder to measure but wasn't expecting the effect to be that large. Re my references to ending all flooding harms, that makes sense; I wasn't trying to suggest that the average cost-effectiveness would be the same as marginal cost-effectiveness. Perhaps a better thing to say would be that in order to be competitive with top charities, marginal targeted interventions would need to be far better than the average of existing interventions. Hmm yes I was a bit surprised at how expensive EWS were made out to be, particularly when I would have thought a lot of costs could be saved by rolling out the same model and infrastructure across different countries. Thanks for the offer, I am not currently working on this and don't expect to go back to it, so I don't think there would be much value in talking further - I'll let you know if I am coming back to this though. I hope you make great progress on your flood forecasting work!

New beta version of the Probably Good website

sella2y1

Thank you for flagging this! I've now corrected the links.

sella3y5

Hi Ben, thanks for these questions.

Regarding whether we achieved “deep” engagement. We have not formally followed up with participants to be able to answer this meaningfully. I can say anecdotally that a couple of participants I know personally have since been active on EA-related Facebook groups, but I don’t know if this generalizes. We’ve also collected the contact information of participants in the study and are able to follow up with additional surveys (of those interested) in the future, exactly for analysis such as this. Also, just a minor clarificat... (read more)

Early Alpha Version of the Probably Good Website

sella3y9

Hi Brian, thanks for the feedback. While we do hope to add other indicators of credibility, we don’t plan on featuring Effective Altruism Israel specifically in the website. Though both Omer and I are heavily involved in EA Israel, and though it seems likely that Probably Good would not exist had EA Israel not existed, it is a separate org and effort from EA Israel. It is “supported by EA Israel” in the sense that I think members of EA Israel are supportive of the project (and I hope members of many other communities are too), but it is not “supported by E... (read more)

Early Alpha Version of the Probably Good Website

sella3y7

Hi Peter, thanks for these suggestions!

I hadn’t seen the doc you linked to before, and is indeed a good starting point. We’re actively working on our internal M&E strategy at the moment, so this is particularly useful to us right now.

I agree with the other suggestions, and those are already planned. Their full implementation might take a while, but I expect us to have some updates related to this soon.

Early Alpha Version of the Probably Good Website

sella3y7

Thanks for this detailed feedback, I’m happy to hear you think the article would be useful to people in situations you’ve been in. All three of the points you raised seem reasonable - some touch on nuances that I already have down in my full notes but were dropped for brevity, while others are things we hadn’t heard yet from the people we interviewed (including those acknowledged in the article, and several others who preferred to remain anonymous). Based on consultation with others I’ll look into incorporating some of these nuances, though I apologize in advance that not all nuances will be incorporated.

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y13

We’re definitely taking into account the different comments and upvotes on this post. We appreciate people upvoting the views they’d like to support - this is indeed a quick and efficient way for us to aggregate feedback.

We’ve received recommendations against opening public polls about the name of the organization from founders of existing EA organizations, and we trust those recommendations so we’ll probably avoid that route. But we will likely look into ways we can test the hypothesis of whether a “less controversial” name has positive or negative effects on the reaction of someone hearing this name for the first time.

MaxRa

Sorry if this is not helpful, but I felt like brainstorming some names. * Worthwhile/Worthy Pursuits * Paths of Impact * Good Callings * Careers for Good/Change * Good Careers Advice * Altruistic Career Support * (Impactify, WorkWell seem already taken... and for the latter GiveWell might not appreciate the association)

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y2

Hi Manuel, thanks for this comment. I think I agree with all your considerations listed here. I want to share some thoughts about this, but as you’ve mentioned - this is one of our open questions and so I don’t feel confident about either direction here.

First, we have indeed been giving general career coaching for people in Israel for several years now, so in a sense we are implementing your recommended path and are now moving onto the next phase of that plan. That being said, there still remain reasons to continue to narrow our scope even at this stage.

Se... (read more)

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y6

Hi Jack, thanks for the great question.

In general, I don’t think there’s one best approach. Where we want to be on the education \ acceptance trade-off depends on the circumstances. It might be easiest to go over examples (including ones you gave) and give my thoughts on how they’re different.

First, I think the simplest case is the one you ended with. If someone doesn’t know what cause area they’re interested in and wants our help with cause prioritization, I think there aren’t many tradeoffs here - we’d strongly recommend relevant materials to allow... (read more)

JackM

Thanks that all makes sense and I agree that a one size fits all approach is unlikely to be appropriate.

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y11

I agree this is an important question that would be of value to other organizations as well. We’ve already consulted with 80K, CE and AAC about it, but still feel this is an area we have a lot more work to do on. It isn’t explicitly pointed out in our open questions doc, but when we talk about measuring and evaluating our counterfactual benefits and harms, this question has been top of mind for us.

The short version of our current thinking is separated into short-term measurement and long-term measurement. We expect that longer term this kind of evaluation ... (read more)

MichaelA

Thanks, that all sounds reasonable :) Here's a (potentially stupid) idea for a mini RCT-type evaluation of this that came to mind: You could perhaps choose some subset of applicants for advising calls, and then randomly assign half of those to go through your normal process and half to be simply referred to 80k. And 80k could perhaps do the same in the other direction. You could perhaps arrange for these referred people to definitely be spoken to (rather than not being accepted for advising or waiting for many months). And/or you could choose the subset for this random allocation to ensure the people are fairly good fits for either organisation's focus (rather than e.g. someone who'll very clearly focus on longtermism or someone who'll very clearly focus on global health & poverty). And then you could see whether the outcomes differ depending on which org the people were randomly assigned to speak to. Including seeing if the people assigned to speak to 80k were substantially more likely to then pursue their priority paths, and if so, whether they stuck with that, whether they liked it, and whether they seem to be doing well at it. I raise this as food for thought rather than as a worked-out plan. It's possible that anything remotely likely this would be too complicated and time-consuming to be worthwhile. And even if something like this is worth doing, maybe various details would need to be added or changed.

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y4

Hi dglid, I agree with your comment. I think there is a lot of value by making career guidance more available to the masses, even without 80K personally being involved.

I see local groups as being the primary type of organization responsible for this type of work - making EA information accessible and personalized for new people and communities. We don’t see ourselves taking over that role. That being said, we are interested in being involved in the process. We know there’s a lot of interest in creating content / tools / support in the career guidance space... (read more)

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y2

Hi Michael, as you mention - the issue of accurately defining our scope is still an important open question to us. I’m happy to share our current thinking about this, but we expect this thinking to evolve as we collect feedback and gain some more hands-on experience.

I think it’s worth making a distinction between two versions of this question. The first is the longer-term question of what is the set of all cause areas that should be within scope for this work. That’s a difficult question. At the moment, we’re happy to use the diversity of views meaningfull... (read more)

MichaelA

Thanks, that all sounds reasonable to me. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And no need to apologise! I think sharing your current thinking at this stage seems like a really good move, and that necessarily means having lots of remaining uncertainties (indeed, that's part of why it's a good move). So I wouldn't at all want to disincentivise that by demanding that someone has all the details figured out when they first post on the Forum about a project :)

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y6

That’s actually a great idea. I’ve now added a link from each clean doc to a commentable version. Feel free to either comment here, email us, or comment on the commentable version of the doc. Thanks!

Vaidehi Agarwalla

Yay thanks! Looking forward to engaging on the topics :)

Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization

sella3y9

Great point Pablo.

I think the analogy to ImpactMatters is insightful and relevant, and indeed reaching a broader audience/scope (even at the cost of including less impactful career paths) is part of the justification for this work. I think the difference between inter-cause elasticity and intra-cause elasticity may be even larger when discussing careers, because in addition to people's priorities and values, many people will have education, experience and skills which make it less likely (or even desirable) that they move to a completely different cause ar... (read more)

MichaelA

Could your describe your current thinking on how you'd measure and evaluate this question? I imagine more clarity on that question would be quite useful for evaluating and informing your organisation. And if you measured it in a way that meant the results could generalise to other organisations/efforts, or if you had a method of measuring it that others could adapt, I imagine this could be useful in a variety of other ways too. E.g., it could inform 80k's own approach, approaches of university and local groups, topic and attendee selection for EAGs, etc.

pmelchor

Yes, thanks for that: I can see the broader strategic implications. I actually think the equivalent to "but actually may lead to more people joining top priority paths in the focus areas of existing career orgs in the long run" may also be true in the effective giving space.

We're Lincoln Quirk & Ben Kuhn from Wave, AMA!

sella3y15

Thank you both for your thoughtful answers.

To clarify, I don't have a strong opinion on this comparison myself, and would love to hear more points of view on this. Sadly I'm not aware of any reading materials on this topic, but have heard the following arguments made in one on one conversations:

For-profit entrepreneurship has built-in incentives that already cause many entrepreneurs to try and implement any promising opportunities. As a result, we'd expect it to be drastically less neglected, or at least drastically less neglected relative to nonprofit opp

... (read more)

Ben Kuhn

Cool! With the understanding that these aren't your opinions, I'm going to engage with them anyway bc I think they're interesting. I think for all four of these I agree that they directionally push toward for-profits being less good, but that people overestimate the magnitude of the effect. Despite the built-in incentives, I think "which companies get built" is still pretty contingent and random based on which people try to do things. For instance, it's been obvious that M-Pesa had an amazing business in Kenya since ~2012, but it still hasn't had equally successful copycats, let alone people trying to improve it, in other countries. If the market were really efficient here I think something like Wave would be 4+ years further along in its trajectory. Similarly, this is directionally correct but easy to overweight—there are still for-profit companies working in all of these spaces that seem likely to have very large impacts (Wave, Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, SpaceX, OpenAI...) This is definitely a risk, and something that we worry about at Wave. That said: 1. In many cases, revenue/growth and impact are highly correlated. In the examples I can think of where they aren't, it mostly involves monopolies doing anticompetitive or user-hostile things. 2. In the monopoly case, many monopolies seem to have wide freedom of action and are still controlled by founders (e.g. Google, Facebook) and their decisions are often driven as much by internal dynamics as external incentives. Uncertain here, but it seems likely that if these companies thought more like EA's they would produce more impact. I think "nontrivial" for a nonprofit is trivial for a successful for-profit :) Wave has raised tens of millions of dollars in equity and hundreds of millions in debt, and we're likely to raise 10x+ more in success cases. We definitely could not have raised nearly this much as a nonprofit. Same with eg OpenAI which got $1b in nonprofit commitments but still had to become (capped)

We're Lincoln Quirk & Ben Kuhn from Wave, AMA!

sella3y21

Hi Lincoln and Ben, thanks for doing this! I would love to hear your perspective on the following topic:

Nonprofit entrepreneurship is a dominant career path within EA, with many people excited about the impact that it can achieve. Impact-focused for-profit entrepreneurship is rarely discussed or recommended by EA organizations, with a 2016 article about your startup being one of the only materials on this topic. I have also heard multiple people argue that for-profit entrepreneurship is an inherently less promising path than nonprofit entrepreneurship for ... (read more)

Ben Kuhn

I agree with most of what Lincoln said and would also plug Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets as material on this, if you haven't read it yet :) Can you elaborate on the "various reasons" that people argue for-profit entrepreneurship is less promising than nonprofit entrepreneurship or provide any pointers on reading material? I haven't run across these arguments.

lincolnq3y18

From my perspective, for-profit entrepreneurship seems better than nonprofit entrepreneurship in terms of making an EA impact. The main reason is that the profit incentive gives you much broader access to capital, so it unlocks ideas that will only be impactful given enough money to get started. And I think there are a lot of ideas like this -- it's not hard to look at e.g. YC's Requests for Startups and see obvious, huge-impact ideas that seem worth working on. (Linked from that page is another page about what YC looks for in a nonprofit, also a good read... (read more)

EA Israel Strategy 2020-21

sella4y10

Hi Brian, thanks for the kind words and the insightful feedback!

Here are my thoughts on the points you raise (not necessarily coordinated or representative of EA Israel in general):

1. I totally agree with your point about having separate metrics for proficiency with EA vs. engagement with EA Israel. In practice, our contributors and participants groups are actually some mix between these two metrics. For example, EAs professionally working in high-priority paths were often included in them (if they were interested) even if they were not actively engaging w... (read more)

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