All of Tony.Sena's Comments + Replies

A very interesting read, thanks for preparing. Is there any research into whether those who do not have access to telecommunications technology in these LMICs actually demand or desire access to this technology? 

There is a risk here that we may be imposing our biases on potential beneficiaries that I believe would be helpful to investigate further. I could plausibly see a world where there is a significant demand for the secondary benefits that arise from telecommunication technology access. 

However, similarly, I could imagine plausible situations where the 3-9% of individuals that you referenced may have strong preferences for their status quo existing lifestyle and technology situation. 

3
Lauren Gilbert
2y
When we spoke to experts in the field, this was not a major concern for them.  Indeed, a couple mentioned that often convincing people to use a development intervention is an uphill battle - but people needed no convincing to use cell phones. This seems to be borne out by usage statistics; even though devices are expensive (44% of monthly income is a lot), usage is growing a lot.  GSMA has smartphone usage doubling in sub-Saharan Africa doubling from 2014-2019 (pg. 17).  World Bank research suggests the major barrier entry to using a mobile device is not lack of interest, but affordability.

Thanks for taking the time to engage with these arguments and provide detailed responses. 

I would argue against the fundamental premise of the arguments that you set out here. As I understand your position, the need and value for transparency in donor characteristics is something whose value should be proven. In the alternative, non-transparency is the status quo. To be frank, this troubles me. I would argue that transparency in philanthropic sources of funding should be the status quo and the onus should sit on the philanthropy to articulate why and ... (read more)

I agree that this norm does not largely exist at the moment, however, I would argue that there is a trend towards greater transparency in philanthropy (see Charity Navigator evaluations of charities and many other charity evaluator criteria that include transparency). I think part of this trend is driven by the EA movement itself and the radical transparency that is exhibited by GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, particularly when compared to funders that are older. 

I would argue that transparency is fundamentally and intrinsically important in a number ... (read more)

2
Sanjay
2y
Hi Tony.Sena, thank you for your interest in SoGive’s work. Thank you for raising your questions about transparency. I think it’s important that sources of funding are made as accountable as possible, so thank you for this. It is not obvious to me that this type of transparency is a good idea, and I would certainly want us to have more rigorous justification for it before we go down this route. (To be clear, some types of transparency are great.) —------- Members of the EA community might have an interest in the things you allude to, namely: * the ways the donors have generated their funds; or  * whether the donors have the appropriate ethical or moral alignment.  Is it right that this should be monitored by the community, or put into the public domain?  Let me illustrate with two examples: Example 1: Bob works for an investment bank and trades derivatives. He believes he earns more than he needs and donates a substantial sum each year. He is open about his philanthropy and feels good about it. Example 2: Charlotte inherited a large sum of money from a family business. The business works in areas which she doesn’t agree with ethically. She has spent a lot of time wondering what she should do about the money she has. Is it wrong for her to donate it, given the money’s lugubrious origins? Is it any better for her to just keep the money? After much worrying, she has decided to donate the money, but would prefer not to draw attention to herself – she doesn’t feel good about the money and doesn’t want to be associated with it. At the moment, I believe that the funds for SoGive grants would likely have provenances that most members of the EA community would not object to. (E.g. I don’t think most EAs would object to a donor who looked like Bob) However I have gotten to know many donors over the years, and if someone who looked like Charlotte came along, I would like us to have a strong rationale for our actions before we discouraged her from contributing fun

Would you be able to provide some more details on the source of the funds, please? I understand if this may be private. However, I think being transparent about where funders are sourcing their money from is a valuable norm in the funding space. 

8
Ben Millwood
2y
Why do you think it's valuable? I don't think we have this norm already, and it's not immediately obvious to me how it would change my behaviour.

Very exciting to see the role that Buddy will be taking on and also the influence of evidence-driven decision making in the wider philanthropic environment. 

Employing a personal assistant - I understand that there was a presentation on this at the most recent EA Global conference. Also, there has been a general movement towards both acting as, and employing, personal remote assistants to support professionals with life administration and other more procedural tasks. It would be interesting to see the cost-effectiveness of this intervention. 

My hypothesis is that this would be highly effective for those professions who, a) spend a disproportionate amount of time on administrative tasks, b) the opportunity cost of their time is high, c) they are highly-focused and require deep-work time. 

Hi Jeremy - I am going through a similar process currently and would love to connect and see if there may be ways to combine efforts / share learnings. I wrote more about my project here.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I deeply empathize with the pull to help people now, while rationally agreeing with longtermist arguments. One insight that really stood out to me was:

"One thing I’m heartened by is that working on the long run feels hard in precisely the way I think we should expect effective altruism to feel hard" 

This intuitively makes sense to me, particularly within the framing of neglectedness. Similarly however, I do wander whether the opposite could be true and whether the sense of something feeling hard may be our intuition p... (read more)

3
MichaelA
3y
Your comments makes me think of two posts which I imagine you might find interesting: * Effective Altruism and Free Riding * A summary of Nicholas Beckstead’s writing on Bayesian Ethics

Thanks for sharing. Firstly, as someone who went through the Yale EA Fellowship, I have to thank the organizers for their thoughtfulness through all stages of the Fellowship. 

I have two questions: 1) how have you thought about DEI in the selection process and minimizing any risks associated with unconscious bias or other systemic bias that may lead to certain individuals not being admitted to the program. 2) Has the team considered leveraging an expimental or quasi-experimental approach in thinking about how the selection process may influence the engagement of the cohort. 

3
jessica_mccurdy
3y
Hi Tony! We actually originally created the scoring breakdown partly to help with unconscious biases. Before, we had given people a general score after an interview but we learned that that is often really influenced by biases and that breaking scores down into components with specific things to look for would reduce that.  We are hoping the checkbox system we are trialing out this semester will reduce it even more as it aims to be even more objective. It is still possible, though, that it would lead to a systemic bias if the checkboxes themselves have one ingrained in them. We will be on the lookout for that and it is part of the reason we are not using it for selection this round :)   Additionally, at the end of the selection process we would look into the demographics of the selected fellows compared to all those being interviewed. Fortunately, for the past several years our selections actually were pretty representative of the total demographics of applicants. Unfortunately, our diversity of applicants, particularly racial, has not been as high as we would like and we are looking for ways to change that.    As for an experimental approach - I would be interested if you had any ideas on how to go about doing that?   

What decision-making frameworks did (and have) you find to be generally be more successful and persuasive? 

For example, did you find that the use of data and evidence led to a higher likelihood of aligning disparate stakeholders? What role did anecdote / story have? Did you observe median voter theorem to hold when decisions had to be made? 

This was a great summary of US foreign aid. I appreciate the research that went into this to synthesize deeply yet succinctly the key features of the system. I recently read Prof Angus Deaton's book, 'The Great Escape' in which he argues against broad based foreign aid, especially in the form that is described in this piece. I key element of his argument (as I understood it) is that there is a correlation between countries that receive aid and countries that depend on aid. Prof Deaton goes on to argue that those countries that are receiving aid are the one... (read more)

2
ljusten
3y
Hi Tony. I just released a second post Is Foreign Aid Effective? where I share a review of aid effectiveness literature. Overall I think that yes aid is an effective mechanism to do good in the world. Important functions like food security and humanitarian relief are almost entirely dependent on foreign aid and are definitely "effective."  Of course the effectiveness of aid is still far from ideal. There lot of examples in which foreign aid projects had no impact or even a negative impact on the recipient countries. Much like we have discovered with charities, effectiveness often varies at orders of magnitude. I imagine foreign aid programs are similar. Foreign aid also hasn't produced much measurable economic growth in poor countries for reasons which I highlight in my second post.  I think there is also reasons for optimism regarding trends in foreign aid. There seems to be a significant shift among countries to implement more randomized control trials and generally be more transparent.The transformation of USAID is a good example a positive step towards more effective foreign aid. 

Fascinating read and potential concept, especially given what we have witnessed in the US over the past few months. I am interested in the framing of this piece around 'collapse' and more specifically how 'collapse' may be differentiated from a more general reduction in relative power? Is there something specific about a 'collapse' that differentiates it from the standard tectonic shifts of power that we have observed over the course of all human history that makes prioritization more important? 

In my opinion, the framing of a cause prioritization aro... (read more)

Thanks all for synthesizing these thoughts and laying out the team’s plan for the upcoming year. I look forward to reading more around how the team’s thoughts progress on these important questions. I understand that defining and subsequently determining ‘key institutions’ is a priority area for the team and so to the extent these still may be being considered please feel free to ignore. I have some questions regarding institutions as a vector for driving effective change. 

What would you consider to be the other main decision making vectors (I am imagi... (read more)

3
Vicky Clayton
3y
Thanks Tony.Sena for the comment and the great questions. It's really good to challenge premises, particularly at the beginning! I guess focusing on institutions is on the premise that good decision-making within institutions involves more than each individual within that institution making good decisions separately - there's coordination, aligning goals etc to think about - and also on the premise that we think most resources / norms are controlled by institutions rather than individuals (even authoritarian leaders operate within a greater decision making operation). I / we shall have to think a bit more about the similarity to economic growth / more macro interventions. I'm imagining you could frame economic growth as the goal and then figure out which institutions to work with and how to support better decision making to promote economic growth, or define "welfare" as the goal and assess economic growth as one of the potential options to get there. I'm much more comfortable on the randomista side of the things myself but shall do some more thinking about what IIDM looks like on a macro level. Thanks again.