I haven’t met any zerocore EAs, but I trust your experience they exist. I tend to use the term “resources” instead of money, as some people have time/talent to give. If people have not contributed resources to EA causes, I agree they should not call themselves EAs.
I haven’t met them either, but I remember reading about them in some articles people shared on facebook. The articles didn’t make any judgement about this subset, they merely mentioned that some of the EAs don’t donate anything, because they were students.
And my reaction was: this is so bad for PR. I mean, the whole message of effective altruism is kinda “instead of donating to cute puppies, we use the same money to heal children with malaria”. And the obvious reply in such case would be: “well, at least I donated to the cute puppies, while you only participate at the conferences talking about healing children with malaria”. A less charitable reply would point out that participating at the EA conferences also costs money.
But maybe in real life the subset is negligible. Internet often exaggerates things.
There’s some discussion, including numbers and graphs, here. Fraction of self-reported EAs self-reporting as donating zero (this was in an LW survey) varies from ~13% to ~43% depending on age. (Younger people are more likely to report donating nothing, especially the under-20 category which is presumably full of impoverished students.)
Would be curious to see the difference between donations and volunteering—statistics show that young people tend to volunteer more. Do you know of any information on EA volunteering?
And my reaction was: this is so bad for PR. I mean, the whole message of effective altruism is kinda “instead of donating to cute puppies, we use the same money to heal children with malaria”.
I know several students are working hard to gain the skills necessary to make big impacts, especially on XRisk reduction. They identify as EAs, and I think it would be the wrong move to tell them they’re not “real EAs” because they aren’t donating money to EA charities.
I haven’t met any zerocore EAs, but I trust your experience they exist. I tend to use the term “resources” instead of money, as some people have time/talent to give. If people have not contributed resources to EA causes, I agree they should not call themselves EAs.
I haven’t met them either, but I remember reading about them in some articles people shared on facebook. The articles didn’t make any judgement about this subset, they merely mentioned that some of the EAs don’t donate anything, because they were students.
And my reaction was: this is so bad for PR. I mean, the whole message of effective altruism is kinda “instead of donating to cute puppies, we use the same money to heal children with malaria”. And the obvious reply in such case would be: “well, at least I donated to the cute puppies, while you only participate at the conferences talking about healing children with malaria”. A less charitable reply would point out that participating at the EA conferences also costs money.
But maybe in real life the subset is negligible. Internet often exaggerates things.
There’s some discussion, including numbers and graphs, here. Fraction of self-reported EAs self-reporting as donating zero (this was in an LW survey) varies from ~13% to ~43% depending on age. (Younger people are more likely to report donating nothing, especially the under-20 category which is presumably full of impoverished students.)
Would be curious to see the difference between donations and volunteering—statistics show that young people tend to volunteer more. Do you know of any information on EA volunteering?
No. Sorry.
I don’t think the whole message about effective altruism is about how to donate money. 80,000 hours for example recently wrote Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps.
Exactly.
I know several students are working hard to gain the skills necessary to make big impacts, especially on XRisk reduction. They identify as EAs, and I think it would be the wrong move to tell them they’re not “real EAs” because they aren’t donating money to EA charities.