Animal Charity Evaluators are now promoting this to animal welfare donors throughout their site in the sidebar, and on their blog.
Drayin
Karma: 55
They would needs hundreds of staff if not more to do that.
That’s a pretty interesting list of x-risk donors. Eyeballing it, it looks like few people plan to donate to far future causes other than x-risk but not to existential risk alleviation itself.
[Suggestions thread]
With the seed content from the annual survey, this is the largest platform for individual EAs (well, I guess it’s the only one currently!) So it’s worth thinking about features etc. that could usefully be added to it, or ways others could leverage the open platform.
To get the ball rolling:
It’d be good if EAs could raise fundraiser through these (or EA groups could organise them by leveraging the platform)
You or others could give the EAs on there jumping-off points for actions which make the world a more optimal place in the most efficient way possible.
Knowing nothing about the survey before I would have filled in a much longer survey but then I’m a survey junkie I even got a long way into the 45 minute Yale survey.
lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA’s claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :
This was a pretty surprising sentence. Weren’t LessWrong & GiveWell growing large, important parts of the community before GWWC existed? It wasn’t called “effective altruism” at the time, but it was largely the same ideas and people.
I see Larks’ point.
The movement data is action-relevant for me, as I’m spending several hours a week going to meetup groups purely to recruit GiveWell donors. I’ve found skeptic/atheist groups particularly fertile, and lefty political groups (and ‘A’ rather than ‘E’ groups generally) the opposite. I haven’t tried any conservative or libertarian groups yet.
Can anyone involved in the census say whether it reached people wholly or mainly thought a post on http://lesswrong.com/promoted/ ? That’d be pretty powerful if it can get 1500+ responses—it would be great if this post could be promoted too, as many people are putting a lot of effort into sharing the EA survey widely! How can we make promotion happen?
It’s a matter of a degree, but in the EA context (which sets a high bar), I personally call people ‘altruistic’ if (but not only if) they’ve donated >=10% of a real income for over a year or they’ve consistently spent over an hour a week doing something they’d otherwise rather not do to help others.
I apply a similarly high bar for altruism—many EAs don’t count as altruistic based on this.
Yes, the survey asks where you heard of it itself, and what groups you’re a member of, and where you first heard of EA: LessWrong is a candidate for each. So you can make predictions for specific groups.
I predict:
utilitarianism’s the most common philosophy
a clear majority will be non-religious, and respondents often identify with skepticism/atheism as a social movement
a clear majority are left wing
most respondents are under 30, with 50% students
people often heard of EA through Peter Singer
And the most significant outcome:
There will be many non-students without significant donations, which in my view is not a good thing at all
I’m not so sure, in terms of their actual policies I hear the British Conservatives are pretty close to the US Democrats. They’re cutting services for the poor, but to a level above that found in the US. That does typically show inclinations similar to those of US Republicans, but it could also reflect a view about the optimal end level of services similar to some Democrats. So I guess it depends on what it shows most often, and whether those inclinations are most informative for the purposes of understanding people (eg in this survey).
One thing that would be really interesting is comparing EA-LW folks with both the standard EA answers and the standard LW survey answers.
“if the CFAR staff had put high probability on having success on one of those three fronts, then I think that logic is worth discussing.”
It would seem somewhat strange for CFAR to test three variables they did not expect to increase...
Also I do not think happiness is very hard to adjust. There is research that some simple things can improve your happiness and have been tested with RCT’s. E.g. meditation and gratitude lists had a measurable effect.
“Why haven’t more EAs signed up for a course on global security, or tried to understand how DARPA funds projects, or learned about third-world health? I’ve heard claims that this would be too time-consuming relative to the value it provides, but this seems like a poor excuse. If we want to be taken seriously as a movement (or even just want to reach consistently accurate conclusions about the world).”
This one worries me quite a bit. The vast majority of EA’s (including myself) have not spent very much time learning about what the large players in third world poverty are (e.g. WHO, UN). In fact you can be an “expert” in EA content and know virtually nothing about the rest of the non-profit/charity sector.
When I first went Veg I became anemic, now I take an iron pill daily and that seems to fix the problem completely, I also eat a cereal which is high in iron (additionally any sort of vegan meat substitute often is fortified with iron).
Also more quickly quantifiable then movement building (my previous EA plan) or getting pledges (Life You Can Save or GWWC).
The quoted claim was in the blog post “Why fundraising”. It was intended to talk about why fundraising as a meta-activity is quantified vs other more speculative meta-activities. You’re very correct that it is also massively important to have quantified charities as this ultimately dictates the impact we have. That being said we use Givewell’s estimates of lives saved as well as keep track of our counterfactual money moved and get a fairly quantified estimate of how much good we are doing.
All this being said I agree that its unclear what the paragraph is referring to and we will improve it.
Disclaimer: I am the Co-ED of Effective Fundraising.
Slight correction here. No one at Effective fundraising has large amounts of fundraising experience. I have fundraised for other charities but not effective ones before. We do not expect the full average ROI in the first year (as you can see from our cost estimates). We are also consulting with several very experienced grant writers that will help speed up our learning process.
Disclaimer: I am the Co-ED of Effective Fundraising.
That is a neat hack—who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch?