Hi Jonathan,
First off, thanks for putting so much time into writing this extensive list of questions and doubts you have about CEA. Unlike for-profit activities, we don’t have immediate feedback effects telling us when we’re doing well and when we’re doing badly, so criticism is an important countermeasure to make sure we do things as well as possible. We therefore really welcome people taking a critical eye to our activities.
As the person who wrote the original CEA material here on LessWrong, and the person who you mention above, I feel I should be the one to collate a response to your questions. However, because of other commitments (managing; fundraising; writing my first piece for a magazine column), it will be a few days before I can get this to you in a form I’d feel happy with. I hope that’s ok.
Before then I’ll just mention a few things in order to make things a bit clearer to the audience.
In what you wrote a couple of comments made it sound as if you’d had an in-depth conversation with me on these issues; whereas really the context of the only exchange we’ve had is my giving a short talk to a group of about 15 people, of very varied backgrounds. You asked a few questions and there was discussion afterwards, but this must have only taken up about 10-15 minutes of time. Though I would very much like to, I haven’t ever spoken with you or Alexey one-on-one.
Similarly, in your response to Luke you say that Adam works full-time at CEA. I think there’s some disagreement between the two of you on the extent to which he had signed off on the content. But, at any rate, it’s worth noting that Adam is an intern at CEA. This means he does contribute a full working week for CEA, but he is not an employee. He’s therefore not the person to go when it comes to high-level evaluation of CEA.
You mention an internal estimate of £1700 for the value of a new pledge. None of us are familiar with this figure, and we’re confused about where it could have come from.
You suggest that CEA has ~4000 people on its mailing lists. The correct figure is less than half that (unless you include TLYCS, which you might have been thinking of, which does have in excess of 4000 on its mailing list).
You estimate GWWC’s research capacity at 6 staff for last year. This is actually more than an order of magnitude higher than the true figure. In fact, the average number of paid employees (full-time equivalent) we have had working on all aspects of 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can over the last six months is only 3.7.
As a more general point, I think we should also be careful to distinguish whether CEA has acted optimally in terms of utility-maximization (to which the answer is certainly not), and whether it gets a return on investment which is better than 1:1.
In my follow-up comment, I’ll talk about some of the many concerns you’ve raised that we share, and the issues over which we might be making big mistakes. I’ll also be able to give a bit more background about our activities, and I’ll be able to answer your questions. Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Best Wishes,
Will
(part 1) Summary Thanks once again, Jonathan, for taking the time to write publicly about CEA, and to make some suggestions about ways in which CEA might be falling short. In what follows I’ll write a candid response to your post, which I hope you’ll take as a sign of respect — this is LW and I know that honesty in this community is valued far more than sugarcoating. Ultimately, we’re all aiming here to proportion our beliefs to our evidence, and beating around the bush doesn’t help with that aim.
In your post you raise some important issues — often issues that those within CEA have also been thinking about. In general, however, the methodology by which you researched and wrote your post was poor. For this reason, there are crucial factual errors in your post that could easily have been avoided, and errors of argumentation that border on embarrassing. This is unfortunate. Powerful criticism of CEA’s activities is extremely important to us: in fact, in the absence of more direct forms of feedback (like profit and loss), it’s vital. But writing poorly researched and poorly thought-through criticism adds more noise than signal; this makes it harder for us in the future to distinguish the incisive and well-evidenced criticism from the rest, which just harms everyone.
I’ll mention some of the issues that you’ve raised that I think are important to think about, before going on to detail some of the mistakes you make in your post. I’ll note just now that, because of other commitments, this post will be the last I make on this thread.
Some Important Points
Individuals vs Large Organizations You ask why we focus on individuals, rather than large foundations, or governments, or intergovernmental institutions like the World Bank. This is a good question, and something we wrestle with. Indeed, it’s also something we’ve pursued. The media attention generated by Giving What We Can has provided a platform for Dr Toby Ord, the principal founder of GWWC, to travel to and speak to the UK Secretary of State for Development, the UK’s Department for International Development, the Centre for Global Development, 10 Downing Street, the Disease Control Priorities Network, the WHO and as it happens, the World Bank, about aid cost effectiveness and how to increase it. He has already had some success in this regard, which wouldn’t have been possible without GWWC, and he expects to spend a significant proportion of his career on this issue.
The question of whether to spend marginal resources influencing individuals versus governmental and international organisations is non-trivial to answer: international organisations have larger budgets, but are more difficult to access and more difficult to influence. If you think it obvious that we should be influencing the latter, I’d be interested to know your reasons. Later in this response, I’ll discuss your suggestion in more depth.
Transparency You raised concerns about the transparency of GWWC and 80,000 Hours. I agree that this is something that both organisations could work on. We have taken steps so far in the direction of transparency, especially in making the organisations transparent to donors and potential donors. Both 80k and GWWC have in-depth 6-monthly reviews, where their progress is assessed internally by the trustees (myself, Nick Beckstead and Toby Ord), and externally, by people, often donors, within the effective altruism community who are not closely involved with the running of the organisation. GWWC has posted on this here, and noted that if you wanted to read the reports from the review you are able to request them. 80,000 hours will make a similar post soon.
In addition, at the request of Giles, I opened CEA up for questioning on LessWrong, and wrote a detailed response to the questions posted there. I try to provide in-depth responses to any questions I receive via e-mail. And I provide the spreadsheet and explanation of an in-depth calculation of GWWC’s impact per dollar to anyone who asks (accurate as of ~March 2012 – we plan to do this annually).
One issue in keeping a start-up organisation transparent is that the nature of our activities changes rapidly. The very idea of 80,000 Hours as primarily a service organization, providing free careers advice, was only thought up in early July 2012. People switch positions regularly while we get a better understanding of whose comparative advantage lies where. It’s difficult to be transparent and non-misleading when you know that the facts might change radically within the space of a few months. There are also many things to be done, and investing in increased transparency has to be weighed against raising more money, or pledges, or making more career changes. So far, we’ve focused on being transparent to our donors and potential donors, which I still think is the right call — but it’s important to think about and reassess this on a regular basis. I’d welcome further thoughts on if you think that we’ve made the wrong trade-off here.
Publishing You briefly suggest the idea that we should use publications as a metric of research output. This is also something that’s worth thinking about. Publishing increases one’s academic reputability, and the scrutiny of peer review improves the reliability of one’s research. However, it is far more time-consuming than one might expect, because one has to tailor one’s research to the norms of the journal, and is especially slow if one is publishing within philosophy journals. (A paper of mine was under review for 10 months from one journal.) It also biases research towards ideas that are publishable, even if less important. So it’s a difficult issue.
For reasons of time, GiveWell don’t publish at all (but the resulting lack of peer review is something I’ve raised as a concern about their research); whereas, in order to boost reputation, MIRI are aiming to publish. At the moment, publishing isn’t a high priority for us, but we do some. I’ve published the central argument in favour of earning to give (it’s forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, available here), and I’m planning to write a book on effective altruism over the next year, from which I might publish a few articles. But beyond that, we’d rather focus on getting the ideas right. However, that’s something we could easily be mistaken about, and is worthy of discussion.
With these points noted, I’ll move on to the mistakes made within the post.
Some misleading aspects of the post
Factual Errors I mention these in my other comment on this post.
One other thing to note is that the 80k pledge was never focused on global poverty. The previous declaration was: I declare that I aim to pursue a career as an effective altruist.
This means that I intend to: (i) Devote a significant proportion of my time or resources to helping others. (ii) Use the time or resources I give as effectively as possible in helping others. (iii) Choose my career based at least in part on how it enables me to further my altruistic aims. And prior to that the declaration was: I pledge that, over my lifetime, I will dedicate 10% of my time or money (or any combination of the two) to those causes that I believe will do the most good with the resources I give them. I understand that it is difficult to know the best way of doing good in the world, and so I will choose those cause(s) on the basis of the best evidence that is available to me at the time. Further, I will deliberately pursue a career that will considerably improve my ability to further those causes I believe to be best.
The new declaration is: “I intend, at least in part, to use my career in an effective way to make the world a better place.” More discussion on these changes later.
Misleading statements “In recent conversation with Will Crouch”… “In conversation with Will Crouch”… “these discussions” I mention this in my other post but it’s worth repeating. Though your post suggests that we had at least two one-on-one conversations, this never happened. We spoke only during a question-and-answer session after a short talk I gave.
“There wasn’t any particular defence of the choice of wording [of the 80k declaration of intent] or any indication that there had been deep thought about precisely what that pledge should constitute.” This is technically true. However, it’s misleading insofar as I wasn’t asked why the declaration of intent was changed, nor was I asked how much time had gone into thinking about revising the declaration of intent.
“The key argument in favour of donating money to CEA which was presented by Will was that by donating $1 to CEA you produce more than $1 in donations to the most effective charities. We present some apparent difficulties with this remaining true on the margin.” This suggests that your post was primarily about difficulties with inferring marginal cost-effectiveness from past average cost-effectiveness. I think that that’s a very important topic (hey, maybe 99.9% of the value of CEA comes from me! In which case marginal cost-effectiveness would be much lower than past average cost-effectiveness), but as far as I can tell in your post you don’t address that issue anywhere.