Doing Good, Better

Conversations about effective charitable giving, effective activism, and high-impact research. Support and advice for people who want to make a difference.

[effectivealtruism]

Is this blog still running?

I can still post submissions but am not actively looking for content at this time and might answer questions or not depending on how long it’d take to give a thorough and helpful answer.

[effectivealtruism]

Dear governments: Want to help the poor and transform your economy? Hold on, recalculating…

You may have heard about Tyler Cowen’s interview with Chris Blattman earlier this month. You would be forgiven, however, to have missed important news about cash transfers because, as far as I can tell, no one tweeted about this:

[theunitofcaring]

GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project are hiring for a lot of roles right now. 

I’ve been following GiveWell and OpenPhil for a long time, and I think they’re great organizations doing great work. Their researchers look into tons of complicated questions related to figuring out what works in charitable giving. They look at the big picture, including long-term effects, effects on local economies and on local stability, the room charities have for more funding, charities’ internal data gathering and transparency, and promising areas for intervention that don’t have associated charities yet. 

Some recent stuff they’ve published which I liked include:

This OpenPhil post trying to evaluate which actions by individual philanthropic orgs most contributed to a massive drop in the price of HIV/AIDS drugs

This GiveWell analysis of the eradication of malaria in the American South, Brazil, Columbia, and Mexico, and what we can learn for malaria eradication efforts elsewhere. I particularly commend them for preregistering their research plan with an external organization!

This OpenPhil post, which I’ve already discussed on this blog, which looks at the effects of incarceration on recidivism and crime

This GiveWell breakdown of considerations that affect their recommendations for Vitamin A supplementation

This GiveWell analysis of their own cost-effectiveness analysis process and how confident they are in it

OpenPhil and GiveWell are both hiring for research analyst positions, which involve lots of training and mentorship. They’re also hiring for operations roles. GiveWell also has a summer internship program for rising college seniors and grad students. 

As far I understand it, both OpenPhil and GiveWell are actively constrained in how much good they can do - how much research they can conduct and write up, how many grants they can recommend, how quickly they can identify good giving opportunities - by the size of their staff. I think a lot of people who might not think of themselves as qualified to work at GiveWell or OpenPhil would actually be a big asset to them and the work they’re doing. I encourage people to apply or to talk to me about whether you should apply. 

[theunitofcaring]

Hi, so I don't mean this to come across as hostile in any way, it is a genuine question: are there any spaces/websites for ppl who want to maximize the effectiveness of their charitable donations + see news about world health progress that don't contain like, overt moralizing or reiterations of the drowning child argument or anything like that? Basically just the practical side. I find existing EA stuff a mental health minefield unfortunately but I'd like to donate effectively

I think you’ll really like the GiveWell blog for this! There’s lots of in-depth discussion of how they see world health giving opportunities, with absolutely no stressful moralizing language - it’s mostly not even about where they recommend others donate, just about how they arrive at their own estimates, and even where there are donation recommendations they’re not presented in an emotive/pressury-format at all!

Some recent posts of theirs:

Update on our views on cataract surgery - discussing the effectiveness of work in this cause area, charities they’ve looked at in the area, and things to consider in estimating whether it is cost-effective compared to other interventions. 

Why we’re considering Zusha! as a potential 2017 top charity - discussing road safety as a cause area in global health

How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses - a pretty technical discussion of what GiveWell means when they publish cost-effectiveness numbers, what decisions those numbers get used for and how they get used

Unfortunately the blog doesn’t update too often; you’ll probably see a post or two a month from them. That’s a problem with the next blog on this list, too: the Innovations for Poverty Action blog mostly publishes writeups of their own research, but they’re doing lots of varied and interesting and promising research:

How do mobile money fee structures impact the poor?

What will the next generation of microcredit products for women look like?

Standing up for the end user of digital payments

Because these discuss IPA’s work, they tend to be a little more opinionish than the GiveWell pieces, but I’ve never noticed them misrepresenting or grossly oversimplifying and the studies are always linked right there.

I also really like GiveDirectly’s blog, and scanning it just now to find some articles to recommend you I didn’t notice any coercive/pressure-y language. It does update more regularly - several times a week - though that’s often just links to articles elsewhere, short study summaries, and short field process reports. Some recent content:

What it’s like to receive a basic income

Unconditional cash transfers and intrahousehold conflict: a pilot study in Kenya (cw: domestic abuse)

Improving our call center

I hope these are good sources for keeping up with news without a mental health minefield! Take care of yourself!

[winged-light]

There’s a criticism of Effective Altruism that goes, “Because you measure everything with RCTs, you’ll prioritise issues and causes that can be easily measured with RCTs, and you won’t look at other kinds of interventions that aren’t easily measured.” IIRC this is called the spotlight effect.

And I am like… this is a feature, not a bug? This strongly selects for the kinds of problem I care about solving.

Problems highlighted and interventions measurable by RCTs:

will tend to be large scale, and affect more than one subgroup of the population, because RCTs can’t pick up on problems that only affect a few people in the sample

statistically significant problems with big effect sizes

problems that are well-defined and operationalized, so we can figure out how to actually measure them in the real world

problems that it is easy to figure out the nature of and understand the effects of on behaviour, the economy, and health outcomes

I expect this to correlate with the kinds of problems I want to prioritise solving, which have features like:

large scale problems that affect lots of people (because these are causing more disutility than problems that only affect a few people, and I can get economies of scale when I solve the problem for all of the people)

significant problems that hurt people really badly (because worse problems should be prioritised to get solved first)

problems that actually exist and are not just a thing people made up because it plausibly could be happening and it would be bad if it did

problems that are tractable and I can work on

problems that cause negative effects on the real world - people’s behaviour, the economy, or health outcomes (as opposed to problems that just ~feel bad with our intuitions~)

problems that I have a hope of solving - so, problems I understand the nature of

problems where the proposed interventions are low-variance (eg. with malaria nets, there’s a chance I could be doing more good, or a chance I’m doing less good than I thought, but I’m almost certainly doing some good; with large scale political change, I might be creating utopia orrrr I might be accidentally killing millions of people)

If a problem is hard to measure, it’s also probably hard to make progress on it. Or it’s a problem that doesn’t affect people’s lives very much in the ways I care about. Or it’s a problem that isn’t really a problem. Or it’s a problem where if I try to fix it I might well do more harm than good.

The spotlight effect also leads to us prioritising problems with fixes that are obvious in the short term. Handing out a malaria net to a kid protects that kid from the moment you get the kid under it. Handing out feminism flyers might have some good effects 20 years down the line but unless we’re prepared to run a really large scale longitudinal study we’re not going to be able to measure those. So we’ll prioritise handing out malaria nets over handing out feminism flyers.

I think this is also a feature, not a bug.

I think good effects tend to cause other good effects. Like, you save kids from dying, so their parents have fewer kids because they’re less worried about their existing kids dying, so fewer women die in childbirth. You improve kids’ health now, and they grow up to be more productive adults, and they start a business and improve the economy of the area. You cure someone of an infectious disease now, and they don’t infect several other people whom they otherwise would have infected. Vaccinating some people now can create herd immunity that protects children in the future. Reducing child mortality means investing time and effort in any one kid is a better deal because they won’t die on you. I think as a general heuristic I expect good flowthrough effects to follow good effects, and bad flowthrough effects to follow bad effects.

(It is pretty generally accepted aiui that bad effects follow bad effects: see eg. the economy takes a hit and then goes into recession so everyone stops spending so it goes further into recession, or cycles of abuse where people who see lots of violence in their childhood are more likely to grow up to be violent, or you get one person infected with a horrible disease and then suddenly there is an outbreak and also they can’t provide for their family and their family starve. I think “bad effects cause more bad effects” is sufficiently good as a heuristic that believing “good effects cause good effects” would be more or less reasonable even if we didn’t have good evidence for that.)

So, some uncertain long-term intervention might have good effects twenty years down the line, but by the time it gets around to having its first good effects, the immediate intervention will be on its twentieth round of good flowthrough effects. You get more good effects in total by causing them earlier.

Immediate effects are also more certain - if a war starts in ten years that mean none of the twenty-year-out good effects materialise, at least you did some good with your immediate intervention, whereas you did nothing with your long-term thingy.

For this reason - and also for all the other reasons given as arguments for donating now rather than later, eg. the world is constantly getting better so the metaphorical fruit are constantly getting higher-hanging - I am generally in support of causing good effects immediately rather than good effects down the line.

You can say “you are prioritising the wrong sort of problems, you shouldn’t be prioritising big problems that are bad and affect lots of people which you think you have a good chance of being able to solve for <reasons>”, but you can’t really say “the spotlight effect means you prioritise measurable problems that show up in RCTs!” Like, yes, I know. I want to prioritise those things.

[effectivealtruism]

We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project.

We want to run a large, long-term study to answer a few key questions: how people’s happiness, well-being, and financial health are affected by basic income, as well as how people might spend their time.

But before we do that, we’re going to start with a short-term pilot in Oakland. Our goal will be to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc.

Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality. We think these traits make it a very good place to explore how basic income could work for our pilot.

[effectivealtruism]

GiveDirectly's Basic Income Guarantee

Our trial will be the first ever basic income that's long-term, universal, and enough to live on.

Basic income is an idea that's been talked about for decades and is currently being hotly debated around the globe, but it's never actually been fully tried and tested. So we're going to do it and study it.

What is a basic income?

A basic income guarantee is a public policy that would provide all people a basic floor—an income that is enough to live on and that is provided irrespective of work simply because the recipient is a member of that community. It is provided to everyone, regardless of need, forever.

Since the time of Thomas More, people from across the political spectrum have expressed interest in the idea, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to the conservative economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek. Some argue this is the moral thing to do; others argue replacing a patchwork of existing government programs with a basic income is more efficient; technologists argue the coming robotization of the workforce makes it necessary. And it's not just words; in countries where basic income is up for debate, trillions of dollars of social services are at stake.

What is the evidence?

The deep evidence base for unconditional cash transfers provides plenty of reasons to be intrigued by basic income. We know people who receive cash transfers don't blow it on drinks or stop working but rather increase their earnings, their assets, and their psychological well-being.

But, we know less about basic income. We haven't yet seen a rigorous evaluation of a program that is:

universal within well-defined communities (not means tested or targeted towards a specific group),

long-term, and

enough to cover a minimum standard of living.

What are we doing?

While we don't have a position on the ultimate value of a basic income absent further evidence, as an organization that has worked extensively on cash transfers, we have an opportunity to help answer some of the big questions associated with basic income. Will people devote more time and capital to valuable enterprises like entrepreneurship or family care? Will basic income disincentivize work, create dependencies, or reduce overall productivity? With your help, we will run a long-term, universal basic income and study it rigorously to find out.

We think the whole thing will cost roughly $30M, of which around 90% of the funds will go directly to very poor households. Running the project in an emerging market, where meeting basic needs is far cheaper, will make it affordable to enroll enough people to generate statistically robust evidence. At the same time it will let us directly inform policy debates in those emerging markets, which are the front lines of the global fight against poverty.

To get started, we’re putting in $10 million of our own funds to match the first $10 million donated by others.

[effectivealtruism]

This plan represents a significant shift from previous years.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve put a lot of effort into hiring and training staff and we now have significantly more capacity to do research than we have in past years. Some of our increased capacity will support the Open Philanthropy Project, which we hope will be a separate organization by the end of 2016; its plans for the year will be discussed on the new Open Philanthropy Project blog. We also expect to have more capacity for GiveWell’s work of finding outstanding evidence-based charities.

At the same time, we have come to believe that the kind of work we’ve recently been doing to find top charities – deeply investigating the most promising-seeming charities we know of, based largely on which interventions they carry out – has limited promise. In past years – and at the beginning of this year – we hoped that these investigations would lead relatively quickly to new top charities. Now, we believe that we’ve already (previously) identified most of the strongest charities by our criteria, and there aren’t many strong candidates left (though there are a few that we continue to investigate, and we remain willing and eager to investigate further promising groups if we come across them). With that in mind, we have begun seeing more potential in other research priorities, such as supporting the development of new organizations and new evidence bases.

A future post will elaborate on why we’ve formed this view. This post focuses on laying out our plans for GiveWell’s research work in 2016, taking this view into account.

In brief, in 2016:

We plan to focus much of our capacity on a small number of initiatives that are unlikely to result in new top charities in 2016, but which we hope will lead to new top charities that are competitive with our current top charities in 2017 or 2018.

We plan to intensify our work following our current top charities and are tentatively planning to make site visits to distributions funded by the Against Malaria Foundation and work supported by Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative.

We are also planning a substantial project focused on the question of whether or not we should recommend that Good Ventures give significantly more than it has in the past to support insecticide-treated nets, arguably the most promising area we know of for substantial additional funding.

We also hope to take on additional work (described in detail below) but plan to prioritize this work below the items listed above.

We plan to put more staff time into donor outreach than we have in the past and discuss our priorities for that work below.

This plan represents a significant shift from previous years, when our primary goal was improving the list of top charities we published at the end of each year. We plan to write more about the reasoning behind this shift in a future post.

[effectivealtruism]

We feel that we broadly achieved our primary goals for 2015 while we generally fell short on several of our secondary goals.

This post reviews and evaluates last year’s progress on our traditional work of finding and recommending evidence-based, thoroughly vetted charities that serve the global poor. It has two parts. First, we look back at the plans we laid out in early 2015 and compare our progress against them, providing details on some of the most significant accomplishments and shortcomings of the year. Then, we reflect on the overall impact of our traditional work and critically evaluate some of our major strategic decisions. In our next post, we will cover our plans for GiveWell’s work in 2016.

In brief, when evaluating ourselves against the goals we laid out in early 2015, we feel that we broadly achieved our primary goals for the year while we generally fell short on several of our secondary goals.

The overall impact of GiveWell’s recommendations continued to increase substantially in 2015, as we tracked more than $100 million that was donated to our recommended charities as a direct result of our research.

This self-evaluation post focuses primarily on how we have grown as an organization and the recent strategic decisions we have made since these are most relevant to thinking about the impact of recent GiveWell-focused work.

[effectivealtruism]

Our working philosophy of high-risk, high-reward “hits-based” giving.

One of our core values is our tolerance for philanthropic “risk.” Our overarching goal is to do as much good as we can, and as part of that, we’re open to supporting work that has a high risk of failing to accomplish its goals. We’re even open to supporting work that is more than 90% likely to fail, as long as the overall expected value is high enough.

And we suspect that, in fact, much of the best philanthropy is likely to fail. We suspect that high-risk, high-reward philanthropy could be described as a “hits business,” where a small number of enormous successes account for a large share of the total impact — and compensate for a large number of failed projects.

If this is true, I believe it calls for approaching our giving with some counterintuitive principles — principles that are very different from those underlying our work on GiveWell. In particular, if we pursue a “hits-based” approach, we will sometimes bet on ideas that contradict conventional wisdom, contradict some expert opinion, and have little in the way of clear evidential support. In supporting such work, we’d run the risk of appearing to some as having formed overconfident views based on insufficient investigation and reflection.

In fact, there is reason to think that some of the best philanthropy is systematically likely to appear to have these properties. With that said, we think that being truly overconfident and underinformed would be extremely detrimental to our work; being well-informed and thoughtful about the ways in which we could be wrong is at the heart of what we do, and we strongly believe that some “high-risk” philanthropic projects are much more promising than others.

This post will:

Outline why we think a “hits-based” approach is appropriate.

List some principles that we think are sound for much decision-making, but — perhaps counterintuitively — not appropriate for hits-based giving.

List principles that we think are helpful for making sure we focus on the best possible high-risk opportunities.

There is a natural analogy here to certain kinds of for-profit investing, and there is some overlap between our thinking and the ideas Paul Graham laid out in a 2012 essay, Black Swan Farming.

[effectivealtruism]

We’re trying an alternative way of writing our evidence reviews that aims for dramatically better accessibility, while hopefully preserving nuance.

To date, GiveWell writeups have focused on being detailed, nuanced, thoroughly cited, and clear. Something we’ve consciously not prioritized is making them “accessible”: easy and fun to read, emotionally compelling, memorable, and strongly persuasive to casual readers. Writing accessibly isn’t a natural strength of ours, and it can be difficult to reconcile with our more core goals of transparency, nuance, etc. As a result, until recently, we haven’t had the capacity to put in the substantial amount of work it would take to improve the accessibility of our writing.

We’ve recently increased our capacity for outreach, however, and over the last several months we’ve been working on a pilot project: trying an alternative way of writing our evidence reviews that aims for dramatically better accessibility, while hopefully preserving nuance. We’ve partnered with several communications firms (whose names we’ve withheld for now pending feedback on our pilot project, subject to the terms of our agreement) that we consider to be on the cutting edge of knowledge about effective communication and persuasion. These firms collaborated on an in-depth study of what we could learn from the most effective communicators from the worlds of business, entertainment, and politics. We were impressed with their methodology for identifying effective persuaders, and we believe our test writeup effectively integrates practices that have shown to be extremely impressive in mass persuasion.

We would greatly appreciate readers’ feedback on our test writeup, and the extent to which it combines emotional resonance and persuasiveness with maintaining our commitment to accuracy, detail and nuance. Please leave feedback as comments on this post.

View the test writeup

[theunitofcaring]

Thursday evening we went to an event at GiveWell! Holden and Elie each talked and answered questions, and then we broke out into discussion groups with GiveWell staff members. Highlights:

Holden and Elie are both excellent people with a bunch of skill sets I want to acquire

namely: fielding highly technical questions with extremely thoughtful detailed answers while making sense to an audience without any background in the topic, coming across as both hypercompetent and likeable, being willing to go into depth on every position they take, and making extremely weird stuff (Holden thinks AI risk is really important and possible to tackle within OpenPhil’s framework!) make sense and fit into a bigger picture. 

I asked for and got a much more detailed explanation of why AMF and Deworm the World have so much more room for funding this year. The answers made me think more highly of everyone involved: only organizations with an exceptionally good process and communication could function the way GiveWell’s room-for-more-funding recs do.

I also asked, since I’ve seen a lot of discussion of it in the Facebook EA community, how OpenPhil would approach the problem of current U.S. politics. Holden’s answer was that they felt no obligation to be apolitical or neutral, that immigration was the most obvious and impactful thing a president had a lot of sway on, and that it was pretty obvious who they’d want to win in November, but that politics is the prime example of a cause that’s not neglected, meaning there are billions of dollars already flowing and your money or time would achieve lots more somewhere else. 

They’re revamping their website to make it more readable and contemporary! I’m sure I’ll miss the current site, which is very determinedly not flashy and which I associate with the GiveWell spirit, but more people reading their content is obviously worth it. 

More people should consider working at GiveWell. Like, a lot more. It’s a good work environment, they are primarily capacity-constrained meaning new hires can let them achieve more good, and it sounds like working there teaches some incredible skills. It is confusing to me how many EAs haven’t considered it. 

[hill-climber]

I learned that they have spreadsheets of their cost-effectiveness models, and they’re very detailed and helpful. They really do a good job of spelling out their assumptions, and it’s easy to input your own values and see how that changes the effectiveness of deworming vs. bednets vs. cash.

I trust GiveWell’s estimates much more now - I wasn’t sure how they were getting their numbers before.

I didn’t realize how much more effective health interventions were compared to cash transfers:

Also, lower discount rates apparently make deworming more attractive relative to bednets. (A lot of the benefits of deworming are from higher future income.) At 1%/year:

At 10%/year:

[effectivealtruism]

When I was younger I thought the wizards in Harry Potter were unspeakably selfish. they could save people from the brink of death. they could end world hunger, they could cure a bunch of diseases, they could blast a giant dent in global poverty. but they don’t. why?

well, why don’t we?

because, okay: yer a wizard, reader. you can cast the most important kind of protective spell - the kind that keeps malaria-carrying mosquitos out of kids’ cradles - for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. keep it up, and in a couple months you’ll have saved a child’s life. you can deworm children with intestinal parasites for even cheaper than that. you can make food appear on someone’s table. you can do even more than that.

And so it’s not hard at all to understand the wizards in their hidden villages. The excuses they’d make are the same ones we make. The people suffering are far away and poor and strangers. We tried well-intentioned relief programs in the past and they didn’t work, so now we’re relieved from trying.  It’s not our problem. There are troubles closer to home. It’s so hard.

There are, and it is. But still, I bet there are a lot of wizards who didn’t cure world hunger because they didn’t think of it. They don’t know what a rubber duck is; how the hell would they know that unlimited clean water isn’t just a useful spell for watering your lawn? I think maybe there are a lot of wizards who, if they knew that they could change the world, would take a shot at it. 

And I think maybe there are a lot of Muggles who would, too. 

[effectivealtruism]

The Zero Effect may not mean what you think it means, and other lessons from recent educational research.

Here’s an excellent blog post that has a good discussion on how studies can err by assuming that no effect found means that there was no effect. The distinction between the production function parameter, the impact of what you did holding all else constant, and the policy parameter, the impact of what you did when other actors adjust, is particularly interesting. For example, increased grants to schools, after only a year, started functioning as conditional cash transfers, because families reduced household spending on education.

[nostalgebraist]

That earlier conversation cleared up my own feelings about EA a bit, and they are as follows:

I give to charity – and to “effective” charities specifically – not because of any abstract argument I have been given, nor out of a feeling of moral guilt, but simply because once it was specifically pointed out to me that I could, it seemed like something I wanted to do.  It is consistent with the values I already have.

I do it because it is something I “should” do, but it isn’t the sort of “should” that comes from some ethical theory baring mercilessly down on me.  It’s the kind of “should” that makes me, during everyday life, actively want to help people.  Which is an impulse I have – not an infinitely compelling one, not one to which I will sacrifice all comfort and beauty and all other good things, but still a natural impulse.  Not something alien bolted on from the outside.

And the reason I want EA to spread is not that I think I have my hands on the correct ethical theory and want people to follow its dictates, their own values be damned.  My guess is that EA-like giving is – as it was with me – already consistent with many people’s values.  In which case telling them about EA would be less like guilting them into doing good, and more like making them aware that an action, of the sort they like to do, is available to them.

Imagine that it is discovered that whenever anyone says the world “bagel,” there was a 1/1000 chance that some randomly chosen person with cancer would be completely cured.  What would happen?  Certainly, this would precipitate some guilt crises – some people would feel bad about doing anything except saying the word bagel over and over again, and some people would argue that this feeling was right.  But the main reaction, I think, would be joy, and not just for cancer sufferers and those who know them.  People would think: my God, I can help someone so much, just by doing something so easy!  They would say “bagel” again and again with glee – not to the point of destroying their lives, but often, when they get a spare moment.  Such a complicated world, and such a simple way to help people so much!  Bagel!  Such a shining piece of unalloyed good in a very alloyed world!  And what a way to make even our own little lives brighten the world!

We would not be quite so happy if, instead, saying “bagel” merely had a 1/1000 chance of curing a less serious chronic illness – say, Tourette Syndrome (which I have, so I am allowed to say this).  In EA, this natural difference in feelings leads to cause prioritization, and puts the “E” in “EA.”  It is not some strange alien philosophical thing.  It is a normal aspect of our sentiments.

I find myself frustrated both by a lot of the EA movement and by a lot of anti-EA sentiment.  The EA movement tends to focus on the more philosophical, controversial, guilt-inducing aspects of the issue – the equivalent of telling people about the bagel thing by haranguing them about how awful it is to do anything but devote your life to maximal bagel-saying.  Anti-EA writing tends to focus entirely on opposition to those philosophical claims, which is fine in itself but pushes people away from discovering how wonderful a thing it can be to donate to effective charities.  It’s the equivalent of writing an article about these weird people who want you to do nothing all day but say “bagel,” and the problematic moral axioms involved, without ever mentioning the fact that saying “bagel” is magic.

The reason I want the EA movement to exist is that I want more people to discover this new action that is consistent with their values.  I don’t literally mean that people don’t know donation is possible, but in my experience it takes some initial push to make them realize that they could be doing it right now.  Many non-religious people, including me, grow up never thinking about it as a possibility, because no one around them talks about it.  Having a community of people doing it, as in religion, also helps – which is something the EA movement has the potential to do.

But the EA movement is certainly not ideal at selling itself for this purpose.  I wish it had nothing to do with Peter Singer, with his “really we should all just be ascetics” extreme utilitarianism and his ill-informed views about disabled people.  I wish it were less about “really we should all just be ascetics” in general.  Forget about asceticism and just focus on communicating the very simple fact that because of the declining marginal utility of wealth (among other things), you can help other people in marvelous ways at extremely low cost to yourself.  This should be a cause for joy.  Bagel!

Since I only really care about the EA movement as a vehicle for making people aware that they can give and that they probably already want to, arguments over EA often look strange to me.  Little or no attention is paid to whether the critics themselves donate, or whether EA caused them to donate.  Notice, in the article I linked this morning, this astonishing buried lede:

The utilitarian was no longer a theoretical construction to do dialectical battle with; he was knocking at the door armed with pamphlets, asking me to sign away 10 percent of my income (I was happy to oblige) and, in the seminar room, claiming authority over how I was to live (which I respectfully declined to concede to him).

Reading on it is clear that the author is not on board with the notion of effectiveness.  But it sounds like the EAs got him to donate.

This is a very strange situation: the fact that the author was awakened to a new way of doing good in the world is relegated to a sidenote (literally in parentheses), while he writes many paragraphs about the problems with the people who thus awakened him.

A man came to the door and told me about the bagel trick.  What is the bagel trick, you ask?  Unimportant, although I will note that I now practice it regularly.  What is important is that this man’s philosophy is wrong and you should not listen to him.

What the hell is going on here?

You may have noticed that I don’t actually seem to be a utilitarian.  If I was, I would be much less concerned with the absolute numbers of people donating and more concerned with the quantity of donations.  I might be much more interested in strategies like “earning to give,” which are weird and scary in ways that push people away from EA, but which may have the potential to create more donations, overall, even when you take that pushing-away into account.

I’m not sure if I’m a utilitarian, but I think a utilitarian could still bear with me here.  What I don’t want is for the EA movement to wither away into a strange, nerdy footnote that leaves most people cold.  What I want is for it to flourish into an overall secular culture of giving that can engage a wide range of people.  (Peter Singer wants this too, although I’m not sure he is effective at achieving it.)  In the short term, yes, a few high-paid “earners-to-give” can numerically outweigh a bunch of well-meaning but lower-earning donors.  In the long run, if we actually create a culture of giving, the number of EAs who just happen to work high-paying jobs will far numerically outweigh current earners-to-give, without anyone even having to adjust their career path.

EA, my EA, is a very normal sort of thing, one with broad appeal, and I hope it will be adopted very widely.  I want a world where ordinary high-paid managers follow GiveWell recommendations because this is a normal thing for people to do.  If we normalize giving – even those of us who can’t give much – the sheer masses of well-off normal people who give will far exceed anything that a small number of utilitarian nerds can do alone.

[theunitofcaring]

GiveDirectly still faces uphill struggles. Many in the United States remain skeptical of giving cash to poor people. “The debates we’re having when we talk with American donors are miles away” from where development experts are at, Niehaus said. The reluctance is not limited to donors. Last year, when a wealthy Chinese financier publicly offered to fund $300 cash payments to homeless New Yorkers, the New York City Rescue Mission refused. Its executive director said he feared the payments would be spent on drugs and alcohol.

(article)

the article’s old, but I just saw it. And now I’m really mad. Dear people at the New York City Rescue Mission, how about your employer withholds your paychecks because you might use them to buy alcohol? What? That’d be unjust? We can’t do that to Valuable Citizens, just to nasty smelly homeless people?

I’m now worried that ineffective charities have a vested interest in fighting cash transfers, because cash transfers give them less power over the people they’re supposedly helping. 

(Most people don’t spend money responsibly. Despite this, giving people money is generally a better way to get their needs met than giving institutions money to spend on helping those people, since people know their needs and institutions don’t.The exception is stuff like healthcare that has huge externalities.)

[bittersnurr]

the worst part about this is people continue to defend charities that spend more on marketing then helping people while having this view.

like people will legit feel better giving to susan komen then giving directly to a cancer patient because the cancer patient might secretly not need it like are you serious?

Yeah I sure would hate a legit needy person spending money on video games or something instead of food instead of a billionaire using it on shit they don’t need!

(also ime if I try to give friends money for fun I have to BUY THE FUN THING FOR THEM because they refuse to ‘waste’ the money. It’s the OPPOSITE of the stereotype people spend their “fun money” on necessities instead)

[swimmiesofdoom]

we have a basic policy when it comes to giving directly to homeless people– once that money leaves our tiny little fins, it is not our money, and whatever gets a homeless friend through the night is none of our business.  if that person spends that money on some food, great.  some alcohol?  great.  a hotel room?  great.  drugs?  great.  because they are fucking homeless.  they can do what they want with what you give them.  and you should be fine with that.

short of handing a homeless person a home, almost everything you do will be a bandaid of a sort.  so let them figure out which wounds they need to bandage.  they know what they need better than you ever will.

[effectivealtruism]

We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research

We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research.

We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work.

It’s true that we have systems in place to give people resources, but the bureaucracy and qualification requirements make it a very imperfect approximation of what most people mean when talking about a basic income. We have some examples of something close to a basic income in other countries, but we’d like to see how it would work in the US.

I think it’s good to start studying this early.I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.

So it would be good to answer some of the theoretical questions now. Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled? Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and benefit society far more? And do recipients, on the whole, create more economic value than they receive? (Questions about how a program like this would affect overall cost of living are beyond our scope, but obviously important.)

50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income. And I think that, combined with innovation driving down the cost of having a great life, by doing something like this we could eventually make real progress towards eliminating poverty.

We’re looking for one researcher who wants to work full-time on this project for 5 years as part of YC Research. We’d like someone with some experience doing this kind of research, but as always we’re more interested in someone’s potential than his or her past. Our idea is to give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period, though we’re flexible on that and all aspects of the project—we are far from experts on this kind of research. We’d be especially interested in a combination of selecting people at random, and selecting people who are driven and talented but come from poor backgrounds. We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed.

If you’re interested in running this project, please apply by February 15th.