Hi everyone!
So I recently took the Giving What We Can pledge, donating 10% of my income to the most effective charities. I spoke to a friend of mine about, and he came with an argument I found it quite hard to respond to, so I was hoping you could share your thoughts on the matter.
Basically, he thinks that helping those most in need should be a responsibility of the government, and the more money we, as individuals, donate to charity, the less money the really big players, governments, will feel they have to donate. His argument then is, that if a lot of people donate money to charity, it would result in less government donations/spending, which would cancel out the effects of privately donating.
Can anyone find a hole in the argument, or any studies/statistics which support EA on this matter, or is he right?
Thank you!
After reading a few posts on the EA forum, I was curious to know what the breakdown of people is in the community is re. their work.
I don't see (or do) much sneering at the Rationalism-adjacent Effective Altruism movement, because they at least seem to be doing something worthwhile. Apparently they are plenty sneerworthy though.
https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung/status/1464688390620725259
https://preview.redd.it/8df54pm00d281.png?width=1482&format=png&auto=webp&s=8db1e165a73b3a67b056824bf6d28740b6428b7e
I'm hoping to start an effective altruism group at UW and I just want to know if anyone at UW knows what it is/would be interested in it.
If you're familiar with EA, please let me know!
If you're not familiar with EA, it's an organization that aims to find the most effective ways to do good. Many other universities have EA groups, with particularly strong programs at Berkeley, Stanford, and Cambridge. We will be discussing issues that affect millions if not billions of people. Issues like emerging technologies, global income inequality, climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, and more. We will also be discussing career goals and helping each other shape those goals, again, in order to have the biggest impact for your effort.
One key idea of EA is that some methods of accomplishing a goal are hundreds of times more effective than others. If your goal is to improve access to education, for example, it turns out that providing traditional educational resources like books and smaller class sizes have almost no effect on test scores, while providing medical resources to children in the poorest parts of the world is tremendously impactful. By paying $1 for medication to treat common parasitic worms, you can enable a child to attend an additional 2 weeks of school every year!
Let me know if you're interested!
Do you want to make the world a better place?
Do you want to think carefully about how to have the biggest impact you can?
Do you want to meet like-minded students and learn more about how you can do good with your career, donations, and activism?
Then the Effective Altruism Fellowship is perfect for you! The fellowship is an 8-week program involving weekly readings and discussion groups (in-person or virtual) on how to have a positive impact. You’ll also learn a framework for career planning to optimize your time, resources, and social impact. Lastly, you’ll get the chance to network with professionals and other EA fellows worldwide from other top universities.
Topics covered in the program: measuring and estimating impact, high-impact careers, global health and poverty, intensive animal farming, longtermism, and global catastrophic risks.
In its discussion of high-impact careers, the fellowship will reference the work conducted by 80,000 Hours to identify the most pressing global problems. The top problems include safely guiding the development of AI, global priorities research, reducing the risk of catastrophic pandemics, nuclear security, improving institutional decision making, and extreme climate change.
The fellowship is open to all members of the Georgia Tech community! The program will start on February 6th, and applications are due on January 23rd.
Let us know if you’re interested here: https://airtable.com/shrQp4aiBQlLTNBtS!
https://preview.redd.it/768se7b2bea81.png?width=1545&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ede21380b2c9f974ab7225b9db3f4120ddf46e8
For the last many years, I've used EA charities as an escape to absolve myself of thinking about charity; I donate to AMF and then don't really think about my contributions anymore.
I really care about the society I live in and am starting to become increasingly worried about the cost of housing. I normally stay away from normal partisan politics but I really am starting to view the housing issue as potentially ruinous for my country's future. I've become concerned to the point where I feel that I need to start contributing/getting involved to have an impact in this area.
Accordingly, I have been thinking about the best ways I can contribute to this cause area - both in terms of donations and my time.
Unfortunately, because I'm so used to thinking through the EA lens, I am having a difficult time evaluating where my contributions can have the most impact.
In light of this, I am curious to hear what non-EA causes people in this community donate to (either time or money) and their thought process that informed their decision making.
If anyone has suggestions on ways to contribute to fight the rising cost of housing/nimbyism etc. in Canada, I would love to hear it.
I donate less than $1,000/year currently, but I am still interested in what the most effective way to direct my money is. I currently donate some money to organizations that I'm personally passionate about and some to disease prevention/more traditional charity. Sam's last podcast got me thinking more into this last segment, but I have some conflicting views between three types of ways of doing this:
- Organizations like GiveDirectly which have very low expenses, limited intermediaries and as the name says, give money directly to the people to do what they want with it. I like this since it's not as paternalistic, but I am concerned that giving money unconditionally to people without high levels of education will just be a waste and they will be back in the same place where they originally started or become dependent on this money forever
- Organizations like Kiva where they give loans to people that they have to pay back. I like this better, because I could in theory use the same money to help multiple people if/when they pay back and it would theoretically be used for a specific purpose, but I'm concerned by the high "interest" that the intermediaries charge the people receiving the money in order to recoup their administrative costs. I like to avoid intermediaries whenever possible due to the business of poverty but this also seems like a good way to teach people how to fish. And since they in theory have to pay the money back, they're more likely to spend the money "wisely" (I know, I know)
- Donating to things like building schools/infrastructure. While I like this too as a way to make more permanent changes and teaching people how to fish, I am concerned about the intermediaries here as well
Anyone have any thoughts on these three approaches and/or individual organizations? I am open to your thoughts and suggestions for alternatives as I just started researching this more in the last week and I'm conflicted
Hello! I am building a local community that focuses on career advisory for NTU undergrads. While most local career advice focuses on what job to get (using your major as a guide) and how to get the job (as your friendly uni advisors will help you with), we focus on the why of a career.
No, we don’t think a career should just be for our personal sustenance; we believe each and every individual has the potential to literally change the world.
To start off with, we are inviting ambitious, unconventional, and driven undergrads to join our small workshop of planning your career. But don’t mind if you think none of those traits reflect you. If what we have expounded so far has piqued your interest, feel free to join us as well!
As a start, we will be using the 80k Hours career planning guide; while you can do it on your own, we hope that providing you with a community can spark your journey.
If you think there is significance in having a meaningful and impactful career, be it possibly solving climate change, reducing pandemic risks, or aligning AI interests with humanity, please indicate your interest by dm-ing me or leaving a comment below! All majors are welcome!
Like many of you, I have been working towards FI over the past 10 or so years, with RE being less of a focus, but I've always wanted the power to walk away from my job if it no longer brought me joy.
FIRE in general is quite a selfish endeavor if you break it down to the key metrics of "save a shitload of money, invest it, get a return that's enough for you to live on, retire, live off the return". There's not a lot of room for structured giving in that arrangement, it's already a huge challenge as it is!
A post recently about ethical ETF investing, and how it's a shit way to make a difference, sparked a little bit of a rabbit hole for me which started with someone linking "The life you can save", which is a book by Peter Singer around charity, effective charities and how morally everyone should be part of the worldwide solution.
He quotes items such as how you can fix someones eyesight in a 3rd world country for $50, however training a guide dog is $50,000, hence the eyesight surgery in 3rd world countries is far more "effective".
Anyway, to the point of this post: -
How are you considering charity with your plans of FIRE?
Do you think it's your (our) moral obligation to give to those less fortunate?
Have you factored this in to your FIRE number, or have you other plans to contribute?
Apparently over the last 50 years, the average donation from each individual in a developed nation was $46 per year. Fortunately I'm slightly above this, but it has been on my mind for some time when it should be time to give back.
My long term plans were to transition to working part time, and then volunteering a couple of days a week, but after reading this book and thinking about it more - Is it worth my time to retire and volunteer, or am I more "effective" earning a high wage and donating it and letting lower paid people volunteer.
I don't have any answers for people, nor a final idea of how I will implement this. So far I have researched the giving platform my employer uses and have confirmed "The life you can save" is part of their matched giving offer ($8k/yr matched). This to me is the #1 way of maximising your impact.
So what's your strategy?
Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech is now presenting the Winter Effective Altruism Fellowship!
The Winter Introductory Effective Altruism Program helps students examine how we can do the most good with our lives and careers — by introducing the ideas and applications of effective altruism: combining compassion, evidence, and reason to find the best opportunities for improving the world. We will also discuss critiques and uncertainties about effective altruism. The three-week fellowship, which will run from mid-December to the beginning of January, will also give an opportunity for us to connect with professionals in the Effective Altruism community and start thinking about our careers so we can think through how we can increase our positive impact with our time, donations, and other resources. Topics include global public health, climate change, pandemic preparedness, AI safety, and farmed animal welfare. The program will involve an investment of 4-5 hours per week for readings, exercises and discussion meetings. Learn more about the topics covered here: https://eagatech.org/winter-fellowship-topics
If you are interested in the Winter Introductory Fellowship, please fill out the application form and specify your available times so that we can move the selection process forward and add people to cohorts for the break. If you were unable to complete the Introductory Fellowship in the fall, or do not have time to complete the fellowship in the spring, then the winter fellowship is an excellent way to catch up with the material if you have the time!
Link to the application form: https://airtable.com/shrCR7JC0SxDfIJhI
Hi everyone, I recently came into the concept and research of effective altruism (if you’re interested: https://www.effectivealtruism.com/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/) and was looking for a way to connect with more people involved with or interested in the movement locally in Ann Arbor. I tried finding established groups through the online database but had no luck; does anyone know if there’s an existing group that is discussing or organizing community around this?
Thanks in advance!
I am currently transfering from PhD in medieval history to a career in EA, global development or related. To make that change, I've been reading a lot about global development and 80000hours. I would like to share my readings and reflections with other people that are equally fascinated by the topic!
To give pointers, I read Duflo and Banerjee's book about poverty economics and loved it: the concrete side of helping people, if you will. I also like to think about longtermism, especially nuclear power and its energetic and military developments. Each meetup would:
- first discuss a book-I have a list of great books but open to suggestions
- address specific topics that people are interested in(but before the meeting so that it doesn't get messy and drooling on for hours uselessly).
I am open to free, spontaneous conversation but the goal would be to learn something after each meetup: if we are comfortable with each other and not too many, we can have free conversations. But until then I believe it's better to plan things ahead.
Okay So I've had a few answers, and the Meetup subscription costs 17 dollars per month (98 dollars for six months), which is a bit much if I'm not sure that people will come. So, if you want to be part of it, I'll create a discord group: PM me and give me your discord identifying number and name, and if you can, your skype name as not everyone has discord I guess?
My partner and I are working on a neg case brief and this k came up in the discussion, I'd love to hear some feedback! I personally think it's a good point but a bad argument, my partner feels the other way.
https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/PxPnAs8fagY4_-9iLXjdL3xCA9Fifvcmu5PykgJYV39MLVCAhArZYzaNgtNjoiLz2dTKfECLXJ27QWb1TvDpQXjKDxlAUh4vSFf3-F4_1i-_EM59KnlYQXvEOq7NsGMo=s0-d-e1-ft#https://ssl.gstatic.com/docs/doclist/images/mediatype/icon_1_document_x64.png
To me the choice to be vegan seems like an easy one. Do I value the life of an animal over my own sensory pleasure. Surely I do. Seems nice and obvious. That was enough to make me vegan.
Reading Into effective altruism. A movement based around doing the best we can to alleviate the suffering in this world. Made me question veganism a little bit more. Sort of ironic considering effect altruism advocates for veganism.
Heres a dilemma I want vegans to consider.
Your going out with friends to a lovely resteraunt and drinks. They're all eating meat and your eating vegan. You think what they are doing is wrong because they are valuing the pleasure of eating meat over the life of the animal. But what about the person who chose not to go out at all and use the money they spent to donate to one of the most effective charities. Let's say you spend £100 on this big night. But that £100 could be used on treating an individual with trachoma and therefore preventing them from becoming blind.
Therefore you'd be suggesting that your own pleasure gained from a night out with friends is worth more than the suffering caused by someone who will spend there life with blindness because they weren't treated.
That is just one example of where the money could go but I hope my point makes sense. I wonder what other vegans think of this ethical dilemma?
You're here to discuss Magic the Gathering and the psychological underpinnings of the color pie. Without being a jerk, let me propose that you may be a nerd. And since you're a nerd on the Internet, let me further presuppose that you're at least aware of effective altruism. If not, well, here.
Inspired by another thread on personalities if you were in the world of Magic, I was reflecting that the existence of the planar multitude in Magic essentially puts its Planeswalkers on the other side of the most important century in history. In other words, through the multiverse, humankind and elfkind and goblinkind and dwarfkind and much, much more are ensured to continue to exist, eliminating a lot of existential threats you'd tend to worry about under most aspects of longtermism. Instead, Planeswalkers find themselves in a sort of futuristic scenario, where sapience has spread widely. There may still be individualized challenges plane to plane (mosquito nets on some worlds, perhaps more silver bullets on others), but you can eliminate a lot of concerns like "What if nuclear world that ends humanity before we take to the stars?"
But of course Magic being a game and world of excitement, we've had the existential threats of Bolas, the Eldrazi, and the Phyrexians. Or at least I think they are supposed to be presented as an existential threat? The Gatewatch certainly argued, but I'm starting to wondering if there could have been more forethought on just how dangerous an individual threat could be to the entire multiverse? The Eldrazi could have kept consuming planes, but with nearly infinite planes wouldn't that have taken a very, very long time to actually threaten anything significant?
I'll end with a thought, is there a specific color combination for effective altruism? I would originally think something like White-Blue, focused on the good of the group as well as an attempt to apply rationalism and knowledge to the situation. But I wonder if there's something else, like perhaps Green's appreciation of the bigger system, that would explain the approach?
Siskind: So you see, I have built this nice rat-NRx pipeline, it has high capacity and high reliability, very proud of myself
Geoffrey Miller: you little kid, hold my beer
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/uncle-yarv-6-effective-altruism/comments#comment-2772036
need a starting block for a presentation im doing on effective altruism.
A reply to this post said that according to the Violinist argument
> nobody is morally required to make large sacrifices, of health, of all other interests and concerns, of all other duties and commitments, for nine years, or even for nine months, in order to keep another person alive.
Does that mean that people in affluent countries are not obligated to donate large portions of their wealth to charity?
Specifically w Jason Jones, but if you had a different teacher, still pls tell what it’s like
I've been an effect altruist for a while and was wondering if other anti natalists agree with the position. If you clicked on this and you want to learn more, watch this ted talk and read "The Life You Can Save"
From my understanding utilitarianism is about maximizing the greatest pleasure for the greatest amount of people and minimizing suffering to the least of amount of people. Seems to use "make the decision that leads to the greatest possible world".
From what I've gathered so far, to the question of one person suffering greatly and millions having small discomfort; utilitarians would say that the one person's pain weighs more heavily because it would lead to a worse world. While Effective Altruism would side with the millions with small discomfort.
Thoughts? Corrections?
Do you want to make the world a better place?
Do you want to think carefully about how to have the biggest impact you can?
Do you want to meet like-minded students and learn more about how you can do good with your career, donations, and activism?
Then the Effective Altruism Fellowship is perfect for you! The fellowship is an 8-week program involving weekly readings and discussion groups (in-person or virtual) on how to have a positive impact. You’ll also learn a framework for career planning to optimize your time, resources, and social impact. Lastly, you’ll get the chance to network with professionals and other EA fellows worldwide from other top universities.
Topics covered in the program: measuring and estimating impact, high-impact careers, global health and poverty, intensive animal farming, longtermism, and global catastrophic risks.
The fellowship is open to all members of the Georgia Tech community! The program will start on February 6th, and applications are due on January 23rd.
Let us know if you’re interested here: https://airtable.com/shrQp4aiBQlLTNBtS!
https://preview.redd.it/iz8uobb96ea81.png?width=1545&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6cc2ecb45bd74fd769ed7288ecc01d7b970b86c
Hello! I am building a local community that focuses on career advisory for SMU undergrads. While most local career advice focuses on what job to get (using your major as a guide) and how to get the job (as your friendly uni advisors will help you with), we focus on the why of a career.
No, we don’t think a career should just be for our personal sustenance; we believe each and every individual has the potential to literally change the world.
To start off with, we are inviting ambitious, unconventional, and driven undergrads to join our small workshop of planning your career. But don’t mind if you think none of those traits reflect you. If what we have expounded so far has piqued your interest, feel free to join us as well!
As a start, we will be using the 80k Hours career planning guide; while you can do it on your own, we hope that providing you with a community can spark your journey.
If you think there is significance in having a meaningful and impactful career, be it possibly solving climate change, reducing pandemic risks, or aligning AI interests with humanity, please indicate your interest by dm-ing me or leaving a comment below! All majors are welcome!
Hello! I am building a local community that focuses on career advisory for SIT undergrads. While most local career advice focuses on what job to get (using your major as a guide) and how to get the job (as your friendly uni advisors will help you with), we focus on the why of a career.
No, we don’t think a career should just be for our personal sustenance; we believe each and every individual has the potential to literally change the world.
To start off with, we are inviting ambitious, unconventional, and driven undergrads to join our small workshop of planning your career. But don’t mind if you think none of those traits reflect you. If what we have expounded so far has piqued your interest, feel free to join us as well!
As a start, we will be using the 80k Hours career planning guide; while you can do it on your own, we hope that providing you with a community can spark your journey.
If you think there is significance in having a meaningful and impactful career, be it possibly solving climate change, reducing pandemic risks, or aligning AI interests with humanity, please indicate your interest by dm-ing me or leaving a comment below! All majors are welcome!
