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In addition to the analyses SoGive conducted that Sanjay has listed, Rethink Priorities conducted some tests which provide further evidence for the claims made, and speak to the question Will MacAskill raised “Do younger people actually have more future-oriented views?” [EA · GW] The samples do appear to be more presentdayist than longtermist, especially so for older respondents.

Explicit questions suggest more presentdayist preferences

In both samples we find evidence in support of the hypothesis that there is a preference for prioritising helping people now rather than considering people in the future as of equal priority. 47-61% of respondents place a greater importance on prioritising present people than they did on treating future people as equal, while 18-34% preferred treating future people as equal more than they preferred prioritising present people. The rest placed the same importance on both.

Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test & Sign test of matched pairs find data in both samples that would be surprising given a null of no difference in the distributions or between the medians of Prioritise Present and Future Equal. Therefore, it seems pretty safe to reject the null with a 5% long run error rate, and be able to reliably detect a small effect size 80% of the time if it exists in reality. One-sided tests suggest we can reject the null hypotheses that there is no difference and that Future Equal has a larger proportion than Prioritise Present. But we cannot reject that Prioritise Present has a larger proportion than Future Equal.

Older people more presentdayist

We do not find evidence to support the claim that younger people consider future people as equally deserving of help, though we do find that older respondents prioritise present people more than younger respondents do. Older people are more likely to always prioritise present people than choose any number of future people to help, though younger people only seem willing to choose future people when there are more people in the future than the present to be helped.

We did not find any significant correlation between age and the explicit question of treating future people as equal. We found a small positive correlation (Spearman, Šidák-adjusted, r=0.17, p<0.01) between age and the explicit prioritise present question, and a regression including Future Equal, Left-Right, Age, and Mean Charity Likeliness suggests older respondents were more likely than younger respondents to Agree/Strongly Agree to prioritising helping people now, though as likely as younger respondents to Slightly Disagree/Disagree/Strongly Disagree.

Of those who gave an integer in response to the tradeoff question asking respondents to offer a number of future lives to improve instead of 1000 present lives, there were very few young respondents who gave a value of less than 1001. Very few (~7%) respondents under the age of 35 gave an answer less than 1001, while ~26% of 35s and over gave an answer less than 1001. None of the under 35s gave a response lower than one hundred, while 44% of the 35 and overs did - with 14% giving a value of 1. It is hard to know if these respondents really preferred improving the life of 1 person 500 years from now rather than 1000 people now or if they answered incorrectly.

Finally, a multinomial logistic regression (of Always Present as base, plus Always Future, 1001 or more, & Less than 1001) suggests that increases in age are negatively associated (-0.03, p<0.0001) with choosing an integer rather than Always Present i.e. older people are more likely to choose always improving lives of present people no matter the number of future lives improved than to offer any number of future people it would be better to improve.

got it! :-)

I was thinking e.g. of Nordhaus's result that a modest amount of mitigation is optimal. He's often criticized for his assumptions about discount rate and extreme scenarios, but neither of those is causing the difference in estimates here.

According to your link, recent famines have killed about 1M per decade, so for climate change to kill 1-5M per year through famine, it would have to increase the problem by a factor of 10-50 despite advancing technology and increasing wealth. That seems clearly wrong as a central estimate. The spreadsheet based on the WHO report says 85k-95k additional deaths due to undernutrition, though as you mention, there are limitations to this estimate. (And I guess famine deaths are just a small subset of undernutrition deaths?) Halstead also discusses this issue under "crops".

I would like to add something that the authors of this piece may be too polite or professional to say themselves: the financial pressures within the media industry have made journalism among the most dishonest professions in society.

Of course there are many fantastic scrupulous people working in the media. And there are a handful of outlets that maintain high levels of integrity.

But the median journalist is under enormous pressure to find some sensationalist angle for their stories in order to drive a lot of clicks. They're also under great pressure to finish stories very quickly, which means little or no fact checking.

If they don't go along, they run a high risk of being forced out of their chosen career entirely. Even idealistic people will often cave when faced with such a stark choice.

As a result I regularly hear about journalists behaving very badly. If you ever know something about a topic, you'll find most news stories covering that issue are very misleading.

So it's sad to say, but the media should usually be avoided. And if they can't be avoided, at least treated with deep distrust.

Very good points, I agree with all.

Don't be afraid to sound negative, honest feedback can save a whole career!

It basically represents my transition from thinking that algorithms were basically fair and fine, to thinking they're biased because people are biased and so bias is baked in eg through bad data, to realising the are a very wide variety of ways that algorithms can unintentionally discriminate.

They're not a particularly EA-related pair of papers, but they are very interesting.

Assessing the impact of Brazilian donors and EA community

We’re thinking about testing if our actions for promoting EA in this year (translations, meetings, networking...) have led to an observable increase in donations from Brazil - particularly outside the group of more "engaged" members. Even if we haven't observed an increase in high-quality engagement (such as GWWC pledges), we do see an increase in some "cheaper signals", such as the number of Facebook group members and the amount of donations to AMF (which, curiously, are concentrated in basically two metropolitan areas - Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre; I know there are some EAs living in Minas and in the North, but currently I'm not aware of any donation coming from Rio and Brasilia, despite them being high-income metropolitan area). We'd like to test if that's a coincidence.

I would appreciate any suggestion/help on that. I think it would demand more than EA survey data. First, we thought about requesting to EA charities data about the amount of donations:

1.1 from Brazil between Oct 23th, 2018 and Oct 23th, 2019 (controlling for month) with the amount of donations from the previous year;

1.2 from similar countries (I’m not sure which countries we should pick: Argentina, Chile, Mexico, S. Africa, Portugal?...China?), in the same periods – to check if any of them presented a similar increase/decrease.

Second, I wonder if we could get in touch with at least some identified donors and ask them how they came to the decision of donating. Possibly, tracking people using the names they provided to those websites might be considered too invasive, but I wonder if the organization itself could send an e-mail inviting them to get in touch with us.

Can you expand on how this influenced you?

I also thought the World Happiness Survey looked flat but it has gone up. 0.25/10 is not be sniffed at.

WHS has a much smaller sample size - around 1,000 per year - whereas the Office of National Statistics asks around 300,000 people a year. ONS data also shows a rise of about 0.3/10 between 2011 and 2019 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/datasets/headlineestimatesofpersonalwellbeing)

Hi Jan,

Thanks for flagging your concerns here. The scope of EA Community Building Grants (CBG) doesn't encompass all funding decisions regarding community building, but is limited to providing funding for people to do part-time or full-time community building with a specific EA group (i.e. at a university, city and national level). We’ve made some grants outside this category, though they account for less than 10% of the total funding we’ve granted out. Within this category of location specific EA community building, the CBG programme likely accounts for the vast majority of funding.

In terms of our process for making decisions on Community Building Grants at CEA, I am the project lead, but other staff and external stakeholders are involved in the process (both in terms of object-level work and by providing oversight). For example, in our last evaluation round:

• I conducted the majority of the interviews for grant applicants and the rest of the interviews were conducted by other members of the groups team.
• I reviewed the applications, solicited input from others internal and external to CEA, and wrote up decision recommendations and my reasoning for the recommendations.
• The decision recommendations were formally reviewed by 2 people at CEA, sent to two external advisers for additional review, and finalised in consultation with CEA's executive director.

My (quick) best guess is that of the total time allocated to community building grants decision making to date, 70% has come from me, 25% from others in CEA and 5% from people external to CEA.

As Community Building Grants is still a relatively new programme, we're still experimenting with the evaluation process, and there's a chance it'll change going forward, though I expect the amount of consultation of other CEA staff and external advisers to remain relatively similar. I'd be happy to hear any ideas you have on how to to ensure that we take into account a variety of viewpoints - feel free to email me at harri.besceli@centreforeffectivealtruism.org or you can contact katie.glass@centreforeffectivealtruism.org (the head of the groups team).