Hey! Obviously, the list you got is a great place to start and I'm sure your project will be awesome.

One thing that the list kind of lacks is focused discussions on one cause area at a time, which we had for existential risks, animal welfare, and global health and development. If you want to make room for deeper dives into each of these topics, it might be a great idea to do a workshop in the beginning of the stipend where you cover a bunch of the essentials (expected value theory, neglectedness, counterfactual thinking), so you don't have to spend whole sessions on them.

I would perhaps also recommend picking a different topic than the chapter on conscious consumerism. While I think that MacAskill has a really great point, I think there are more important topics to cover, and you risk turning off people who care deeply about conscious consumerism already.

Let me know if you have other questions :)

Thanks so much, Risto_Uuk, I really appreciate it. I agree that admissions are quite difficult and ultimately we relied on intuition to some extent as well, but I do believe that putting the criteria in explicit terms helps structure the process a bit. Another thing that helps is to be multiple people going through the list of candidates together. :)

It would be nice if someone updated it regularly and had a note about when it was last updated on the top of the page. For example, according to Julia Wise there were 3855 Giving What We Can members at the beginning of 2019, whereas the number here is outdated with 1800+ members.

Let’s face it. Long-termism is not very intuitively compelling to most people when they first hear of it. Not only do you have to think in very consequentialist terms, you also have to be extremely committed to acting and prioritizing on the basis of fairly abstract philosophical arguments. In my view, that’s just not very appealing - sometimes even off-putting - if you’ve never even thought in terms of cost-effectiveness or total-view consequentialism before.

I agree. Because of this, the 2nd edition of the EA handbook doesn't seem appealing at all as an EA introduction. I don't want to hijack this thread, but along these lines, what do you think about the following content as an introduction to effective altruism?:

Week 1:

• MacAskill's intro: “How can you do the most good?” (14 pages)
• MacAskill's 1st chapter: “Just how much can you achieve?” (11 pages)
• Addition: “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/mm/articles/Singer_1972Famine.pdf (15 pages)

Week 2:

• MacAskill's 2nd chapter: “How many people benefit, and by how much?” (14 pages)
• MacAskill's 3rd chapter: “Is this the most effective thing you can do?” (12 pages)
• Addition: “How can we do the most good for the world”: https://www.ted.com/talks/will_macaskill_how_can_we_do_the_most_good_for_the_world (12 min)

Week 3:

• MacAskill's 4th chapter: “Is this area neglected?” (12 pages)
• MacAskill's 5th chapter: “What would have happened otherwise?” (12 pages)
• Addition: “Prospecting for Gold”: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/prospecting-for-gold-owen-cotton-barratt/

Week 4:

• MacAskill's 6th chapter: “What are the chances of success and how good would success be?” (21 pages)
• Addition: Introductions to expected value theory: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/expected-value-theory/

Week 5:

• MacAskill's 7th chapter: “What charities make the most difference?” (24 pages)
• Addition: Read one review from here: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-reviews/all-charity-reviews/ and skim GiveWell's methodology: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work

Week 6:

• MacAskill's 8th chapter: “How can consumers make the most difference?” (19 pages)
• Addition: “Conscious consumerism is a lie. Here’s a better way to help save the world”: https://qz.com/920561/conscious-consumerism-is-a-lie-heres-a-better-way-to-help-save-the-world/?fbclid=IwAR0J-ftZl_j9jsRIP6AIOagFovM

Thank you for writing this summary!

• Altruism: Passionate about helping others
• Effectiveness: Ambitious in their altruism, with a drive to do as much good as they can. Potential to be aligned with the central tenets of EA.
• Potential: Excited to dedicate their career to doing good or to donate a significant portion of their income to charity
• Open-mindedness: Open-minded and flexible, eager to update their beliefs in response to persuasive evidence
• Enthusiasm: Willing and able to commit ~3-4 hours per weekFit: How good a fit are they with the fellowship format? Will they be good in discussions? Will they do good work for the Impact Challenge?"

I appreciate that you explicitly listed all the traits you were looking for in the applicants. We have done that more intuitively, but it's very useful to make them explicit. These traits align well with my intuitions for what we also look for in applicants.

Roger. Points taken.

I think you can get a very rough sense of possible changes by comparing the results from different years (as in the first two graphs in the post), but given the difficulties in interpreting these differences I would be wary of presenting these as % changes. Aside from possible differences in the sample across different years, changing categories for causes would also obviously distort things (we start with a fairly strong presumption against changing categories for this reason, but in some cases, the development of Mental Health as a field being one, it's unavoidable).

Yeh, I certainly think this would be valuable, although it would need to be weighed against the fact that we already have more than 10 causes listed, which may be pushing it. We may be able to accommodate this by splitting out the questions into questions about broader cause areas and then about more specific causes.

Another thing I'd be interested in seeing would be the percentage changes in support for causes year-on-year as that would indicate what the internal dynamics of the movement are. I'm (at least) partly motivated to see this because mental health, which I've written quite a lot on, may be the smallest top priority cause, but this is also the first time it's snuck into the list.

Thanks for this. Were there any causes you considered adding beyond those stated? Those seems like the main causes EAs support, but it would be nice to include 'minor' ones to see what the community feeling is about those, e.g. wild animal suffering, education, social justice, immigration reform, etc.