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I don't have a complete list, but here are quite a few of the organisations that I subscribe to for updates.
Long Term Future
Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
Artificial Intelligence
Center for Security and Emerging Technology
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Animal Welfare
Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter from OPP
Global Development
Devex International Development
Wellcome Trust (also improving institutions)
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation
Innovations for Poverty Action
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
Overseas Development Institute
Development Media International
Improving Institutions
Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy
Centre for Excellence in Development and Learning
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism Newsletter (by CEA, EA Hub and Rethink Charity)
Philanthropy
The Center for Effective Philanthropy
General Interest
Matt’s Thoughts In Between - Founder of Entrepeneur First
I thought it was so that it tied in with EA Funds, which is something that made me think CEA was paying much more attention to donations, making a unified system that also allowed people to donate from one platform and automatically record donations.
Although I agree that repeated donations not being an option is quite annoying.
I used these images for a slide show a few years ago, the original source being this report by CEA (page 6).
That might be old data though, this is the most up to date version on JPALs website.
I don't think addressing these questions in a handbook that's meant to introduce EA would be that useful as most of them require much more in depth reading than a few paragraphs would allow.
It may make more sense to have an FAQ for these typical questions or to say that lots of areas within EA are still being discussed, and then list the questions.
I think this is a really good comment and probably should be it's own post.
A minor point, I would say that giving to the Against Malaria Foundation may not on it's own be systemic change, but if enough people keep on giving to charities that are evaluated on their impact, it could change individual giving as a system, as charities respond to these new incentives.
A two stage strategy might be best, outreach for the first week, then core community the rest of the semester.
It may be that getting lots of email sign ups can be okay to then pass on 80,000 Hours material, the first few events and 1-1 sign up. I've heard from quite a few people that they first heard of EA at a university fair and kept on getting the 80,000 Hours emails and then got much more involved once they started working 3-5 years later.
After focusing on outreach for the first week, I agree it probably makes sense to focus on the core 5-30 people who are actually interested in EA rather than trying to put on events for the wider student audience that signed up to everything but wont really come to anything.
If there is a situation where someone is really interested but it's hectic, I would put a note by their name to remember to reach out to them individually rather than prioritising the 5 minute conversation.
1. Most of my time will be spent doing similar things to last year, although I've only been working full time for 9 months. I think innovation, at least for me, happens over time rather than as a one off process, with ideas being formed and then being tested to see what people like. One recent example is the community spotlight, which was an idea a few weeks ago and now has become a regular post.
In terms of taking EA to the next level, there isn't a plan to grow or hire more people but rather coordinate and support nascent organisations in London that can start doing other work and grow independently.
2. I will have a look
There is a Facebook group and a small page on the website.
It's not that I don't want people to upskill, it's that I think it's best done by people who have experience in that area, whether that is via a course or workshop.
In terms of getting people to meet in person, I agree that certain talks/workshops/themes can help attract different people, but the best outcomes from that aren't usually what people learn, but the connections they make, and designing a workshop just to drive attendance may not be the most efficient way of getting people to attend.
I agree with everything you said, I guess those three points aren't things that I think about often but might make sense to update the document to better reflect that.
I may have missed this but does the $10 billion spent on peace building programs in 2016 include spending by governments, or is that just foundations?
I'm not sure that's roughly true, EA priorities also have to be neglected, generally the most effective interventions are already taken by governments and large organisations.
I don't think that this article is a good representation of the debate over these issues and takes an approach where the author seems to have already made up their mind about possible solutions.
This post from Our World in Data probably gives the best overview of stagnation in global poverty
"A generation ago the majority of the world's poorest lived in economies that went on to grow very fast. What is different now is that a rising share of the world's poorest are living in economies which have not achieved economic growth in the recent past.
Half a billion are expected to remain in extreme poverty by 2030 if current trends of economic growth and levels of within-country inequality persist.
The decline of extreme poverty is expected to slow down.
Much of the progress will be driven by economic growth in Asia, and India in particular. The number of people in extreme poverty in Africa is expected to stagnate."
I think this article in Vox covers some of the main points.
"...improving the American education system, while important, is neither a neglected cause nor a tractable one. It is a system on which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually by diffuse governments whose policies are difficult and expensive to change, where matters of importance are intensely contested, and where interest groups tend to fight each other to a standstill.
And it’s a system where, even after investing millions if not billions in research, we still don’t have a lot of confidence as to which interventions are helpful and which are not. The views of key actors, notably the Gates Foundation, have tended to shift rapidly on those substantive questions.
If every issue in the world were as crowded and hard to make progress on as education in the US, then I’d understand why foundations like Gates and Broad keep chugging. But that’s not the case..."
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.
Functionally it would be similar, but from a user point of view it would probably be quite a different experience.
From my own usage I have rarely used tags on blogs or news feeds but have often interacted with different sub-forums.
I guess I have concerns with over valuing metrics that are easier to collect which might lead to optimising for the wrong activities.
There is the impact report from EA London for 2018.
Why not just use Glassdoor?
Thanks for writing this up, I think it's really useful to collate these resources together. Although I think some of the sources are a bit out of date and some recent write ups indicate the opposite advice in some situations - one example being outreach techniques.
Facebook advertisement, direct messages and meetup.com subscriptions are very effective
for outreach but are costly. Email lists and word of mouth are not effective.
I would say that email lists and word of mouth have been the two most useful ways of building up a community in London, this could potentially be down to how it's done, but we stopped doing FB adverts and meetup events as it would generally attract people who aren't as interested in EA.
I also have this list of various community building resources I have found useful over the last few years that might have some things that could be added to the literature review.
I wrote a similar post about this a few months ago, a few days before GiveWell announced they were looking into a wider range of interventions.
The EA fund for global development seems to be the easiest way to get funding towards this area. I suspect that most donors involved in EA would be happy to fund interventions with less hard evidence if given the choice.
One reason why there may be a lack of conversation in this area is that there are many organisations and 10,000+ experts in international development and ways to engage that don't involve EA. Whereas in factory farming and emerging technology risks there are fewer places for people to go to discuss these causes and so discussion happens in EA spaces (until causes get big enough to create their own networks).
There is a paper from the Centre for Global Development that might be relevant.
"We Can Learn a Lot about Improving Girls’ Education from Interventions That Don’t Target Girls"
It is probably this career discussion one.
One low cost way of doing this, if the EA newsletter people thought it was useful, would be to just have a link in the main newsletter for the recent updates post.
I'd be happy if someone else wanted to send out these updates or put them on a website.
These updates don't add any extra info so if people are happy to ignore jobs/events they could sign up or use an RSS feed for the website.
The books on this list by conceptually are quite useful. The ones I've read and thought are useful I've listed below.
Superforecasting
Thinking Fast and Slow
The Undercover Economist
The Righteous Mind
Predictably Irrational
The Better Angels of our Nature
Influence
Adapt
The Signal and the Noise
Some others I have found useful
4DX - How to execute plans efficiently (meant more for people in charge of orgs or teams but still applicable to individuals)
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy - Summary of a useful strategy framework
The Charisma Myth
Lean Startup
The Art of Gathering
The Art of Community
You Are Not So Smart
Also two EA reading lists that cover poverty, future generations, animal welfare, psychology, productivity, career/business and advocacy.
Not the posts exactly, but there is the EA London blog page which contains all the newsletters although they include events and job postings that might be less relevant.
I'd be happy for other people to make posts if they've found something they want to dive into.
I think the gist of the "Heretical Knot" is that we could always do more good, and so we are always second guessing ourselves and burning out attempting to do more.
Here is an edited version of the dissertation mentioned earlier. It has had most of the non EA London related content removed to help make it more relevant.
I remember a couple of people doing something slightly similar to this.
Dan Artus wrote a dissertation in 2018 - "An ethnographic exploration of ethics,
empathy and data practises within the London Effective Altruist community"
Nick Philips wrote a thesis about the EA movement in 2015 -"Rational Faith: A Study of the Effective Altruism Movement "
Imperial university has just launched the worlds first centre for psychedelics research.
"The new Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research will build on over a decade of pioneering work in this area carried out at Imperial, including a clinical trial that has kick-started global efforts to develop psilocybin therapy into a licensed treatment for depression. "
I'm not sure that many people who push for moral obligations hold inconsistent views. These seem like two mainly distinct sets of people.
Most people I speak to either think people are morally obligated to do actions that might improve the world, whether that's veganism, frugality etc or they take the more laid back approach.
I'd also say there are some differences between eating factory farmed meat and spending on ineffective charities, mainly that a world that still has factory farmed meat is hard to imagine as one of the best worlds compared to one where people still give money to ineffective charities.
I think they said they were shifting it to CEA. That probably makes sense to have one organisation deal with grants, support and tech rather than two separate ones.
I think I disagree with this piece because although I think it's true that places are valuable for connecting, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a place that people own. In London we can use pubs, cafes and parks, often for free with just a picnic blanket indicating the edge of this space that separates the conversations from the outside world.
Similar to Milan I agree with the main point of your comment and also think that the EA community conforms less than the majority of communities.
Maybe ironically, I also think that there is a relative lack of experience with communities in general among a lot of people interested in EA, which makes it harder for people to know what is expected, such as using group slang, strong identities, close connections and group 'rituals' which are very common in most communities.
It's good to see people trying small low cost experiments like this although I suspect there are diminishing returns to how many people will be interested if you try a similar post again but that's also why it's good that you've given a framework for others to copy.
At EA London I haven't given as many books out in the last 12 months as the previous 12 as I've usually only given them to people after a 1-1 meeting or significant interest from someone at an event where it seems more likely that they'll actually read it and want to take away some advice rather than offering to give it to people who are more interested in the idea of a "free book".
The EA forum is a forum with just two categories so it functions more like a news board, which means most conversation ends up happening in bespoke Facebook groups for various causes, careers and interest groups. Facebook has a similar problem of losing good posts and conversations, which might have been stickied in a traditional forum with multiple categories and sub-categories.
There may be advantages to having these discussions happen on Facebook as people might be more likely to check, although it does make it hard to find out where the conversations are happening.
I massively agree with most of this and when talking to people about careers I try to help them find a field that fascinates them and has the potential to be leveraged in the future. At the risk of over simplifying, EA organisations seem to be "experience-constrained" which can't be solved by just getting smart graduates to work in EA jobs.
I think I disagree slightly that there needs to be a "task Y", it may be the case that some people will have an interest in EA but wont be able to contribute. Just as there people who have an interest in evidence based medicine but don't get an opportunity to contribute to medical journals or become doctors. The aim of EA isn't to make use of all resources available, even if it may seem like a lost opportunity not to.
Also I think the EA community is a subset of the EA movement, and lots of people have positive impact whilst rarely or never engaging online/in person and it might be a mistake to focus on just the community part. This post though might lead to people being happier to focus on their own field and potentially reengaging when it makes sense to.
Online content is generally the amount of people that open or click on an email (but baring in mind that long term, getting more clicks relies on your community trusting you to have content they want to click on rather than clickbait).
Occasionally people also send replies saying they value newsletters and when I ask people in person what they value, that sometimes gets mentioned.
For Meetup, it seemed to have negative value in the way it is used by default.
I think people mainly join meetup because they are looking for new hobbies and/or friends rather than deciding they want to do good or have impact in their careers. This can be useful for increasing attendance but I think it's using the wrong digital tool for the goals most groups have.
Potentially with a closed meetup group with questions that have to be answered before joining it could work well, similar to Facebook. Although Meetup still has the issue of their users being a subset of Facebook that don't necessarily have a good overlap with the kind of people that EA can help the most.
I think your examples highlight a difference between barriers to entry rather than the amount of alienating conversations.
With twitter almost anyone can take part anonymously whereas to get into law school you probably have to take part in interviews/get references where you don't alienate people.
I don't think there is a systematic process for feedback for the EA funds at the moment. It's mainly ad hoc with the fund managers gathering feedback themselves, people emailing them or forum posts like this one.
There may also be a way of telling by looking at how much people continue to give to each fund, although I don't know how closely donors are monitoring the eventual impact.
I agree that individuals will find it hard when donating individually but the call to action is about using the EA fund or creating a separate one with these aims in mind.
Similar to how people might choose to invest in a low/medium/high risk fund for their own savings.
This is quite a tangential point to the post and might come across as trying to divert the conversation.
There's a possibility that if this happens a lot, it lowers the chance that other people pay attention to the points when they are relevant.
I don't know as much about them.
I think that it would make sense to have experts that know this landscape pretty well to work out where the potential gaps are.
The author has a tweet about what inspired the piece
The Long Time project
Seth Baum at GCR
Nick Beckstead
Toby Ord and FHI
Thanks, I've updated the post.
It may be a good thing that people that are less inclined to write up a report will be less likely to join a donor lottery.
"Correct answer" is maybe not the best wording, it means the answer that Rethink Charity used to describe their results, and is also consistent with how they reported the results in previous years. I should have pointed this out at the beginning of the survey.
In terms of the political questions, that is also shifted by a large response from people supporting libertarian or other political views.
I'd be interested in seeing how evidence based medicine became the default in most places (amongst the general public as well as within medicine), and if there were previous attempts to popularise it that failed.