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This matches my experience working at CEA and Founders Pledge. I used to work at a startup and a bunch of my friends work in startups and the experience seems similar.
I agree that it mostly depends on the role, the culture of the org and individual but it’s very possible to not work evenings and weekends.
Sorry I meant it as two separate things.
1. I'm not sure tech will help you fundraise more at work.
I spoke to one traditional payroll-giving fundraiser and he raised more for charity in a day than I did in several months. His method was to go round each table in an office, pitch them for 5 mins on the tax benefits of signing up and ask them to sign up on a piece of paper to give to a charity close to their hearts.
2. I'm not sure EA will help you fundraise more at work.
As in the above example, people are happy to give to charity regardless of the EA pitch. I think the EA pitch can help inspire some people and the fact that a chunk of people chose our recommended charities is encouraging but I don't think it's a gamechanger in the volume of donations.
Thanks Craig - I'm glad to hear it. Like I said in the piece, I'm sure there are some opportunities and angles here but I think that's a decent summary.
Glad to hear Jan.
That's right re: PMF. We were very open about what causes people could support but I think you could be right that leaning into e.g. climate change could have helped. My sense was that companies in the UK preferred other ways to contribute to these causes because:
1. Donating money feels less direct than interventions like recycling, not using plastic, vegetarian catering
2. HR didn't want to be seen to ask people to give their money away (this felt awkward for some)
3. There are activities which are more visible, feel-good and cheaper to signal support (e.g. charity fundraisers).
Thanks Henrith!
It would take me some time to get good numbers for these. Here are some thoughts off the top of my head in the meantime.
1. Rate of enrollment at companies.
I think this averaged 25%. We had a couple of enthusiastic companies of around 50 people where we got 35-40% . But it wasn't uncommon to have more like 6%.
2. Average donation amount.
The £15,000 number includes company matches. The average monthly donation is £75 and the average company contribution is £25. Some companies offer very generous matching e.g. topping up donations by £50 regardless of donation size. Also bear in mind a small number of people are donating 10x more than the average.
I don't think it was lower when we were operating as a for-profit.
3. Dropoff rates
Dropoff rates are very low (less than 5% a year if you exclude people who leave the company). This is one of the biggest advantages of payroll giving.
Would be great to hear your account of the Swedish charity startup.
Thanks Yonatan. I like your version of "should exist vs people want this to exist". I've also seen and been tempted by proposals for "lists".
Thank you Larks!
Out of curiosity, what would the post be about?
Wow. I hadn't realised Jaan Tallinn was a billionaire.
Thanks Dewi!
Yes, if you click "New Post" - you can turn this off in the normal way by unticking the checkbox: "This post may appear on the frontpage".
New Threads will only appear in the subforum.
Pre-commitent: I will reply on this thread with where I decide to donate by New Years Day.
I’m planning to meet up with a friend and decide where to give my donations on New Years Eve. I often find I put my giving off so I'm using this post as a commitment device.
1. If anyone wants to join me, feel free to comment with the date you plan to donate by.
2. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to structure your thinking on where to donate? I’m planning to spend a couple of hours on this with a friend.
Thanks for this candid answer! I really appreciate hearing your thinking and more emotional motivations behind the decisions.
Thank you Bruce! If it's easy to share, how did you decide on these nonprofits?
What are the main advantages of having entrepreneurs start separate organisations vs running the projects inside a larger organisation? You could imagine a world in which entrepreneurs are employees of CE and this would have benefits.
Does anyone know why the Gates Foundation doesn't fill the GiveWell top charities' funding gaps?
Thanks for sharing!
Useful to know, thanks. I think that’s an interesting way to think about it.
Thanks Oscar! I've updated the sentence in the essay now to read: "The result would be an enormous transformation, perhaps of a significance similar to or greater than the industrial revolution in the 1800s."
Good question - I think there are a bunch to choose from but perhaps not one winner. We cover this in one of the FAQs (copy and pasting below).
What resources have inspired people to get involved with effective altruism in the past?
Some examples of resources that have inspired people to get involved in effective altruism (but don’t necessarily represent its current form) include:
- Doing Good Better, by Will MacAskill
- The 80,000 Hours career guide, by Benjamin Todd
- The Precipice, by Toby Ord
- Taking Charity Seriously, by Toby Ord
- Our top charities, by GiveWell
- Rationality: A-Z, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Doing Good – A conversation with William MacAskill, by Sam Harris
- The why and how of effective altruism, by Peter Singer at TED.
- The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, by Peter Singer
- On Caring, by Nate Soares
- The most important century, by Holden Karnofsky
- 500 million, but not a single one more, by Jai Dhyani
- An introduction to effective altruism, by Ajeya Cotra
- Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
- Effective altruism: an introduction, the 80,000 Hours podcast
Great to hear Andre! :)
That's really cool to see - thanks for sharing Patrick!
Thanks Jay! @Quinn, this is what I intended it to mean.
Good point, thanks.
Thanks Eddie. We're planning to make some design tweaks and some edits in the coming weeks including a table of contents. I'll post in the forum when this is done. To be clear, I wouldn't recommend sharing widely until then.
I would definitely encourage collecting 1 on 1 feedback by having people new to EA read the content in person and speak their thoughts out loud.
We have done exactly that in the process of writing this essay!
Thanks for the feedback on the image preview - I hadn't spotted that.
Agree!
Thanks Denis. I am a fan of the variety of this list! :)
Awesome, thanks Eli.
1. Yeah something like this!
2. Great, thanks. I've added you to the google form but I think it will work better if other people who comment add their calendly so that people don't have to go through me.
Thanks for pointing this out - I’ve updated this now.
Apologies to anyone who weren’t able to complete the form.
Kind of obvious list, but things that I’ve enjoyed about other offices I’ve worked at:
- Interesting/fun people. Good water cooler conversation can provide me a lot of energy.
- Ambitious/hard-working people. Lunch time conversations with people working on cool projects and seeing people work in the evenings can be inspiring.
- Natural light.
- Large kitchen/congregation area, separate to people trying to work for conversation.
Very helpful - thanks a lot Ivy!
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting, thanks! I'd be curious to ask about the connections you have made on slack etc. I'll message you.
Relatedly, this uptick is kind of wild to me.
Thanks - I'll correct that.
Good to see this question Garrison! I'm working on effectivealtruism.org and planning to add a section like this to the website.
This is a decent existing page for this but very tricky to find: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/impact
I think I agree with this. Two things that might make starting a startup a better learning opportunity than your alternative, in spite of it being a worse learning environment:
- You are undervalued by the job market (so you can get more opportunities to do cool things by starting your own thing)
- You work harder in your startup because you care about it more (so you get more productive hours of learning)
Cool - thanks for engaging in this! Excited to see what you do in future.
Thanks for the reply.
I agree no correlation would be surprising but I wouldn’t be totally surprised if it was less predictive than say ”openness to new ideas” or something.
I wonder if you could learn more by interviewing people who are just starting to get interested in EA and seeing how their responses change over say a year? Interviewing people who have just started an intro to EA fellowship/virtual program could work well for this.
Fascinating, thanks for doing this research - excited to see more work in this area.
Is it possible that being E and A correlates with EAs who have been involved and absorbed EA ideas but wouldn’t correlate with EAs if you were able to survey them before they got involved in EA?
I found myself agreeing with the statements that predicted E and A but not sure I would have done before getting into EA.
I could also imagine someone who is very open to reasonable arguments but isn’t particularly E or A but comes to agree with the statements over time.
[sorry if I’ve misrepresented what you’re saying - I read the post a couple of days ago and may be misremembering]
Nice, thanks!
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I've now made a long list in a spreadsheet of people but it doesn't feel like a good idea to share it widely (I haven't contacted these people and I don't want to give the wrong impression about who has claimed to be affiliated). I'd be very happy to share on an individual basis - feel free to email me at ben.clifford@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
“ I could take a bet on less trusted/proven people as grantmakers.”
I was thinking just yesterday that if I won the EA lottery this might be a cool thing to do - I think the value of giving a “future grantmaker” the opportunity would be high and then I would guess that their end decision wouldn’t be much worse than your punt/GiveWell charities.
To find this person and minimise time spent on it, I might ask local group organisers who the most promising “future grantmakers” are and then filter by underrepresented groups in EA or just pick one of the shortlist at random. Others could say if this is at all realistic!
A separate comment is that I get the impression you would have a different perspective to other grantmakers so I would be excited to see what you would fund if you did decide to put some time in.
Worth noting you don’t have to be a US citizen to do this - the $ made me hesitate…
This is awesome - thanks!
Hey Jessica, great to hear about this! I was thinking about doing something similar. Would you consider involving non-researchers working at EA-orgs remotely? I’ve spoken to a few interested people with this profile.
Rather than setting up a charity, a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) is a good option for this purpose. This post may be helpful: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qYuehBsAe6Ri6PZvL/a-comparison-of-donor-advised-fund-providers
Hi Ryan, I may be misunderstanding the question so correct me if I'm wrong - are you saying something like: "given that there's lots of uncertainty about what's needed this seems in tension with starting an organisation that concentrates on only one user type (e.g. recent generalist graduate) or one domain (e.g. AI Safety)"?
Thanks, great questions! In response:
1) How come you choose to run the fellowship as a part-time rather than full-time program?
We wanted to test some version of this quickly, part time meant:
- It was easier to get a cohort of people to commit at short notice as they could participate alongside other commitments
- We could deliver a reasonable quality stripped back programme in a short space of time and had more capacity to test other ideas at the same time
With that said, if we were to run it again, we almost certainly would have explored running a full-time program for the next iteration.
2) Are there any particular reasons why fellowship participants tended to pursue non-venture projects?
Do you mean non-profits rather than for-profits? If so, I think this is because nonprofits present the most obvious neglected opportunities for doing good. Participants did consider some for profit ideas.
3) Throughout your efforts, were you optimizing for project success or project volume, or were you instead focused on gathering data on the incubator space?
The latter - we were trying to learn rather than optimise for early success.
4) Do you consider the longtermist incubation space to be distinct from the x-risk reduction incubation space?
Yes, mostly insofar as the Longtermist space is broader than the x-risk space - there are ideas that might help the long term future or reduce s-risk without reducing x-risk.
5) Was there a reason you didn't have a public online presence?
I think having an online presence that is careful about how this work is described (e.g. not overhyping entrepreneurship or encouraging any particular version of it) is important and therefore quite a bit of work. We felt we could be productive without one for the time we were working on the project so decided to deprioritise it. If we had continued to work on the project, we would have spent time on this.
Hi Rory, thanks for the comment! We haven’t published those ideas. In terms of classes of organisation, one way to carve up the space is to think about Object-level and Meta-level approaches to generating ideas.
Object-level approaches focus on doing direct work to solve the problem at hand. For example:
- developing and deploying technologies
- conducting research
- advocating for policy change
The main type of impact here comes in the form of tangible changes in actions taken in the real world, in whatever form that might take.
Meta-level approaches focus on improving the capacity for others to solve the problem. This can be done on the EA/longtermist wide-level (building up the movements) or in a specific domain, e.g. building a talent pipeline specifically for bio policy experts. Concrete types of meta work include, for example:
- community and field building
- the dissemination of ideas and knowledge and values
- increasing the resources available to work on object-level approaches
The main type of impact here comes in the form of the change in likelihood that object-level approaches will be impactful.
Hope that's useful!
Glad to hear!
Roughly this would mean having worked in a relevant area (e.g. bio, AI safety) for at least 1 - 2 years and able to contribute in some capacity to that field. To be clear, some ideas would require a lot more experience - this is just a rough proxy.
A quick thought on having a YC-style programme and taking risks on more junior talent:
Domain expertise is important - I think YC would agree on this. If taking on a deep tech startup they would look for someone on the team who had domain expertise in the field.
I think early YC Internet startups like Dropbox or Airbnb make it look like domain expertise is less important and it’s more about just getting stuck in. The difference is that when Dropbox started there was no expert in “files on the internet” so the founders could basically become the world experts just by getting stuck in and working on it.
The difference with Longtermist areas like AI and Bio is you can’t just become the expert by working on it and (yes, you guessed it) the downside risk means we don’t want to take bets on people to just go for it and try it out (unlike Dropbox where it doesn’t really matter if it fails catastrophically).