Welcome to the second open thread on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is our place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Thanks to an upgrade by Trike Apps, each time you visit the open thread, new comments will now be highlighted!
Should we moderate ourselves to help grow the movement?
I've come across this idea before in the EA community and also thought about it a lot myself.
EA's are known to do some pretty "out there" things to maximize their impact. Many of us give far more than 10%. I know someone who lives in a van and is a "freegan" to maximize the amount of cash they have to give. Personally, I live with my parents and have forgone overseas holidays to leave me extra money to give/save. I know that many people who ask me why think I'm crazy even after hear... (read more)
Does anyone have any thoughts on whether the Ebola outbreak is a unique effective giving opportunity compared to better-studied issues like malaria and schistosomiasis? I tried to do a Fermi estimate here but I don't trust it further than I can throw it.
Are young people really more idealistic than older people? More young people attend protests but more older people participate in lobbying, fund political parties, and provide most funding for charities. Perhaps a large fraction of what is going on just relates to older people possessing different kinds of resources from young people. Do you agree or disagree?
There was a great thread in the facebook group on whether people making a modest wage (around or below $30k/yr in US terms) should be donating to effective charities or saving money. I'd like to weigh in on this but that thread is already pretty crowded and unstructured.
The proposition here is "People with average or below average income should save money rather than donate to effective charities"
One thing that it looks like almost nobody mentioned is the opportunity cost of worrying about other people over yourself and how this corresponds to ef... (read more)
I was involved in the initial facebook thread on the topic. At the time, I made less than 30k, didn't ever expect to make much more than $30k (I'm a nanny), and was highly turned off by the conversation.
Two cross-country moves later, I have actually doubled my income, but I still am highly turned off by elitist EA conversations that assume that all the readers are high-potential-earners in their 20s with strong social safety nets.
It would have been much easier to convince me to donate 10% of a $30k income, than to upend my life in order to make some kind of career change.
I think that if the Standard EA Recommendation for middle- to low-income people is "come back when you make more money", no middle- to low-income people (to a first approximation) will ever become interested in EA.
I think if I made 30k a year and asked someone what EA-related things I could do and they told me "you don't make enough to worry about donating, try to optimize your income some more and then we'll talk," my reaction would be "Ack! I don't want to upend my entire life! I just want to help some people! These guys are mean." And then I would stop paying attention to effective altruism.
My general heuristic for stuff like this is that it's more important for general recommendations to look reasonable than for them to be optimal (within reason). This is because by the time someone is wondering whether your policy is actually optimal, they care enough to be thinking like an effective altruist already, and are less likely to be scared off by a wrong answer than someone who's evaluating the surface-reasonableness.
I'm thinking about what kinds of material newcomers to EA should be exposed to. What are some of the basic conceptual tools that are useful for thinking about EA, and evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions/career paths/charities?
I'm thinking about stuff like:
What else?
Me and some others are interesting in creating an Effective Altruism video that can serve as the go-to introductory video for EA. Does anyone know of examples of videos that we might want to emulate?
What do effective altruists think about population ethics? I asked about this on Slate Star Codex, and got the impression that there's too much disagreement for there to be an Official Position about this. I'm asking again here since I want to know what the general range of opinions on this is. Do you think that the number of future lives should be valued systematically, and if so, what sorts of future lives do you think we should:
Excellent news.
A promising idea in macroeconomics is that of NGDP level targetting. Instead of targetting the inflation rate, the central bank would try to maintain a trend rate of total spending in the economy. Here's Scott Sumner's excelent paper making the case for NGDP level targetting. As economic policy suggestions go, it's extremely popular among rationalists - I recall Eliezer endorsing it a while back.
At the moment we have real-time market-implied forecasts for a variety of things; commodity prices, interest rates and inflation. These inflation ex... (read more)
Do we allow links in the open thread? If so, here's a nice one by Bryan Caplan.
A poem, with an effective altruism bent that I have in my evernote. I don't have attribution as to where I found it online first, but it is called The Exposed Nest, By Robert Frost
YOU were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay, 5 If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But ’twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was... (read more)
Hey everyone! I've been very busy the last couple of weeks, so I haven't been able to make those open and special threads I mentioned in my post. Luckily, it seems as though others have taken it up. Thanks to Ryan Carey, Diego Caliero, Peter Hurford, Tom Ash, and Kaj Sotala for keeping things going. The importance of an online community is often underscored. This forum wouldn't exist, for example, if there wasn't Facebook to provide us with a place to rally as allies in the first place, and greater collaboration for reviews of strategies, and new collaborations between effective altruists, won't take place as soon as they would without this forum.
Could giving good vegan food to poor people compete with other effective charity?
The idea: A charity develops or purchases nutrition-complete vegan food, ships it to areas of global poverty, and distributes it to the poorest for free.
The positive impact would be: Improved practical knowledge and demand to make nutrition-complete affordable vegan food, improved nutrition and purchasing power for the poor, reduced farm animal use without appeals to values or emotions toward animals (because the incentive is in-built into the wealth transfer).
It might be less... (read more)
EDIT: struck from the record. (I don't know whether "retract" does what I want or not so I'm doing this instead.)