Have you come across Toby Ord's Shaping Humanity's Longterm Trajectory? I think it might expand on the ways you might do longtermist "accounting" to figure out what matters and compare different kinds of intervention. Saving future lives probably sits under the "Gains" section.
Attributing your impact to any particular organisation or program can be quite difficult. A lot of people make changes after two EAGx attendances, a handful of local group interactions, building in-depth connections with certain people, etc.
But as a community builder trying to evaluate the impact of our programs, it would be really useful if someone reached out and said: "Hey, I think the 30-minute chat we had last year was maybe 5% influential in getting me to my current position, alongside X, Y, and Z other programs and influences." 5% influence for a 30-minute chat is a useful signal for us when evaluating a 1:1 program! But people are unlikely to share that, because there's usually a more substantial mentor or program that felt much more influential.
So beyond proactively telling people when they've changed your actions, it seems good to me if there was a norm of proactively sharing when something influenced you even a bit.
This seems to rhyme with a concern I've had when planning programmes for EAGxAustralasia - what talks and workshops make sense under the "global health and development" banner?
A very naive categorisation of GHD content that's easy to put on at EAGx:
Updates from a particular organisation doing direct work.
Often very interesting; risks being too niche. Organisations end up being specialists in the logistics and research of their intervention.
Updates from research organisation (e.g. Institute for Poverty Action) about upcoming promising interventions
Rehash key GHD ideas for the part of the EAGx audience that hadn't heard it before
This relates to your point (5) above - how much GHD stuff has been "solved"?
It's quite difficult to figure out what content would be exciting to EAGx attendees, and actually pushes their thinking beyond "here is information about another type of intervention".
From my position, it seems like other cause areas are grappling with bigger, more fundamental and less "solved" questions that make it easier to find relevant content for an EAGx audience.
But, one thing I'm taking from this post - there are still GHD topics to grapple with (systems change vs direct delivery, cash benchmarking, other career paths, funding transparency / scrutiny). Going to take inspo from this when planning our 2026 conference programme.
Hi! I really appreciate you writing this, it offers a level of thoughtful introspection that is otherwise difficult to inspect by people like me (community builder).
Can you imagine a group that you would feel motivated to spend time in, that would be EA affiliated? I'd love to know what aspects would be appealing and any constraints it would have to satisfy.
There seems to be a tension, where EA is exciting as a sort of intellectual project, where you read things and share thoughts and learn new stuff, but the energy to sustain that sort of involvement is difficult to maintain.
A social scene where everyone hangs out is easier to be a part of, but then - whats the point? Plus, lots of people already have a roster full of friends and families and don't need another social group.
I think if anyone is attracted to the intellectual project, but there aren't any formats that make it easy for them to engage, this might be solvable with thought event design. If the intellectual project is too taxing in an otherwise busy life (work, family, other interests etc), I'm not sure there's a way to meaningfully re-engage the old-hand EAs.
Very cool, and thank you for such a well considered cost-effectiveness model.
Do you have modelling for the potential scale of this intervention? How many healthcare workers are there in settings where this will be counterfactually useful?
I think that this question framed as an all-or-nothing is difficult to answer - we don't know how to measure all the benefits as well as risks that the current community patterns afford us. Plus we can't exactly change "EA" as a whole - but we could add subcomponents that have tighter centralisation, official membership etc.
This could be a great undertaking as a "spin-off" brand that collaborates closely with existing EA community groups.
There are some follow-on questions that come to mind like:
would the target members be primarily working in high-impact roles or would they be in other professions and have an interest in EA? (Less educational perks can be offered if the member base is from different industries)
is there a segment of people who would join the professional association and be a part of that community that wouldn't be otherwise interested in EA? (Maybe other philanthropy-focused professionals)
(Cons of a spin-off approach come to mind, namely confusing org structures)
Really interesting way to start looking at this idea. I have been wanting to think about this topic for a while but it's such a large question — using ChatGPT seems like a good way to get a foothold.
Some other organisations that I think have lessons for EA are the 20th century "service groups" like Rotary International, Lions Club etc. Particularly Rotary has some similarities (local groups, international network) and some successes in ambitious projects (eradicating polio). Under the categories you put forward, I think this would be categorised under social movement support but perhaps also network development by influencing people who end up holding power.
It's not clear to me what's most useful about doing these comparisons — maybe we can see certain outcomes we want to avoid, or learn about ways that the initial philosophy of the organisation changes over the lifespan. I also think there are some interesting observations about what gives an organisation a long lifespan or do these movements primarily confine themselves to people of a single generation.
Completely agree with this and have been thinking about mechanisms for doing this lately.
I think there are high context and low context services. A low context service doesn't require knowledge of EA to perform, high context does.
Services that are low-context (i.e. doesn't require knowledge of EA to perform) should be selected based on quality & price. There's no reason to prefer that a member of EA is making money as a web developer (as opposed to any other provider) unless you believe you're getting more than what you pay for based on their membership to the community.
Services that are high-context there's amore nuanced case: there might be a lot of benefits to having more people trained up in that domain specific skill. Essentially, there are positive externalities to having this funded. But, I still believe the signal of how much orgs are willing to pay is very important.
An idea about cost effectiveness evaluation for services: "Primary industry" organisations can approximately model cost effectiveness in terms of their main output: $ per life saved, $ per career change etc. When somebody charges for their services, it requires the primary orgs to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of that service. How many more lives saved if this operational system cost less to run? If we had a better website?
I imagine there could be a way of capturing that trade-off and having service providers estimate their impact through the prices organisations are willing to pay.
There seems to be a few directions that this kind of discussion could to go:
What does "ideal funding" look like for the EA ecosystem? What's our model for getting there? I've heard the assumption "we need more billionaires" and I can agree that that's true but I'd love to see a fleshed out model for what that target state looks like. Can we ever have too much money? How would we know?
What are the issues in the current funding landscape and how can they be characterised? I.e. if we think there's too much centralisation, why is that & what are we trading of against?
If you're starting a new organisation, are there any key considerations for how to get funding given what we know about the funding landscape?
Cool project!
I think instead of popularising the site itself, it's better as a source for journalists or social media to create viral moments.
Two headlines that come to mind are:
"You only need to donate X amount to beat billionaire philanthropists at saving lives"
Or something like
"Why do some rich people make such bad (philanthropic) investments?"
Have you come across Toby Ord's Shaping Humanity's Longterm Trajectory? I think it might expand on the ways you might do longtermist "accounting" to figure out what matters and compare different kinds of intervention. Saving future lives probably sits under the "Gains" section.
Attributing your impact to any particular organisation or program can be quite difficult. A lot of people make changes after two EAGx attendances, a handful of local group interactions, building in-depth connections with certain people, etc.
But as a community builder trying to evaluate the impact of our programs, it would be really useful if someone reached out and said: "Hey, I think the 30-minute chat we had last year was maybe 5% influential in getting me to my current position, alongside X, Y, and Z other programs and influences." 5% influence for a 30-minute chat is a useful signal for us when evaluating a 1:1 program! But people are unlikely to share that, because there's usually a more substantial mentor or program that felt much more influential.
So beyond proactively telling people when they've changed your actions, it seems good to me if there was a norm of proactively sharing when something influenced you even a bit.
This seems to rhyme with a concern I've had when planning programmes for EAGxAustralasia - what talks and workshops make sense under the "global health and development" banner?
A very naive categorisation of GHD content that's easy to put on at EAGx:
It's quite difficult to figure out what content would be exciting to EAGx attendees, and actually pushes their thinking beyond "here is information about another type of intervention".
From my position, it seems like other cause areas are grappling with bigger, more fundamental and less "solved" questions that make it easier to find relevant content for an EAGx audience.
But, one thing I'm taking from this post - there are still GHD topics to grapple with (systems change vs direct delivery, cash benchmarking, other career paths, funding transparency / scrutiny). Going to take inspo from this when planning our 2026 conference programme.
Hi! I really appreciate you writing this, it offers a level of thoughtful introspection that is otherwise difficult to inspect by people like me (community builder).
Can you imagine a group that you would feel motivated to spend time in, that would be EA affiliated? I'd love to know what aspects would be appealing and any constraints it would have to satisfy.
There seems to be a tension, where EA is exciting as a sort of intellectual project, where you read things and share thoughts and learn new stuff, but the energy to sustain that sort of involvement is difficult to maintain.
A social scene where everyone hangs out is easier to be a part of, but then - whats the point? Plus, lots of people already have a roster full of friends and families and don't need another social group.
I think if anyone is attracted to the intellectual project, but there aren't any formats that make it easy for them to engage, this might be solvable with thought event design. If the intellectual project is too taxing in an otherwise busy life (work, family, other interests etc), I'm not sure there's a way to meaningfully re-engage the old-hand EAs.
Very cool, and thank you for such a well considered cost-effectiveness model.
Do you have modelling for the potential scale of this intervention? How many healthcare workers are there in settings where this will be counterfactually useful?
I think that this question framed as an all-or-nothing is difficult to answer - we don't know how to measure all the benefits as well as risks that the current community patterns afford us. Plus we can't exactly change "EA" as a whole - but we could add subcomponents that have tighter centralisation, official membership etc.
This could be a great undertaking as a "spin-off" brand that collaborates closely with existing EA community groups. There are some follow-on questions that come to mind like:
(Cons of a spin-off approach come to mind, namely confusing org structures)
Really interesting way to start looking at this idea. I have been wanting to think about this topic for a while but it's such a large question — using ChatGPT seems like a good way to get a foothold.
Some other organisations that I think have lessons for EA are the 20th century "service groups" like Rotary International, Lions Club etc. Particularly Rotary has some similarities (local groups, international network) and some successes in ambitious projects (eradicating polio). Under the categories you put forward, I think this would be categorised under social movement support but perhaps also network development by influencing people who end up holding power.
It's not clear to me what's most useful about doing these comparisons — maybe we can see certain outcomes we want to avoid, or learn about ways that the initial philosophy of the organisation changes over the lifespan. I also think there are some interesting observations about what gives an organisation a long lifespan or do these movements primarily confine themselves to people of a single generation.
Completely agree with this and have been thinking about mechanisms for doing this lately.
I think there are high context and low context services. A low context service doesn't require knowledge of EA to perform, high context does.
Services that are low-context (i.e. doesn't require knowledge of EA to perform) should be selected based on quality & price. There's no reason to prefer that a member of EA is making money as a web developer (as opposed to any other provider) unless you believe you're getting more than what you pay for based on their membership to the community.
Services that are high-context there's amore nuanced case: there might be a lot of benefits to having more people trained up in that domain specific skill. Essentially, there are positive externalities to having this funded. But, I still believe the signal of how much orgs are willing to pay is very important.
An idea about cost effectiveness evaluation for services: "Primary industry" organisations can approximately model cost effectiveness in terms of their main output: $ per life saved, $ per career change etc. When somebody charges for their services, it requires the primary orgs to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of that service. How many more lives saved if this operational system cost less to run? If we had a better website?
I imagine there could be a way of capturing that trade-off and having service providers estimate their impact through the prices organisations are willing to pay.
So glad this exist, incredible work. EA can aspire to a norm of transparency that is far beyond the standard set by every other movement/industry.
This has been on my mind a lot lately: https://twitter.com/bridget_e_l/status/1659934882301374464?t=C5FCdBv85ujvfJgG7cV1bw&s=19 https://twitter.com/bridget_e_l/status/1665171766434578435?t=jWERYLo7H5dSUiG-L7jWvg&s=19
There seems to be a few directions that this kind of discussion could to go:
What does "ideal funding" look like for the EA ecosystem? What's our model for getting there? I've heard the assumption "we need more billionaires" and I can agree that that's true but I'd love to see a fleshed out model for what that target state looks like. Can we ever have too much money? How would we know?
What are the issues in the current funding landscape and how can they be characterised? I.e. if we think there's too much centralisation, why is that & what are we trading of against?
If you're starting a new organisation, are there any key considerations for how to get funding given what we know about the funding landscape?