That is awesome feedback, James. Thank you! 

An interesting way to think about this is that when you donate money to a good cause, nobody can ever take that away from you. Not the tax-man, not Trump, not a recession or a stock-market collapse. You will forever have that "credit" in your account. 

The idea of this post is so obviously correct that anything else just doesn't make sense. If it's a competition for who has earned / inherited the most money - which sadly for some people it is - then why shouldn't money voluntarily given away be part of the total? 

Right now, rich-lists are a contest to find the greediest humans, people who amass but do not share huge fortunes. Maybe calling the the "Forbes Greed list" would help change this??

People who have devoted more time and energy to EA and have a deeper grasp of it should have a bigger role in defining what is or isn't worth other people reading. It's not just judgment (is it right or wrong), it's also originality - is this a new opinion for EA's to think about? is this a topic which EA's haven't really engaged? It's hard for a new person to make these calls. 

Karma is a reasonably good indicator of meaningful engagement with the EA forum - as good as any other that can be quickly and fairly calculated. 

I would add one caveat: to use a more powerful supervote, a person should be required to add a comment. From personal experience, I am very happy to have dissenting opinions and arguments against my posts, but it's frustrating to get downvotes without any explanation. 

Great post!

As a senior professional who went through the hiring process for EA groups, but also as a senior professional who has hired people (and hires people) both for traditional (profit-driven) organisations and for impact/mission-driven organisations, my only comment would be that this is great advice for any role. 

As hiring managers, we love people who are passionate and curious, and it just feels weird for someone to claim to be passionate about something but not have read up about it or followed what's happening in their field. 

In terms of the job-search within EA, the only detail I would add is that there are a huge number of really nice, friendly, supportive people who give great feedback if you ask. One of my first interviewers did a 1-hour interview, after which he (rightly) did not continue the process. He explained very clearly why and what skills I was missing. He also set up an additional call where he talked through how my skill-set might be most valuable within an impactful role, and some ideas. He gave me lots of connections to people he knew. And so on. And he offered to help if I needed help. 

Within EA, this is the norm. People really respect that someone more senior wants to help make the world a bit better, they want to help. 

 

Thank you for writing this John!

I'm not sure this post (from Givewell, who are great and are doing the best they can in a bad situation) is the right place. 

I also agree with other commenters that many EA's do engage with political topics, with policy makers and some of the most impactful examples of EA work have been where we have succeed in changing laws (for example, about lead pollution). 

I also accept that many EA's (for example, myself) tend to engage in politics separately from EA activities, and maybe see the two as complementary activities. 

So it's not about engaging in politics - EA's do that - but about engaging in large-scale politics, and especially at critical moments like now. 

But I find a massive disconnect when a group claims to be looking to do the most effective things possible, and when obviously by far the most effective thing to do right now is to engage in preventing President Trump from destroying the world, and yet any suggestion that EA's get involved in that gets shot down. I made a post on this theme that has MINUS 29 Karma. My point was just that we need to put energy into stopping President Trump from destroying the world. Nobody explained what they had against it, they just voted it down. 

I think there is an important distinction here. I don't think this is about EA's becoming associated with one political party (in the US or elsewhere). That would just put people off. 

But the follow-up question would be how to get involved. 

Because right now, absurdly, EA does not have a high reputation with the general public. Recently, in an article on AI Safety, about the AI-2027 paper that you may have heard about, the NY Times had the following quote: "Mr. Kokotajlo and Mr. Lifland both have ties to Effective Altruism, another philosophical movement popular among tech workers that has been making dire warnings about A.I. for years." The clear implication was that that somehow gives their opinions less credibility, as if EA were some sort of cult - rather than a group of people who think clearly and rationally. 

In a better society, EA's would be an important influence group, just like doctors, scientists, economists or whatever. People would say "this action is strongly opposed by EA's" as a strong argument against something. Right now, we are not there. If the EA community were to come out officially as calling President Trump a threat to democracy, this would probably be seized upon by the right-wing media as proof that he was doing a great job and annoying all the right people. 

[My second most downvoted post was one where I dared to suggest that EA's should do more to stand up for ourselves when we are ridiculed in the press ... unfortunately we live in a world where, much as we may not like it, image matters, and if we let others treat us like a small, weird minority, then when important moments like AGI or Trump come along, we don't have as much influence as we should have with the general public.]

So, basically, I love your post, I think I fully feel how you feel - but I'm also not sure what exactly we should do. Maybe EA's engaging as individuals to stop Trump, encouraging all their friends to do the same is the best we can hope for. 

I'm curious to know if you have tangible suggestions of what the EA community can and should do. 

Nice post and I fully agree.

Unfortunately it all goes back to inadequate math education and effective disinformation campaigns. Whether it was tobacco or climate change, those who opposed change and regulation have always focused on uncertainty as a reason not to act, or to delay. And they have succeeded in convincing the vast majority of the public. The mentality is: "even the scientists don't agree on whether we'll have a global catastrophe or total human extinction - so until we're sure which one it is, let's just keep using fossil fuels and pumping out carbon dioxide." 

With AI, I liken most of humanity's mentality to that of a lazy father watching a football game who needs a soda. And there is a store just across a busy highway from his house. He could go get the soda, but he might miss an important score. So instead he sends his 7-year-old son to the store. Because, realistically, there's a good chance that his son won't get hit by a car, while if he goes himself, it is certain that he'll miss a part of the game. 

No parent would think like that. But when it comes to AI, that's how we think. 

And timelines are just the nth excuse to keep thinking that way. "We don't need to act yet, it mightn't happen for 5 years - some people say even 10 years."

The challenge for us is to somehow wake people up before it's too late, and despite the fact that the people who are in the best position to pause are the most gung-ho of all, whether they are CEO's or US president, because they personally have everything to gain from accelerating AI, even if it ends up screwing everyone else (and let's be realistic, they don't really care about anyone else). 

I wrote this post one month ago, it received minus 29 votes and 6 x's. 

Do people still feel the same way? Or are you now realising that this man is trying to turn the US into his own personal Russia? That there is a model for this that he is following - look at Turkey or Poland or Hungary or Slovakia or Brazil or Argentina or Venezuela. All slighly different, but similar in the way that an apparently stable, mature democracy was hijacked by a populist movement and eventually became an authoritarian state where the constitution and the rule of law were gradually replaced by the whims of one individual. 

I spent some time in Venezuela when Chavez was in power, and it is scarily similar to the US right now. At the time, it was early in Chavez's rule, the economy was still working, the country was rich although with a lot of terrible poverty and many people, even educated people, supported Chavez's vision of a more equal society. But now the country has been destroyed. 

I have read a wonderful novel, Europe Central, by William Vollmann, which describes what it was like to live under Stalin. So much parallels what's happening in the US today, from punishing people for expressing the "wrong" opinions, to, for example the way Stalin was the person who decided if Shostakovich's latest works were acceptable or not - just like the way Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center. 

And this is happening to the most powerful country in the world, the country that used to be the good guys in a world where Russia and China support so much that is bad. 

To me this is utterly terrifying. And I'm not sure why EA's don't see this as a problem. 

• Is it that EA's are secretly libertarians who actually think that some of what Trump is doing is good?
• Or is it that we rather focus on narrow problems that seem more tractable, and leave the global political problems to others?
• Are those of us in Europe missing something? 

Could anyone enlighten me? 

It would be amazing if some of the people who downvoted this and or disagreed with it could provide some perspective on why. 

Specifically: do you genuinely believe that stopping Trump's destruction of so much that is good and altruistic and necessary in the world is not an important and worthy objective? Or do you not believe that EA's should get involved in the dirty world of politics? 

[NickLaing's comment is great, but was based on a previous version that I'd had updated even before I saw his comment.] 

 

Hi Nick, 

I fully agree with you. In fact, after I re-read the post, I realised I urgently needed to edit it. I had intended the idea of actual assassination to be provocative, but instead it read as if I was actively proposing it. 

What I'm hoping for is, indeed, non-violent options, protests, etc. 

What I'm objecting to, though, is him feeling he can break laws and accepted conventions at will, but everyone else blindly following them to enable him. For example, this is the moment when the EU could take a strong, moral stance. We could propose, in the short term, to literally replace the US - fund US Aid, pay the workers, etc., which could be both helpful for those who need help and a really powerful rebuke of Trump. But we could also just refuse to treat him seriously. 

For example, I'm Irish. On March 17th, St Patrick's Day, traditionally Irish leaders visit the US president and give him some shamrock. Many Irish people want us to skip the visit this year, and to instead make a very public point about wanting nothing to do with Mr. Trump - while still having massive respect for all the great things the US stands for. But it looks like it will go ahead as normal, he'll get a nice photo-op, and everything will seem normal. 

It's not normal. We shouldn't normalise it. 

But I totally agree with you, assassination is not the literal answer. Hopefully you are one of the few people who read it before I edited it :D 

Cheers

Denis

Thanks for this great post. 

My first reaction to the original article (which I saw scrolling through the NY Times online, without any realisation that it was about EA or Effective Giving), it made me really angry. It still makes me angry, and I'm not normally the type to get angry. 

First, given that I had just co-founded an Effective Giving organisation in Ireland, following a @Charity Entrepreneurship Incubator, I found it very sad that people were sharing such ill-informed articles, which would potentially discourage many donors from using their donations to help many more people. I cannot help but wonder how many more children will die because of this article? How many more animals will suffer in factory farms because of this article? 

Because this article is wrong in a very bad way. It doesn't just focus on the benefits of giving to charities that are close to your heart - it also actively criticises effective giving as if it were something that only truly insensitive people would do, as if EA's as a species were somehow less than human because we dare care more about the people we want to help than about the warm fuzzy glow we get when we donate. 

Because that is what effective giving is. It is saying "When I donate, I am going to decide how to donate not based on what feels good to me, but rather on what will help the most people or animals." 

But also, almost nobody in the effective giving movement discourages "non-effective" charity. First, because most of us arrived there not because we were super-logicians, but rather because we've been donating all our lives to causes we care deeply about, and started to realise that some of these donations weren't helping people in desperate need as much as they might. But we still kept donating - and then when we discovered Effective Giving, it was like opening our eyes to a world of people who thought just like us, but had taken it a step further and devoted their lives to it. 

It sickens me to see how these people, some of the most sensitive, generous and caring people I've ever encountered, have been mischaracterised in this article as unfeeling cynics who were in it for the joy of the math. 

There are benefits to giving to all charitable causes* and that it is absolutely great when a person donates to a charitable cause close to their heart, or with which they have a personal connection to it. Effective Giving organisations want to help raise their awareness that there is also the option to give some of their money to very effective causes. We don't ask that they stop giving to causes they already support. Indeed, there is a famous "3 pots" thinking (I first heard this from @Bram Schaper, the inspiring leader of the Dutch effective giving organisation, Doneer Effectief)  that we often share: If you have some money available after all your costs have been paid, why not share it out into 3 pots:

• something for yourself, your family, your friends, ...
• something for a charity close to your heart
• something for a highly effective charity that will ensure your donation really helps someone a lot.

I really wanted someone with some credibility to reply to this article and call it out for what it was, which is just nonsense, low-quality, one-sided journalism. But apparently it's OK to display bias as long as the people you're biased against are mostly well off white males, which is unfortunately the stereotype of EA's. The problem was that it wasn't the well off white male EA's who were the victims of the article, but rather the people that we are all trying to help, the people who desperately need help. 


But, I decided to reflect a while before posting an angry comment on here, and I actually read some other comments about the article. Calm, measured, accepting that people have a right to their opinions. They focused on the fact that the journalist probably meant well and was probably a good person - and kind of glossed over the minor detail that that same journalist had shockingly and intentionally mis-characterised the entire EA and Effective Giving movements in a very harmful way. 

Can you imagine how any other group would feel if they were treated like that? 

Where was the anger? Where was the passion to stand up for what we believe in? 

It's very easy to sit comfortably in our chairs and debate the subtle details of arguments. But that's not how we're going to change the world. If we're willing to let people attack the EA movement and Effective Giving and not defend ourselves, how can we expect to convince others? 

We may be mostly in the 99th percentile for calm, logical reasoning, but the vast majority of people** are not. History shows that great movements require not just great thinkers and strategies, but also passionate advocates, and even sometimes stubborn, pig-headed supporters who do not back down. 

And if we want to be scientific about it, we can. There is a huge amount of science related to effective ways to communicate with and convince the general public. Writing precise, detailed arguments is one of the least effective parts of this - although it is still vital that someone does this. 

The world right now is utterly broken. In a world with the technology and capacity to feed and clothe and nourish and educate and care for everyone, we have billions of people who literally do not have the most basic necessities like clean water or enough food to avoid starvation. We have wars started because individual Sudanese generals or national leaders decide they want more power or a stronger image - and so hundreds of thousands die. We have an out of control AI development program led by a group of immature men with no history of responsible behaviour. We have a growing risk of nuclear war. We have a climate crisis that we're effectively ignoring and denying even as the evidence grows more incontrovertible every day. 

EA's are among the few groups who really care about this. But if we remain a niche group and let ourselves be defeated by inaccurate stereotypes and biased communicators, we're not going to have the impact that the world desperately needs us to have. 

We have great thinkers and wonderful, good people within the EA movement. But we could use more overt passion - many of us are deeply passionate about EA, but too many of us do not want to share that passion with the world, to shout out our demands and lead others towards our ideas, without them necessarily having to go through the same deep thought process that brought many of us here. 

Many people just want to be part of a movement - why not let that movement be one that will make the world better. Instead, we are literally being out-thought by people like Donald Trump, who understands people's need to be part of a movement and is more than happy to cynically exploit it. 

Imagine how much better off we'd be if people were chanting "no more factory-farms" and "stop the wars" rather than anti-immigrant slogans. But we won't get there by just imagining it. 

 

*although, especially in the US, some tax-exempt causes like extremely rich universities attended by some of the richest students, are IMHO pushing the definition of "charity" a bit too far.

**more than 98% of people, to be exact!