Ian Turner
Posts 4
Comments347
My sense is that this is absolutely true:
election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor
However, I also get the sense that it's quite hard, in a way that (for example) following GiveWell recommendations isn't. Politics is highly anti-inductive and it's really hard to know how and where to give, and even in retrospect it can often be hard to tell if one's donations made a difference.
Personally I stay away from political donations just because I feel like I don't understand it well, and getting that understanding is really quite difficult. It's hard to have true beliefs about politics for a variety of reasons.
I think the claim is that while this intervention wasn’t as cost effective as we thought, it’s still more cost effective than most interventions. The belief regarding the cost effectiveness (about a third as good as we thought) is itself supported by evidence, so if you think the best options are 10× as good as the average ones, you would still expect this one to be “above average”. Not sure about 90th percentile but I do think there’s a fair amount of NGO work whose effectiveness is statist indistinguishable from zero, and a minority that’s arguable actively harmful.
Is it possible that subgroups within EA have sexual harrassment rates that are significantly above or below baseline? For example, maybe AI related spaces or SF Bay Area spaces have higher levels of sexual harrassment. Then people who are generally in those spaces would subjectively observe that the level of sexual harrassment is high, even though it might not be if you were to average across all of EA.
If there are parts of EA that have lower than average levels of sexual harrassment, I would not expect anyone to speak up and say, "man, this animal welfare community sure doesn't have much sexual harrassment". So there is a bias in terms of who is moved to share their experience.
I would argue that MacKenzie Scott’s giving is pretty close to direct indexing and … pretty not great. Though it does have the one advantage that apparently nobody will criticize you for taking this approach.
Maybe instead of indexing one should do something like, spend 5 minutes upfront to decide what your default option will be, be it GiveDirectly, GiveWell, or something else (even unicef!). And then send whatever you haven’t granted there.
I certainly think being an evaluator is hard; but I was referring to the difficulty of choosing an evaluator.
GiveWell is able to provide extremely transparent and legible background to all their grants and recommendations, which makes it very easy to trust their decisionmaking. Essentially, I am confident that GiveWell is doing a good job at their recommendations because (a) I dug carefully into their reasoning and it holds up very well, even the parts that I validated independently/personally, and (b) it's relatively easy to verify the claims made by GiveWell's critics (at least with respect to GiveWell).
In politics, I don't really think any of that applies. It's inherently adversarial, which among other things means a good evaluator can't really be fully transparent: Much of the most important information is shared in private. Sure Eric Neyman exists; but as an outsider I don't really see how to validate his work in the way that I can with GiveWell. And if an evaluator of political donations were to accumulate a lot of followers, they would in turn become a target of political operatives that would limit their ability to maneuver.
I know a lobbyist personally and while he's able to give me a lot more candor than would be possible in public, I still don't really feel like I have a good sense of how effective his work is as a whole. Working with a stranger would be even tougher.