I chatted to Matt at the weekend, and I had misunderstood what he was claiming. He was claiming that in 2 years you persuade someone to do as much good as you do in the rest of your life. So, in those 2 years you create the value of your entire career, whatever activities it involves. So, even if you go on to recruit more people in subsequent 2 year periods, the person you persuaded in the first 2 year period ALSO recruits that many people. So, you can never overtake the value created in those first two years.
It should be pointed out that whether or not the finance industry is positive or negative for society is basically irrelevant to our arguments for professional philanthropy.
Since financial jobs remain highly popular, someone working in finance is replaceable, so their personal net effect is nearly zero, even if finance is negative for society (as nef claims).
The much more interesting part of the article is this:
“Liberals should also be wary of self-selecting out of certain occupations. After Vietnam and revelations of C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s, many university students avoided the military and the intelligence agencies. So slots were filled disproportionately by ideological conservatives in a way that undermined everyone’s interests. We would have been better off if more Swarthmore idealists had become generals and C.I.A. officers — and we may be better off if some idealists become bankers as well.”
Suggesting that ethically minded people avoid finance jobs could almost be irresponsible. Your efforts are unlikely to prevent these jobs from existing, but they are highly likely to make sure they get filled with unscrupulous people.
And then there’s all the money you could give away.
Also consider:Improving human rights is not only hard to quantify, but efforts to do so are highly uncertain in their success (it’s unclear what even what measures you should consider if you want to improve human rights in a country)On the other hand, incredibly cheap health interventions exist, with near certain huge benefitsAlleviating extreme poverty seems to be a good way to improve human rights (it’s difficult to stand up for your rights when you’re struggling just to stay alive, and when you couldn’t go to school because of parasites)Studies of well being show that people REALLY value their health.
We’re interested in all kinds of interventions, and as soon as GWWC has a big enough research budget, they will try to investigate them all, but don’t be too hasty to write off funding health
Hey Ruairi, yes my figure is for the fundraising of all charities taken together. If you look at individual charities, they’ll be getting returns higher than 90% at the margin, because they’ll also be taking some money from other charities.
Our research term is working on a much bigger article!If anyone reads this and wants to get involved with this kind of research, we’d be very happy to hear from you.
It’s certainly a patchwork solution, in the sense that in an ideal world there would be no need to become a professional philanthropist. Unfortunately, we’re not in an ideal world…or even close to being in one.
Point taken. It’s difficult to promote pro phil without angering both left and right. This is one example. If you pretend certain high earning careers, like banking, are not harmful, then you anger the left. If you consider the fact that they might be, then you anger the right.
In practice, we talk so much about banking because it’s the most salient example of a high earning career that is widely regarded as ‘unethical.’ If you can make the case for pro phil with banking, then it follows for all the other (legal) high earning careers.
Good point about foreign aid. GWWC recently did some research that suggested the cost-effectiveness of US health aid could be better than NTDs. We suspect there’s a serious problem with the estimate, but nevertheless, it’s looking like it might be pretty cost-effective. Then, cuts to health aid would be difficult to offset by donations to health charities.
Hey Zander,You should also point out that Sabin is currently funding the awesome ‘End7’ campaign. They do a lot of advocacy as well as research. http://endtheneglect.org/2011/...
Just a question about career choice to fight AI x-risk. You seem to suggest there’s one main choice: if you’re a strong mathematician or physicist then consider working in AI research, otherwise you can probably do more by earning money and donating it to AI research. Most people don’t have the research option, so generally professional philanthropy is the best way to go.
But have you considered some of the other options? For instance, you could persuade people to donate to AI research. If you give up a high earning career, but persuade 2 people to take high earning careers and donate toAI research, then you’ve made more difference. That seems very easy, given how few people donate to AI research. So this seems better than pro phil. And there are probably other extremely effective things you could involving advocacy.
A slightly different option would be anything that improves the effectiveness of AI researchers. A great manager might be able to make 10 researchers 10% more effective, and thus do as much good as becoming one himself.
and note the huge pledges by the UK government (£250m http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal... and Gate’s foundation ($350m I think). The Gates Foundation seems to be the main mover in the process.
To be clear, I was talking about the ‘direct harm’ done by bankers.
The point of replaceability, the flat margin effect and other compensation effects, is that the harm done by becoming a banker can be completely different from the harm done directly by bankers.
In 80k strategy, we often consider applying some weight to common-sense, since in some cases it might actually be optimised, or reflect some of things you miss if you’re too analytic.
You could also look at ‘meta’-strategies, like being flexible, so that you can continually update as you learn more.
This has been on the list to investigate for a while, but we’re not going to have capacity for at least the next six months.
Basically, there’s a literature around the issue of whether doing an MBA boosts your earnings enough to make up for the costs (mostly concluding that it does). Unfortunately, it’s mostly produced by business schools, so biased and controversial. Our best guess is that it does, but by less than is normally claimed. Also note that if you have a high discount rate, it’s going to be less worth it, since you’re also moving your earnings further into the future.
I’d imagine that the effect on earnings is strongly dependent on the prestige of the school, just because school name is normally very important, but I don’t have any firm evidence. One point against this is that MBAs are sometimes required as prerequisites for certain positions and can allow you to skip a couple of years (e.g. if you join a consultancy with an MBA you start at a higher level). In these cases it’s more about just having an MBA, rather than having a respected MBA.
One point against this is that it seems like another big portion of the value of an MBA comes from the networking opportunities. These will be much better at top schools.
My final impression is that not many people think the info you learn at business school is intrinsically useful, especially if you’re interested in doing entrepreneurial stuff. The main value comes from network, then the status and the fact that people sometimes offer better jobs to MBAs. That also means that if these factors won’t be useful in your situation, then it’s less likely to be worth it.
If you’d like to look into some of the literature on the value of an MBA and try to start piecing it together, we’d love to help!
It’s not obvious. There certainly seem to be students who are looking for a life project. They can suddenly flip from a non-altruistic course to an altruistic one.
Person B can’t do just as much good, because B is 2 years behind Person A.
In the next two years, person B persuades one more person. Person A, however, has persuaded someone else the two years before. Now that person, who persuaded A persuaded, persuades someone else.
So, the ‘A chain’ is always one step ahead of the B chain. So, the first 2 years are always more valuable than the next 2 years.
The point is that you persuade people to do ‘about as much good as you’, so we’ve assumed each person goes on to persuade one other person over the next 2yr, and then stops, irrespective of their age.
It’s true that if you keep influencing, the B chain is only a little shorter than the A chain. So it’s not true that the 2yr period is more valuable than the rest of your life if you keep influencing, but it is true that it’s more valuable than any later 2yr period.
To get that conclusion, Matt should have assumed you can persuade 2 people in the 2yr period. The weird thing about supposing that each person persuades one other, is that then you don’t get any compounding. If each person persuades 2 in the period, then the first chain is always a factor of 2 larger than the second. (and the 2nd is a factor of 2 larger than the 3rd etc.).
Then you can show that the first chain will always be larger than the sum all the others. So, then the first 2yr period is more valuable than all of the rest put together.
In realistic situations with a great deal of uncertainty, you’d certainly want to include some kind of damping factor like this. I’m not sure how rapid it would be. It seems to depend a lot on the situation.
If we suppose, however, that P2 would not have become an EA if it were not for P1, and P3 would not have become an EA if it were not for P2 becoming an EA, then it seems to be that P3 would not have become an EA if it were not for P1. (Apparently this pattern of reasoning, conditional transitivity, is not valid in general, although this is a matter of debate: http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/2/286.extract) If that’s the case, then the counterfactual dependence genuinely transmits through the chain.
80k is actively trying to include women. Our market research suggests that women are equally keen on the message as men, perhaps slightly more interested given that proportionally more women want ethical careers. I think the gender imbalance is the largely the result of us being founded by a group of men, and how we have promoted ourselves through some male heavy networks (LW and GWWC). I anticipate us evening out as we grow.
Nice estimate. Another interesting point AdG made in the lecture: he reckoned that if you could demonstrate a bunch of rejuvenation techniques in mice (which, as it says, he reckons would take $50m p.a. for ~5 years), then big pharma would almost certainly jump in, since the potential financial rewards could be huge. So, the people who supply the first $250m have a chance of triggering many times that amount of money entering the field (if it works in mice).
I was just thinking that since only one person in each field ends up being the best, and there’s thousands of people in each field, it’s unlikely to be you.
Hey Greg, Richard mentions a couple of other bits of support beyond the ones you mention. Also note that he’s arguing in favor of some kind of task management system, not necessarily GTD, although a simplified version of GTD seems like the best right now.
Goal setting has a pretty strong evidence base for increasing output (at least if done right) - see the article Richard links to. Task management systems encourage you to systematically goal set.
It also encourages you to make your tasks precise - there’s other studies suggesting that this also makes you more likely to do them
A major benefit is peace of mind. There aren’t proper trials showing that GTD leads to more peace of mind compared to other alternatives, but it’s one of those situations where all that matters is that it works for you. This in turn leads to conserved will power etc.
Another major benefit is not forgetting things. I think it’s pretty clear that a task management system of some sort is going to make you less likely to forget things.
I think the main reason they’re not more widely used is that people don’t know about them, and it’s seen as a bit unusual. It’s also much less useful when you’re a student and mostly just have to manage your studies, which might explain why you don’t see it more among your peers. In other professions when high output is really important, people effectively have a task management system via their PA.
There’s certainly a lot of practical issues to consider if one was actually going to do this. This post is not a practical recommendation, rather a demonstration of how different ethical careers become if one takes the counterfactual view.
Apart from the issues you raise, there seem to be options that are likely to be better. For instance, pursuing professional philanthropy and hiring PAs (though there are situations where this doesn’t work e.g. where one academic takes the teaching load of another). Or by forming a group of volunteers who carry out this activity.
Hey Daniel - I think this is basically right. It’s certainly the case that it’s too simple just to look at the difference between you and the person who replaces you. In general, there’s an ‘iteration effect’ where a whole chain of people switch jobs. The difference you make to some field is probably closer to the difference you make directly and the difference made by the worst person in the field. There are also effects from sliding the higher ability people into other jobs. It’s too simple to say that replaceability means aid workers don’t make a difference. Though, it’s probably correct to say that many aid workers make much less than difference than they think. I’ll be writing a lot more about this in future posts.
Nice find! I had noticed a bit of a backlash against ‘do what you’re passionate about’ when I researched the post, but I didn’t realise someone was writing a whole book about it!
Without knowledge of your GNS score, the 5 characteristics are approximately equally good predictors of job satisfaction (mean r=0.4). Task identity is a little bit weaker than the others.
I only came across the result that if you have a high GNS, then you should weight mental challenge overall more highly. I guess the study would have been done with a combined ‘mental challenge’ score consisting of all 5 characteristics. I didn’t come across studies showing the impact of knowledge about GNS on the predictive power of the individual characteristics. It could easily be out there though.
I’m surprised that so many readers think Greg isn’t taking quality of life improvements into account. He uses QALYs to measure the health improvement, which are quality adjusted life years. There’s problems with this measure, but it’s the best out there at the minute.
I agree with the last comment that making a difference (or, in this case, ‘saving lives’) is not the only thing that matters in choosing a job. But it does matter. Sometimes it can be more important than what you’ll enjoy. http://80000hours.org/blog/62-don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1
Givewell also has blog posts about why they think health in the developing world is likely to be one of the world’s best giving opportunities full stop. And it’s worth pointing out that Givewell Labs has the aim of considering any giving opportunities. On the other hand, Givewell is only interested in what you can do with your money i.e. finding funding gaps. Seb is more focused on what you can do with your career i.e. finding talent gaps. And even within funding opportunities, there will be opportunities Givewell is not considering.
Hey Andy, it’s not clear to me how much fundraisers worry about taking money from other causes. Most charities don’t seem to think fundraising is a zero sum game, but I’m not sure.
Givewell finds it hard to hire non-US citizens, but Giving What We Can is happy to! You can apply to intern with them on their pages www.givingwhatwecan.org
It seems pretty likely that there will be some cases where attractiveness helps you in the interview, but doesn’t help in the job (or at least doesn’t help as much as it helps in the interview). It would be pretty lucky if interviewers (who aren’t purposely selecting on the basis of attractiveness) happened to subconsciously apply exactly the right weighting to it.
Thanks! I was trying to argue that education’s main benefits come from promoting other factors (like wealth and health), rather than being an end in itself. One common response to saying that education can have a muted impact is that it’s intrinsically good to educate people. I might have been overstating the case though. Although education’s impact on wellbeing is indirect, it seems like ‘perceived trust’ and the like might be difficult to promote any other way and have significant benefits.
This question turns a lot on whether the cause of promoting anti-speciesism is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained at the time when you start working. (when is that btw?)
This is really hard to predict.
So might first thought is try to keep your options open. It seems like if you get some training in sales, then you can potentially make good money in business or use the same skills to promote a cause.
What plans did you have for making money? Maybe you can avoid reducing your earning potential much, while also learning useful marketing skills.
Reading: Influence by Cialdini (just read the summaries of each chapter, it’ll be familiar to you already) To Sell is Human (just skim the second half) Secrets of Power Negotiating (skim the ‘key points’ of the first few chapters)
Hm, cool! I’d like to live on less than that, in both cases. But if people pay for me to do the campaigning work then im taking >that money out of the charity :( So if I’m worth 40k and they pay me 20k, then as a donor I only need to donate 20k to break >even. Or is there something wrong with this logic?
That’s right. I was using tougher assumptions in which the ppl you’d hire would want higher wages than yourself. If they wanted 30k (closer to market rates) then you’d need to donate 40k instead. That might be too harsh though.
Taking a brief look at salaries for market researchers, they seem lower than lawyers at most levels, though perhaps not much lower for the median lawyer. I think you’d also have to do an extra 1-2yr of low paid training work as a lawyer. I’d reckon there’s more potential to go into some sales role in business, but this is going to more unpredictable. Basically, you might not be giving up much earning potential, particularly in the early years, by doing psychology.
Will the law degree be more time consuming? That could be a big factor from a haste point of view. You can start making big contributions to comms for your cause already while at uni.
You should check out the Irish qualification thing.
Anyway, we could go into more detail on the expected value of different paths given your skills, perhaps we should chat on skype?
What kind of quality? Building new schools is one way to improve quality. Does the supply-side vs demand-side distinction still hold? Seemed like it did from reading the overall conclusions, but I haven’t read the new education section.
One quick extra correction you could do is using the average age of death to go from lives lost to QALYs lost. That would (roughly guessing) suggest that all else equal, we should fund AIDS about 2x as much as cancer and malaria about 3x as much as cancer.
Hi Ken, it’s true I was only considering a fundraiser who gets average returns from fundraising. In reality, some fundraisers are better than others. If you’re a fundraiser who’s genuinely raising money that wouldn’t have been given to charity otherwise, then you won’t be causing harm in this way.
The studies just looked at the differences within positions. They didn’t adjust for pay.
As you say, however, there are rarely 7x differences in pay for people doing the same job, so it seems like the market is not efficient in this instance. I would guess this is because of employment law, issues surrounding team morale, uncertainty about how much value different people are producing, and other distorting factors.
It’s also pretty unclear to me that interviews are a good way of judging whether you’ll be able to get on with someone in the long-term, though it looks like a better thing to assess through interviews than most, especially if you go into it with that intention.
Moreover, it doesn’t actually rely on marginal fundraising causing NO extra money to be donated to charity. Because the difference between mean and median is likely to be so large, if even a small amount is moved from another charity (as opposed to wouldn’t have been donated otherwise) then it’s likely to be net harmful. I work out the breakeven point in footnote (6).
Good question. This is essentially studied by the psychology literature on persuasion as summarised in books like ‘influence’ and ‘59 seconds.’ There’s also a small literature around charitable giving, as summarised by books like ‘the science of giving.’ Beyond scientific research, it then comes down to the market research of fundraising organisations.
Check out Cialdini’s book ‘influence’ in the section on ‘likability.’ Attractive people are more likable, likable people are more persuasive. I don’t recall how strong the effect is though.
Hi Evan, we’re definitely going to be looking into which skills are most useful to acquire in the next couple of months. I’ll contact you when we do more. In the meantime, let me know if you come across any good sources.
Hey John, this is a cool post. Graham’s thoughts match my own (much more limited) impressions of how this works.
I’d certainly like to turn us into a start-up hub. Graham suggests that the best place to be is at the forefront of a rapidly changing field. I think many of our members are in that position, and in particular, the staff of 80k are riding the evidence-based living movement. I think there’s some evidence we’re already turning into such a hub. For instance, check out our projects page: http://80000hours.org/projects And we’ve got a couple of new ideas that haven’t come out yet!
These are really interesting ideas. Another strategy some charities are been pursuing is social bonds. For instance, some charities only ask their donors to lend money rather than give it to them. The charities can use this money on fundraising or setting up charity shops, enabling them to repay the capital. Since the donors are not making a loss, the level of commitment to the cause is far lower, greatly expanding your potential donor base. Moreover, it acts as an excellent foot in the door. After making this small financial commitment, many donors go on to make donations or to cancel the debt.
Boycotts probably cause some damage that scales roughly linearly with the number of participants too, which would be reputational damage to the company.
But I agree that the main effect probably comes from reaching a threshold where the company feels its forced to change.
One way to think about this effect is that each additional participant in the boycott very slightly raises the probability of reaching the threshold. This will be some function of how influential the person is and how many people are already involved and other things.
The consequences of some boycotts might be so large that even just raising the probability of success very slightly might be well worth it. For most boycotts, I’d also guess there are some particularly high leverage moments when the involvement of extra people has an unusually large impact.
Something like that in general I guess. Also note that if someone gets involved, they may set off chain reactions of other people getting involved. If these chains are likely, then even early involvement could be significant. I’m also inclined to think there’s a hump in the impact for the first tens of people to get involved (assuming it’s not destined to failure), while they get it started. All of these things are going to depend very strongly on the details of the situation.
It ties into a general issue that sometimes being irrational day-to-day can lead to better results in the long-term. (And this, in turn, ties into the general issue that often common sense rules of thumb work better than you might expect) It’s not always best to be less biased. We’ll write about this when designing our careers decision processes.
I think EAA assumes Vegan Outreach and The Humane League persuade people to stay vegetarian for about four years in their cost-effectiveness estimates of online vegan ads. And I think this figure is based on follow up surveys by VO and THL. They generally try to estimate the counterfactually adjusted number of vegetarians (how many became vegetarians who wouldn’t have become vegetarians otherwise) in their effectiveness estimates though, so Roman’s point should already be accounted for. Brian and Ilan will know much more about both points.
There’s a lot of interesting issues here. We’d definitely like to post more about investing in the future.
One big issue is whether it’s better donate to charity now or to donate more in the future. I’m not going to talk about that here, but to get an overview of the issues, have a look at this: http://givingwhatwecan.org/how-to-give/donating-vs-investing
As I understand it (am I right?) the main issue you’re worrying about here is the following (which I’ve been asked once or twice before): You need a certain amount of savings to live off when you retire, about half a million dollars. You have two ways to accumulate these savings:
Invest conventionally, earning C% return per year
Impact invest - invest in order to earn a financial return (call it F%) AND a social return that’s larger than the social return conventional investing would earn
Switching to impact investing involves two main costs: (i) extra effort on your part (ii) a potentially lower financial return. The key question is: are these costs worth the benefit of the extra social return that you could earn on your portfolio?
This is pretty tough to answer, and I’d like to do a more detailed analysis in the future. But here’s some considerations.
First, note that if you earn a lower financial return on your savings, you’ll need to save more today in order to have enough when you retire. Let’s consider some plausible example figures. If you earn 7% p.a., you’d need to save $66k today in order to have $500k when you retire in 30 years. If you only earn 6% p.a., you’d need to save $87k today to have enough. So, if you can earn 7% on your retirement savings, then you could donate an extra $21k to charity today instead of saving it. So, if impact investing was going to cost you 1ppt of returns down from 7%, then you’d need to think the extra social return on your portfolio of $88k that you can gain with impact investing is greater than the social return of $21k donated to a charity today.
To summarise: In situation (1), we’ve got: $21k invested in the best charitable intervention we know about, generating high social returns $66k in your retirement portfolio (possibly generating some small social returns)
In (2), we’ve got: $87k impact invested (generating some social returns presumably higher than the $66k in your conventional portfolio)
That’s a pretty tough comparison, and I need to think a lot more about how large the benefits of impact investing are. My first thought, however, is that the $21k donated to charity today can go to very highest leverage interventions we know about, which generate very large social returns (e.g. deworming generate social economic returns of ~20% per year for at least a couple of years after, and then probably at the rate of economic growth in the relevant areas in the long-term). The impact investing portfolio has much more diffuse social returns, which seem unlikely to be as high leverage as the best developing world interventions. After all, people are attempting to earn these social returns alongside running a regular portfolio, whereas with charity we’re focusing directly on having a social impact. Another point to note is that there’s a limited pool of good impact investing opportunities, which other people are chasing. So if you don’t take some good investment opportunity, someone else will. So the extra social impact that comes from you participating in impact investing is significantly less than the direct social impact of the investments made. Overall, I suspect that the $21k to charity would dominate in this case.
What does this suggest more generally? For impact investing to be competitive, you probably wouldn’t want to compromise much on the financial return on your portfolio. The exception would be if you believe that the social returns on impact investing are relatively large compared to the social returns on the top charities known today.
In addition to comparing the potential social benefits, it’s also worth considering social and environmental costs. One of my motivations in exploring impact investing is that I have become increasingly troubled by the many social and environmental injustices that can be traced back to shareholders’ expectations for growth. I’ve experienced firsthand the changes that can happen when a private company goes public, and I’m not sure I want to keep contributing so much of my money to a system that encourages growth at all costs–especially if there are alternative investing options available.
Sorry for being unclear. Read what I said above as ‘net social benefit’ i.e. the total social benefits minus the total social costs.
The returns on any investment are uncertain, as is the impact of inflation on the amount we will actually need to live on during our retirement years. We can project alternative scenarios, but in real life there will be one actual scenario that plays out. We cannot know in advance what that scenario will be. This uncertainty tends to encourage people to over-save or to take on more risk in the hope of higher returns. That in turn has opportunity costs in terms of the amount they allocate today to charitable giving.
That’s a good point. Irrationality in investing has social costs.
It’s worth noting that impact investing can be very lucrative (there are examples of impact investors receiving returns of 200% or greater), but it can also be very risky. Most impact investing currently happens outside of traditional markets and instead involves direct investing in projects and enterprises. As I mentioned in my original discussion post, right now retail impact investing opportunities are mainly limited to debt: for example, the Calvert Foundation’s Community Investment note puts 100% of investment dollars received to work on social projects in developing countries, but investors receive a 2% return, which is lower than the long-term inflation rate in the United States. My current “strategy,” if you could call it that, is to keep most of my retirement investments in their current portfolio, which should earn closer to 6 or 7% over the long term, while I wait to see if more attractive impact investment opportunities for retail investors emerge.
It’s all a question of your expected returns. It seems very unlikely that exchanging regular investing at 6-7% for impact investing at 2% would be worth it. You’d have to save $278,000 today to have $500,000 in 30 years! So the charitable investments you’d have to forgo today would be several times as large as your impact investing portfolio. On the other hand, if you can earn equal or better expected returns in impact investing, then it looks worth it (unless you think that the impact investing approach won’t actually lead to greater social benefits than regular investing).
I think some people will respond to lower anticipated returns not by saving more but by delaying retirement. For an altruist, delaying retirement should not represent much more of a sacrifice than donating 10% or more of one’s current salary to charities. This is the approach I decided to take personally, as I’m not willing to reduce my charitable donations in order to invest more toward my retirement.
This gets back to the issue of whether it’s better to give now or later as I mentioned at the start.
I’d just make the clarification that there IS a unit for MEASURING x-risk reduction - that’s expected human welfare gained from reducing the chance of x-risk (which you could start to approximate by considering QALYs gained!).
The difficult thing is estimating by how much a research program reduces x-risk. As Luke points out, it’s sometimes not clear whether the SingInst increases or decreases the risk of dangerous AI! On the other hand, because even a tiny reduction in the probability of extinction is (if you place value on future people) an extremely good thing, so long as the research program is having a positive effect, it seems like a good bet that it’s among the very best causes.
There’s lots of reasons. The main one is that in the lead up the financial crisis, bankers took on large amounts of leverage in search of short term profits and sold products without making their risks clear (sometimes in activities that were borderline illegal). The combination lead to a very unstable financial system, resulting in the financial crisis, leading to the recession. I think the NEF estimate is based on assuming that some significant fraction of the costs of the financial crisis was due to bankers.
Of course, there were lots of other reasons for the financial crisis e.g. central bank low interest rate policies, the housing bubble, chinese monetary policy, etc. It’s controversial how much is due to bankers.
What really angers people is that the bankers who made these bad decisions didn’t financially suffer. The accusation is that they manipulated the system to their advantage. Indeed, the financial lobby seems to have quite a bit of influence over congress.
More socialist minded people would say that (financial crisis aside) bankers fundamentally exploit people, and act to prevent social reform that would remove this exploitation.
I’ve been reading some of the facebook chatter about this post. The main criticism seems to be that it would be difficult to determine whether you should try to become the PA or become the researcher. It’s true that it would be difficult, but it’s worth noting that these kinds of judgements are made all the time. Whenever we run a phd application process or award grant funding, people are judging which of two applicants are more likely to produce good research. You could do a similar process if you were deciding between these two options.
A second related criticism is that it might be harmful to spread this idea, because it risks discouraging people from research who might be able to do a great deal of good some time in the future. The example might have this effect on some people, but I think many people find the idea that they can do this much good inspiring. Also note that overall 80k encourages people to take seriously even small probabilities that they become a high impact researcher. See this idea in action when applied to entrepreneurship in one of Carl’s posts: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers
Hey Mike, on the second point in your first post, I was thinking of a model in which you believe that some harm-producing industry produces two types of harm (i) avoidable (ii) unavoidable. If someone non-ethically motivated enters the industry, they make a negative difference because they contribute to these two types of harm (to the extent that they’re not replaceable). If an EA enters the industry, however, then they can reduce the avoidable harms. If the EA would have been replaced by a non-ethically motivated person, then the EA makes a positive difference. As the fraction of EAs in the industry increases, then the probability of displacing a non-ethically motivated person decreases, so it becomes harder and harder to make a positive difference insofar as your work in that industry goes. So, the expected benefit of entering the industry as an EA goes down.
I was only thinking of the industry considered in isolation. You’re right that you’d really want to think about what the people you displace go on and do outside the industry as well.
Hi Austin, we get lots of other feedback saying the articles are too long! Our approach is to build shorter posts into sequences. For instance, we’ve now got around 7000 words on the complex relationship between happiness and making a difference with your career, which is summarised here: http://80000hours.org/happiness-and-your-career This post is going to work with many more in describing replaceability.
That said, I think your comments area bit unfair. Rather than arguing that output is difficult to measure, I argued that there are some commonly used ways to measure it, which are likely to underestimate the true variability. So, the 45% standard deviation figure for high-complexity jobs found by the meta-study is an underestimate of the true variability. Being 10% better than your replacement is achievable (or perhaps it would be better to say ‘realistic’) in the sense that if the standard deviation is 45%, then a large fraction of people are 10% better than the mean. (and the true variability is even larger). In other words, you should expect 10% differences between people to be common. The topic of how to actually achieve a 10% increase in your output is huge, and will vary from job to job.
I think there are likely to be quite a few situations when you can avoid replaceability by taking a job at an NGO.
One is if you’re significantly better than the extra person who would be hired otherwise. If that’s the case, then you might well have several times the output: http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best Of course, some NGO jobs seem to be oversupplied with talent. The jobs are very popular, but the wages can’t drop any lower, so you seem to have too many talented people chasing the same jobs. In these cases, you’d probably be quite replaceable, but there are probably neglected areas where this doesn’t apply.
Second, if the tasks are very high impact, then even if you’re quite replaceable, just being a tiny bit better than what would have happened otherwise can be a big deal.
Third, there seems to be lots of opportunities to pull the rope sideways in NGOs: http://80000hours.org/rules-of-thumb By this I mean having different goals or methods from the people who would replace you. A good example might be bringing rigorous impact assessment into a charity, bringing it up to Givewell’s standards, and making it more effective>
So do you need to choose between studying law and psychology pretty soon?
Yes, you’d also meet a lot of people, which could be useful. It’s going to be pretty difficult to work out whether it’s talent constrained or funding constrained in 3yr. It seems like THL and Vegan outreach are slightly funding constrained, but I don’t know if this applies to key skilled areas like comms. (also consider than there might be other places you could go, e.g. enter into average animal charities and make them more effective)
Another factor is that it might be a bit more difficult to donate enough to pay for someone to replace you. Market researchers with a couple of years experience seem like they can earn ~£30k (prospects.ac.uk). You could reasonably expect an average employee to have twice as much outputref=”http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best”>http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best</a>) as a marginal hire. And you seem to have above average enthusiasm, which might translate to above average output! Like it’s plausible that you might work 50% longer hours. And if you would accept lower wages (£20k), then if we use a 2x skill multiplier, you’d need to be donating £40k to replace yourself. That would probably require earning £70k (assuming you’d need more to live on as a lawyer than as a campaigner).
To get an idea of your output compared to other hires, it would be good to get an internship in one of these organisations.
That would require being reasonably successful in law, and would probably take about 5 years after graduating? (really unsure about this, will check up on it).
Time is another factor. If you think the anti-spec cause is a movement with rapidly compounding growth opportunities, then there’s a strong reason to contribute to it sooner rather than later. This probably tells against taking the law path, though I’m not completely sure.
Finally, I guess you’d be way happier working as a campaigner than a lawyer!
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
I chatted to Matt at the weekend, and I had misunderstood what he was claiming. He was claiming that in 2 years you persuade someone to do as much good as you do in the rest of your life. So, in those 2 years you create the value of your entire career, whatever activities it involves. So, even if you go on to recruit more people in subsequent 2 year periods, the person you persuaded in the first 2 year period ALSO recruits that many people. So, you can never overtake the value created in those first two years.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
Hey Brian, we also think of movement growth in these terms - there’s a lot of work to be done!
Posted a comment in Is banking harmful?:
It should be pointed out that whether or not the finance industry is positive or negative for society is basically irrelevant to our arguments for professional philanthropy.
Since financial jobs remain highly popular, someone working in finance is replaceable, so their personal net effect is nearly zero, even if finance is negative for society (as nef claims).
The much more interesting part of the article is this:
“Liberals should also be wary of self-selecting out of certain occupations. After Vietnam and revelations of C.I.A. abuses in the 1970s, many university students avoided the military and the intelligence agencies. So slots were filled disproportionately by ideological conservatives in a way that undermined everyone’s interests. We would have been better off if more Swarthmore idealists had become generals and C.I.A. officers — and we may be better off if some idealists become bankers as well.”
Suggesting that ethically minded people avoid finance jobs could almost be irresponsible. Your efforts are unlikely to prevent these jobs from existing, but they are highly likely to make sure they get filled with unscrupulous people.
And then there’s all the money you could give away.
Posted a comment in The best causes - updated:
Also consider:Improving human rights is not only hard to quantify, but efforts to do so are highly uncertain in their success (it’s unclear what even what measures you should consider if you want to improve human rights in a country)On the other hand, incredibly cheap health interventions exist, with near certain huge benefitsAlleviating extreme poverty seems to be a good way to improve human rights (it’s difficult to stand up for your rights when you’re struggling just to stay alive, and when you couldn’t go to school because of parasites)Studies of well being show that people REALLY value their health.
We’re interested in all kinds of interventions, and as soon as GWWC has a big enough research budget, they will try to investigate them all, but don’t be too hasty to write off funding health
Posted a comment in Donation methods: credit vs cheque:
Nice post. We could have a whole series on ‘tricks’ to make effective giving a little easier.
Posted a comment in Just what is ‘making a difference’? - Counterfactuals and career choice:
You’re absolutely correct that if you’re consequentialist, what you do directly only matters insofar as it leads to certain consequences.
Posted a comment in Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?:
Hey Ruairi, yes my figure is for the fundraising of all charities taken together. If you look at individual charities, they’ll be getting returns higher than 90% at the margin, because they’ll also be taking some money from other charities.
Posted a comment in Health vs education:
Yes - it seemed to me that Round 4 is won by health?
Posted a comment in Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate:
Our research term is working on a much bigger article!If anyone reads this and wants to get involved with this kind of research, we’d be very happy to hear from you.
Posted a comment in Today Show:
I’ve written a quick response to this blog post (see the link)
Posted a comment in Today Show:
It’s certainly a patchwork solution, in the sense that in an ideal world there would be no need to become a professional philanthropist. Unfortunately, we’re not in an ideal world…or even close to being in one.
Posted a comment in Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers:
I think this is a really interesting post. Interesting follow up to do one day would be ‘when does risk aversion does matter for do-gooders?’
Posted a comment in The flat margin effect:
Hi Lip,
Point taken. It’s difficult to promote pro phil without angering both left and right. This is one example. If you pretend certain high earning careers, like banking, are not harmful, then you anger the left. If you consider the fact that they might be, then you anger the right.
In practice, we talk so much about banking because it’s the most salient example of a high earning career that is widely regarded as ‘unethical.’ If you can make the case for pro phil with banking, then it follows for all the other (legal) high earning careers.
Good point about foreign aid. GWWC recently did some research that suggested the cost-effectiveness of US health aid could be better than NTDs. We suspect there’s a serious problem with the estimate, but nevertheless, it’s looking like it might be pretty cost-effective. Then, cuts to health aid would be difficult to offset by donations to health charities.
Ben
Posted a comment in The best causes - updated:
Hey Zander,You should also point out that Sabin is currently funding the awesome ‘End7’ campaign. They do a lot of advocacy as well as research. http://endtheneglect.org/2011/...
Posted a comment in Just what is ‘making a difference’? - Counterfactuals and career choice:
Nick, I completely agree. Hopefully we can explore replaceability more in future posts (I’m writing my Masters thesis about it!).
Posted a comment in The flat margin effect:
Hey David, it’s basically just this atm: http://www.wikicharities.org/index.php?title=Advocacy_for_Health_ODA It’s pretty rough stuff and not kept updated. One of the priorities for GWWC is to properly write up the interesting stuff they’ve thought about!
Posted a comment in High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI:
Hi Luke,
Just a question about career choice to fight AI x-risk. You seem to suggest there’s one main choice: if you’re a strong mathematician or physicist then consider working in AI research, otherwise you can probably do more by earning money and donating it to AI research. Most people don’t have the research option, so generally professional philanthropy is the best way to go.
But have you considered some of the other options? For instance, you could persuade people to donate to AI research. If you give up a high earning career, but persuade 2 people to take high earning careers and donate toAI research, then you’ve made more difference. That seems very easy, given how few people donate to AI research. So this seems better than pro phil. And there are probably other extremely effective things you could involving advocacy.
A slightly different option would be anything that improves the effectiveness of AI researchers. A great manager might be able to make 10 researchers 10% more effective, and thus do as much good as becoming one himself.
Thanks for the interview - really interesting.
Ben
Posted a comment in Pledge to fight neglected tropical diseases:
and note the huge pledges by the UK government (£250m http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal... and Gate’s foundation ($350m I think). The Gates Foundation seems to be the main mover in the process.
Posted a comment in Pledge to fight neglected tropical diseases:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...
Posted a comment in Professional philanthropy vs professional influencing:
Thanks a lot for the interesting post Ryan.
Posted a comment in The flat margin effect:
Yes.
To be clear, I was talking about the ‘direct harm’ done by bankers.
The point of replaceability, the flat margin effect and other compensation effects, is that the harm done by becoming a banker can be completely different from the harm done directly by bankers.
Posted a comment in Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette:
Really interesting article Carl. What other professions do you intend to give a similar treatment in the near future?
Posted a comment in Software engineering: Britain vs Silicon Valley:
Nice work Vicky!
For readers: we’ll be trying over time to prepare research like this for different fields!
Posted a comment in Estimation is the best we have:
But what strategy should you use instead?
In 80k strategy, we often consider applying some weight to common-sense, since in some cases it might actually be optimised, or reflect some of things you miss if you’re too analytic.
You could also look at ‘meta’-strategies, like being flexible, so that you can continually update as you learn more.
Posted a comment in In praise of Viktor Zhdanov:
really interesting - I haven’t heard the other side before
Posted a comment in Research request: MBA:
Hi Ben,
This has been on the list to investigate for a while, but we’re not going to have capacity for at least the next six months.
Basically, there’s a literature around the issue of whether doing an MBA boosts your earnings enough to make up for the costs (mostly concluding that it does). Unfortunately, it’s mostly produced by business schools, so biased and controversial. Our best guess is that it does, but by less than is normally claimed. Also note that if you have a high discount rate, it’s going to be less worth it, since you’re also moving your earnings further into the future.
I’d imagine that the effect on earnings is strongly dependent on the prestige of the school, just because school name is normally very important, but I don’t have any firm evidence. One point against this is that MBAs are sometimes required as prerequisites for certain positions and can allow you to skip a couple of years (e.g. if you join a consultancy with an MBA you start at a higher level). In these cases it’s more about just having an MBA, rather than having a respected MBA.
One point against this is that it seems like another big portion of the value of an MBA comes from the networking opportunities. These will be much better at top schools.
My final impression is that not many people think the info you learn at business school is intrinsically useful, especially if you’re interested in doing entrepreneurial stuff. The main value comes from network, then the status and the fact that people sometimes offer better jobs to MBAs. That also means that if these factors won’t be useful in your situation, then it’s less likely to be worth it.
If you’d like to look into some of the literature on the value of an MBA and try to start piecing it together, we’d love to help!
Ben
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
In reply to Brian:
It’s not obvious. There certainly seem to be students who are looking for a life project. They can suddenly flip from a non-altruistic course to an altruistic one.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
In reply to David:
Person B can’t do just as much good, because B is 2 years behind Person A.
In the next two years, person B persuades one more person. Person A, however, has persuaded someone else the two years before. Now that person, who persuaded A persuaded, persuades someone else.
So, the ‘A chain’ is always one step ahead of the B chain. So, the first 2 years are always more valuable than the next 2 years.
Posted a comment in What is an effective altruist?:
’apparent’ yes, but ‘actual’ no :p
Posted a comment in Review of Dead Aid:
80k itself tries not to take political positions, but we do argue that aid can be very effective if done carefully.
For more on the same topic, check out: http://www.givingwhatwecan.org...
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
The point is that you persuade people to do ‘about as much good as you’, so we’ve assumed each person goes on to persuade one other person over the next 2yr, and then stops, irrespective of their age.
It’s true that if you keep influencing, the B chain is only a little shorter than the A chain. So it’s not true that the 2yr period is more valuable than the rest of your life if you keep influencing, but it is true that it’s more valuable than any later 2yr period.
To get that conclusion, Matt should have assumed you can persuade 2 people in the 2yr period. The weird thing about supposing that each person persuades one other, is that then you don’t get any compounding. If each person persuades 2 in the period, then the first chain is always a factor of 2 larger than the second. (and the 2nd is a factor of 2 larger than the 3rd etc.).
Then you can show that the first chain will always be larger than the sum all the others. So, then the first 2yr period is more valuable than all of the rest put together.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
Hello!
In realistic situations with a great deal of uncertainty, you’d certainly want to include some kind of damping factor like this. I’m not sure how rapid it would be. It seems to depend a lot on the situation.
If we suppose, however, that P2 would not have become an EA if it were not for P1, and P3 would not have become an EA if it were not for P2 becoming an EA, then it seems to be that P3 would not have become an EA if it were not for P1. (Apparently this pattern of reasoning, conditional transitivity, is not valid in general, although this is a matter of debate: http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/2/286.extract) If that’s the case, then the counterfactual dependence genuinely transmits through the chain.
This is getting seriously abstract though!
Posted a comment in Where are the women?:
80k is actively trying to include women. Our market research suggests that women are equally keen on the message as men, perhaps slightly more interested given that proportionally more women want ethical careers. I think the gender imbalance is the largely the result of us being founded by a group of men, and how we have promoted ourselves through some male heavy networks (LW and GWWC). I anticipate us evening out as we grow.
Posted a comment in Living to 1000: an interview with Aubrey de Grey:
Nice estimate. Another interesting point AdG made in the lecture: he reckoned that if you could demonstrate a bunch of rejuvenation techniques in mice (which, as it says, he reckons would take $50m p.a. for ~5 years), then big pharma would almost certainly jump in, since the potential financial rewards could be huge. So, the people who supply the first $250m have a chance of triggering many times that amount of money entering the field (if it works in mice).
Posted a comment in The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research:
I was just thinking that since only one person in each field ends up being the best, and there’s thousands of people in each field, it’s unlikely to be you.
Posted a comment in Dramatically increase your productivity by using a task management system - Meta-skills Part 3:
Hey Greg, Richard mentions a couple of other bits of support beyond the ones you mention. Also note that he’s arguing in favor of some kind of task management system, not necessarily GTD, although a simplified version of GTD seems like the best right now.
I think the main reason they’re not more widely used is that people don’t know about them, and it’s seen as a bit unusual. It’s also much less useful when you’re a student and mostly just have to manage your studies, which might explain why you don’t see it more among your peers. In other professions when high output is really important, people effectively have a task management system via their PA.
Posted a comment in The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research:
There’s certainly a lot of practical issues to consider if one was actually going to do this. This post is not a practical recommendation, rather a demonstration of how different ethical careers become if one takes the counterfactual view.
Apart from the issues you raise, there seem to be options that are likely to be better. For instance, pursuing professional philanthropy and hiring PAs (though there are situations where this doesn’t work e.g. where one academic takes the teaching load of another). Or by forming a group of volunteers who carry out this activity.
Posted a comment in Why do people love charity workers? pt 1:
Hey Daniel - I think this is basically right. It’s certainly the case that it’s too simple just to look at the difference between you and the person who replaces you. In general, there’s an ‘iteration effect’ where a whole chain of people switch jobs. The difference you make to some field is probably closer to the difference you make directly and the difference made by the worst person in the field. There are also effects from sliding the higher ability people into other jobs. It’s too simple to say that replaceability means aid workers don’t make a difference. Though, it’s probably correct to say that many aid workers make much less than difference than they think. I’ll be writing a lot more about this in future posts.
Posted a comment in Collective Action: working in unethical industries part 2:
Hey Joe, we’ll be writing more about this soon!
Posted a comment in Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 2:
Thanks! Do you think that’s because most of the white collar work you’ve tried is roughly equally challenging?
Posted a comment in Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers:
Hey Michael, there’s some info about your second point in Carl’s follow up post:
http://80000hours.org/blog/23-entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulettePosted a comment in Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 1:
Nice find! I had noticed a bit of a backlash against ‘do what you’re passionate about’ when I researched the post, but I didn’t realise someone was writing a whole book about it!
Posted a comment in How to find a job you'll love:
Without knowledge of your GNS score, the 5 characteristics are approximately equally good predictors of job satisfaction (mean r=0.4). Task identity is a little bit weaker than the others.
I only came across the result that if you have a high GNS, then you should weight mental challenge overall more highly. I guess the study would have been done with a combined ‘mental challenge’ score consisting of all 5 characteristics. I didn’t come across studies showing the impact of knowledge about GNS on the predictive power of the individual characteristics. It could easily be out there though.
Posted a comment in How many lives does a doctor save?:
I’m surprised that so many readers think Greg isn’t taking quality of life improvements into account. He uses QALYs to measure the health improvement, which are quality adjusted life years. There’s problems with this measure, but it’s the best out there at the minute.
I agree with the last comment that making a difference (or, in this case, ‘saving lives’) is not the only thing that matters in choosing a job. But it does matter. Sometimes it can be more important than what you’ll enjoy. http://80000hours.org/blog/62-don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1
Posted a comment in How much malaria is biodiversity worth?:
sub-optimal career choice
Posted a comment in How much malaria is biodiversity worth?:
Givewell also has blog posts about why they think health in the developing world is likely to be one of the world’s best giving opportunities full stop. And it’s worth pointing out that Givewell Labs has the aim of considering any giving opportunities. On the other hand, Givewell is only interested in what you can do with your money i.e. finding funding gaps. Seb is more focused on what you can do with your career i.e. finding talent gaps. And even within funding opportunities, there will be opportunities Givewell is not considering.
Posted a comment in Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?:
Hey Andy, it’s not clear to me how much fundraisers worry about taking money from other causes. Most charities don’t seem to think fundraising is a zero sum game, but I’m not sure.
Posted a comment in Looking for a seriously high impact job using your analytical skills?:
Givewell finds it hard to hire non-US citizens, but Giving What We Can is happy to! You can apply to intern with them on their pages www.givingwhatwecan.org
Posted a comment in Why attractive people are dangerous:
It seems pretty likely that there will be some cases where attractiveness helps you in the interview, but doesn’t help in the job (or at least doesn’t help as much as it helps in the interview). It would be pretty lucky if interviewers (who aren’t purposely selecting on the basis of attractiveness) happened to subconsciously apply exactly the right weighting to it.
Posted a comment in Social interventions gone wrong:
Gwern has also posted a paper about the average effectiveness of social interventions to his blog: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1987-rossi
Posted a comment in Let's stop building schools:
Thanks! I was trying to argue that education’s main benefits come from promoting other factors (like wealth and health), rather than being an end in itself. One common response to saying that education can have a muted impact is that it’s intrinsically good to educate people. I might have been overstating the case though. Although education’s impact on wellbeing is indirect, it seems like ‘perceived trust’ and the like might be difficult to promote any other way and have significant benefits.
Posted a comment in Marketing vs. Donating, & the benefits of out-sourcing:
Hey Ruari,
A couple of points to get the ball rolling.
This question turns a lot on whether the cause of promoting anti-speciesism is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained at the time when you start working. (when is that btw?)
This is really hard to predict.
So might first thought is try to keep your options open. It seems like if you get some training in sales, then you can potentially make good money in business or use the same skills to promote a cause.
What plans did you have for making money? Maybe you can avoid reducing your earning potential much, while also learning useful marketing skills.
Ben
Posted a comment in Help with Fundraising Job!!:
Reading: Influence by Cialdini (just read the summaries of each chapter, it’ll be familiar to you already) To Sell is Human (just skim the second half) Secrets of Power Negotiating (skim the ‘key points’ of the first few chapters)
Posted a comment in Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?:
Good point Carl - my note (8) might be wrong
Posted a comment in Marketing vs. Donating, & the benefits of out-sourcing:
That’s right. I was using tougher assumptions in which the ppl you’d hire would want higher wages than yourself. If they wanted 30k (closer to market rates) then you’d need to donate 40k instead. That might be too harsh though.
Taking a brief look at salaries for market researchers, they seem lower than lawyers at most levels, though perhaps not much lower for the median lawyer. I think you’d also have to do an extra 1-2yr of low paid training work as a lawyer. I’d reckon there’s more potential to go into some sales role in business, but this is going to more unpredictable. Basically, you might not be giving up much earning potential, particularly in the early years, by doing psychology.
Will the law degree be more time consuming? That could be a big factor from a haste point of view. You can start making big contributions to comms for your cause already while at uni.
You should check out the Irish qualification thing.
Anyway, we could go into more detail on the expected value of different paths given your skills, perhaps we should chat on skype?
Posted a comment in The most important unsolved problems in ethics:
Link fixed
Posted a comment in Help with Fundraising Job!!:
Skip the Carnegie for now I reckon. Change of Heart is good, but I reckon Influence will be more useful to you right now, and is similar material.
Posted a comment in Marketing vs. Donating, & the benefits of out-sourcing:
I’ve heard stuff along these lines too. Seems like the median salary for lawyers is still reasonably good, but worse than something like medicine.
Posted a comment in Marketing vs. Donating, & the benefits of out-sourcing:
We’ll be trying to find out more…
Posted a comment in Let's stop building schools:
What kind of quality? Building new schools is one way to improve quality. Does the supply-side vs demand-side distinction still hold? Seemed like it did from reading the overall conclusions, but I haven’t read the new education section.
Posted a comment in How many lives does a doctor save? - Part 2 - Diminishing marginal returns:
I think Greg attempted to correct for wealth, but you’re right about the other things.
Posted a comment in Anyone come across a rough estimate of the effectiveness of cancer research?:
Interesting!
One quick extra correction you could do is using the average age of death to go from lives lost to QALYs lost. That would (roughly guessing) suggest that all else equal, we should fund AIDS about 2x as much as cancer and malaria about 3x as much as cancer.
Posted a comment in Why most charity fundraisers cause harm:
Hi Ken, it’s true I was only considering a fundraiser who gets average returns from fundraising. In reality, some fundraisers are better than others. If you’re a fundraiser who’s genuinely raising money that wouldn’t have been given to charity otherwise, then you won’t be causing harm in this way.
Posted a comment in (In)effectiveness of boycotts?:
We’d like to do research on which advocacy methods have worked the best in the past, but that’ll be sometime into the next year.
Posted a comment in How good are the best?:
The studies just looked at the differences within positions. They didn’t adjust for pay.
As you say, however, there are rarely 7x differences in pay for people doing the same job, so it seems like the market is not efficient in this instance. I would guess this is because of employment law, issues surrounding team morale, uncertainty about how much value different people are producing, and other distorting factors.
Posted a comment in [Link] The Hustler's MBA:
I found this pretty interesting and have some sympathy for it.
It does eliminate a large number of jobs for you, but that could be fine for most people. And it probably requires a lot of self-discipline.
I’d like to have 80k research on ‘should you do a degree?’ at some point.
Posted a comment in Should we stop interviewing people?:
It’s also pretty unclear to me that interviews are a good way of judging whether you’ll be able to get on with someone in the long-term, though it looks like a better thing to assess through interviews than most, especially if you go into it with that intention.
Posted a comment in Following in Schindler's footsteps:
Hi Max, we’ve written about this point here: http://80000hours.org/blog/61-collective-action-working-in-unethical-industries-part-2 Though there’s plenty more to say.
Posted a comment in Why most charity fundraisers cause harm:
Hi Simon, I link to a whole blog post about this near the start: http://80000hours.org/blog/92-why-don-t-charities-spend-more-on-fundraising
Moreover, it doesn’t actually rely on marginal fundraising causing NO extra money to be donated to charity. Because the difference between mean and median is likely to be so large, if even a small amount is moved from another charity (as opposed to wouldn’t have been donated otherwise) then it’s likely to be net harmful. I work out the breakeven point in footnote (6).
Posted a comment in Optimal inspiring?:
Hey Joey,
Good question. This is essentially studied by the psychology literature on persuasion as summarised in books like ‘influence’ and ‘59 seconds.’ There’s also a small literature around charitable giving, as summarised by books like ‘the science of giving.’ Beyond scientific research, it then comes down to the market research of fundraising organisations.
Ben
Posted a comment in Attractiveness and public figures:
Check out Cialdini’s book ‘influence’ in the section on ‘likability.’ Attractive people are more likable, likable people are more persuasive. I don’t recall how strong the effect is though.
Posted a comment in The Skilled Workers Gap:
Hi Evan, we’re definitely going to be looking into which skills are most useful to acquire in the next couple of months. I’ll contact you when we do more. In the meantime, let me know if you come across any good sources.
Posted a comment in [Link] How to Get Startup Ideas:
Hey John, this is a cool post. Graham’s thoughts match my own (much more limited) impressions of how this works.
I’d certainly like to turn us into a start-up hub. Graham suggests that the best place to be is at the forefront of a rapidly changing field. I think many of our members are in that position, and in particular, the staff of 80k are riding the evidence-based living movement. I think there’s some evidence we’re already turning into such a hub. For instance, check out our projects page: http://80000hours.org/projects And we’ve got a couple of new ideas that haven’t come out yet!
Posted a comment in Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?:
These are really interesting ideas. Another strategy some charities are been pursuing is social bonds. For instance, some charities only ask their donors to lend money rather than give it to them. The charities can use this money on fundraising or setting up charity shops, enabling them to repay the capital. Since the donors are not making a loss, the level of commitment to the cause is far lower, greatly expanding your potential donor base. Moreover, it acts as an excellent foot in the door. After making this small financial commitment, many donors go on to make donations or to cancel the debt.
Posted a comment in (In)effectiveness of boycotts?:
Boycotts probably cause some damage that scales roughly linearly with the number of participants too, which would be reputational damage to the company.
But I agree that the main effect probably comes from reaching a threshold where the company feels its forced to change.
One way to think about this effect is that each additional participant in the boycott very slightly raises the probability of reaching the threshold. This will be some function of how influential the person is and how many people are already involved and other things.
The consequences of some boycotts might be so large that even just raising the probability of success very slightly might be well worth it. For most boycotts, I’d also guess there are some particularly high leverage moments when the involvement of extra people has an unusually large impact.
Posted a comment in (In)effectiveness of boycotts?:
Something like that in general I guess. Also note that if someone gets involved, they may set off chain reactions of other people getting involved. If these chains are likely, then even early involvement could be significant. I’m also inclined to think there’s a hump in the impact for the first tens of people to get involved (assuming it’s not destined to failure), while they get it started. All of these things are going to depend very strongly on the details of the situation.
Posted a comment in How to judge your chances of success:
It ties into a general issue that sometimes being irrational day-to-day can lead to better results in the long-term. (And this, in turn, ties into the general issue that often common sense rules of thumb work better than you might expect) It’s not always best to be less biased. We’ll write about this when designing our careers decision processes.
Posted a comment in Splitting donations between GiveWell recommendations:
There has been a big discussion about this on our sister organisation’s blog:
http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2012-11-30/givewell%E2%80%99s-recommendation-of-givedirectly#commentsPosted a comment in The power of effective activism:
I think EAA assumes Vegan Outreach and The Humane League persuade people to stay vegetarian for about four years in their cost-effectiveness estimates of online vegan ads. And I think this figure is based on follow up surveys by VO and THL. They generally try to estimate the counterfactually adjusted number of vegetarians (how many became vegetarians who wouldn’t have become vegetarians otherwise) in their effectiveness estimates though, so Roman’s point should already be accounted for. Brian and Ilan will know much more about both points.
Posted a comment in Adding investments to the picture:
Hi Brad,
There’s a lot of interesting issues here. We’d definitely like to post more about investing in the future.
One big issue is whether it’s better donate to charity now or to donate more in the future. I’m not going to talk about that here, but to get an overview of the issues, have a look at this: http://givingwhatwecan.org/how-to-give/donating-vs-investing
As I understand it (am I right?) the main issue you’re worrying about here is the following (which I’ve been asked once or twice before): You need a certain amount of savings to live off when you retire, about half a million dollars. You have two ways to accumulate these savings:
Switching to impact investing involves two main costs: (i) extra effort on your part (ii) a potentially lower financial return. The key question is: are these costs worth the benefit of the extra social return that you could earn on your portfolio?
This is pretty tough to answer, and I’d like to do a more detailed analysis in the future. But here’s some considerations.
First, note that if you earn a lower financial return on your savings, you’ll need to save more today in order to have enough when you retire. Let’s consider some plausible example figures. If you earn 7% p.a., you’d need to save $66k today in order to have $500k when you retire in 30 years. If you only earn 6% p.a., you’d need to save $87k today to have enough. So, if you can earn 7% on your retirement savings, then you could donate an extra $21k to charity today instead of saving it. So, if impact investing was going to cost you 1ppt of returns down from 7%, then you’d need to think the extra social return on your portfolio of $88k that you can gain with impact investing is greater than the social return of $21k donated to a charity today.
To summarise: In situation (1), we’ve got: $21k invested in the best charitable intervention we know about, generating high social returns $66k in your retirement portfolio (possibly generating some small social returns)
In (2), we’ve got: $87k impact invested (generating some social returns presumably higher than the $66k in your conventional portfolio)
That’s a pretty tough comparison, and I need to think a lot more about how large the benefits of impact investing are. My first thought, however, is that the $21k donated to charity today can go to very highest leverage interventions we know about, which generate very large social returns (e.g. deworming generate social economic returns of ~20% per year for at least a couple of years after, and then probably at the rate of economic growth in the relevant areas in the long-term). The impact investing portfolio has much more diffuse social returns, which seem unlikely to be as high leverage as the best developing world interventions. After all, people are attempting to earn these social returns alongside running a regular portfolio, whereas with charity we’re focusing directly on having a social impact. Another point to note is that there’s a limited pool of good impact investing opportunities, which other people are chasing. So if you don’t take some good investment opportunity, someone else will. So the extra social impact that comes from you participating in impact investing is significantly less than the direct social impact of the investments made. Overall, I suspect that the $21k to charity would dominate in this case.
What does this suggest more generally? For impact investing to be competitive, you probably wouldn’t want to compromise much on the financial return on your portfolio. The exception would be if you believe that the social returns on impact investing are relatively large compared to the social returns on the top charities known today.
Ben
Posted a comment in Adding investments to the picture:
Just a couple of quick responses:
Sorry for being unclear. Read what I said above as ‘net social benefit’ i.e. the total social benefits minus the total social costs.
That’s a good point. Irrationality in investing has social costs.
It’s all a question of your expected returns. It seems very unlikely that exchanging regular investing at 6-7% for impact investing at 2% would be worth it. You’d have to save $278,000 today to have $500,000 in 30 years! So the charitable investments you’d have to forgo today would be several times as large as your impact investing portfolio. On the other hand, if you can earn equal or better expected returns in impact investing, then it looks worth it (unless you think that the impact investing approach won’t actually lead to greater social benefits than regular investing).
This gets back to the issue of whether it’s better to give now or later as I mentioned at the start.
Posted a comment in High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI:
I’d just make the clarification that there IS a unit for MEASURING x-risk reduction - that’s expected human welfare gained from reducing the chance of x-risk (which you could start to approximate by considering QALYs gained!).
The difficult thing is estimating by how much a research program reduces x-risk. As Luke points out, it’s sometimes not clear whether the SingInst increases or decreases the risk of dangerous AI! On the other hand, because even a tiny reduction in the probability of extinction is (if you place value on future people) an extremely good thing, so long as the research program is having a positive effect, it seems like a good bet that it’s among the very best causes.
Posted a comment in The flat margin effect:
Tog,
Note: none of these are the opinions of 80k
There’s lots of reasons. The main one is that in the lead up the financial crisis, bankers took on large amounts of leverage in search of short term profits and sold products without making their risks clear (sometimes in activities that were borderline illegal). The combination lead to a very unstable financial system, resulting in the financial crisis, leading to the recession. I think the NEF estimate is based on assuming that some significant fraction of the costs of the financial crisis was due to bankers.
Of course, there were lots of other reasons for the financial crisis e.g. central bank low interest rate policies, the housing bubble, chinese monetary policy, etc. It’s controversial how much is due to bankers.
What really angers people is that the bankers who made these bad decisions didn’t financially suffer. The accusation is that they manipulated the system to their advantage. Indeed, the financial lobby seems to have quite a bit of influence over congress.
More socialist minded people would say that (financial crisis aside) bankers fundamentally exploit people, and act to prevent social reform that would remove this exploitation.
Ben
Posted a comment in The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research:
I’ve been reading some of the facebook chatter about this post. The main criticism seems to be that it would be difficult to determine whether you should try to become the PA or become the researcher. It’s true that it would be difficult, but it’s worth noting that these kinds of judgements are made all the time. Whenever we run a phd application process or award grant funding, people are judging which of two applicants are more likely to produce good research. You could do a similar process if you were deciding between these two options.
A second related criticism is that it might be harmful to spread this idea, because it risks discouraging people from research who might be able to do a great deal of good some time in the future. The example might have this effect on some people, but I think many people find the idea that they can do this much good inspiring. Also note that overall 80k encourages people to take seriously even small probabilities that they become a high impact researcher. See this idea in action when applied to entrepreneurship in one of Carl’s posts: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers
Posted a comment in Collective Action: working in unethical industries part 2:
Hey Mike, on the second point in your first post, I was thinking of a model in which you believe that some harm-producing industry produces two types of harm (i) avoidable (ii) unavoidable. If someone non-ethically motivated enters the industry, they make a negative difference because they contribute to these two types of harm (to the extent that they’re not replaceable). If an EA enters the industry, however, then they can reduce the avoidable harms. If the EA would have been replaced by a non-ethically motivated person, then the EA makes a positive difference. As the fraction of EAs in the industry increases, then the probability of displacing a non-ethically motivated person decreases, so it becomes harder and harder to make a positive difference insofar as your work in that industry goes. So, the expected benefit of entering the industry as an EA goes down.
I was only thinking of the industry considered in isolation. You’re right that you’d really want to think about what the people you displace go on and do outside the industry as well.
Posted a comment in How good are the best?:
Hi Austin, we get lots of other feedback saying the articles are too long! Our approach is to build shorter posts into sequences. For instance, we’ve now got around 7000 words on the complex relationship between happiness and making a difference with your career, which is summarised here: http://80000hours.org/happiness-and-your-career This post is going to work with many more in describing replaceability.
That said, I think your comments area bit unfair. Rather than arguing that output is difficult to measure, I argued that there are some commonly used ways to measure it, which are likely to underestimate the true variability. So, the 45% standard deviation figure for high-complexity jobs found by the meta-study is an underestimate of the true variability. Being 10% better than your replacement is achievable (or perhaps it would be better to say ‘realistic’) in the sense that if the standard deviation is 45%, then a large fraction of people are 10% better than the mean. (and the true variability is even larger). In other words, you should expect 10% differences between people to be common. The topic of how to actually achieve a 10% increase in your output is huge, and will vary from job to job.
Posted a comment in International Development:
I think there are likely to be quite a few situations when you can avoid replaceability by taking a job at an NGO.
One is if you’re significantly better than the extra person who would be hired otherwise. If that’s the case, then you might well have several times the output: http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best Of course, some NGO jobs seem to be oversupplied with talent. The jobs are very popular, but the wages can’t drop any lower, so you seem to have too many talented people chasing the same jobs. In these cases, you’d probably be quite replaceable, but there are probably neglected areas where this doesn’t apply.
Second, if the tasks are very high impact, then even if you’re quite replaceable, just being a tiny bit better than what would have happened otherwise can be a big deal.
Third, there seems to be lots of opportunities to pull the rope sideways in NGOs: http://80000hours.org/rules-of-thumb By this I mean having different goals or methods from the people who would replace you. A good example might be bringing rigorous impact assessment into a charity, bringing it up to Givewell’s standards, and making it more effective>
Ben
Posted a comment in Marketing vs. Donating, & the benefits of out-sourcing:
So do you need to choose between studying law and psychology pretty soon?
Yes, you’d also meet a lot of people, which could be useful. It’s going to be pretty difficult to work out whether it’s talent constrained or funding constrained in 3yr. It seems like THL and Vegan outreach are slightly funding constrained, but I don’t know if this applies to key skilled areas like comms. (also consider than there might be other places you could go, e.g. enter into average animal charities and make them more effective)
Another factor is that it might be a bit more difficult to donate enough to pay for someone to replace you. Market researchers with a couple of years experience seem like they can earn ~£30k (prospects.ac.uk). You could reasonably expect an average employee to have twice as much outputref=”http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best”>http://80000hours.org/blog/69-how-good-are-the-best</a>) as a marginal hire. And you seem to have above average enthusiasm, which might translate to above average output! Like it’s plausible that you might work 50% longer hours. And if you would accept lower wages (£20k), then if we use a 2x skill multiplier, you’d need to be donating £40k to replace yourself. That would probably require earning £70k (assuming you’d need more to live on as a lawyer than as a campaigner).
To get an idea of your output compared to other hires, it would be good to get an internship in one of these organisations.
That would require being reasonably successful in law, and would probably take about 5 years after graduating? (really unsure about this, will check up on it).
Time is another factor. If you think the anti-spec cause is a movement with rapidly compounding growth opportunities, then there’s a strong reason to contribute to it sooner rather than later. This probably tells against taking the law path, though I’m not completely sure.
Finally, I guess you’d be way happier working as a campaigner than a lawyer!