My favorite is GlassDoor.com, although I haven’t used Salary.com much since ~2008. Do you not like GlassDoor.com as much because it’s individuals who enter the data? I myself have found that GlassDoor.com matches very well with what I earn and what friends earn.
From a brief glance, it looks like Salary.com only shows averages for the job, while GlassDoor.com shows them for individual companies. The latter could be more useful because your specific skill level can be better expressed by a company you could work for than by the general pool for your industry. It’s also obviously useful when picking specific companies once you’ve chosen a field.
This post is more meant for the stage when you’re choosing between major career options e.g. accountant vs software developer. That’s when you’ll want to do expected earnings estimations for different broad options to compare them. I thought that GlassDoor was less useful for this because it doesn’t have data for broad career options.
Good point about matching skill-sets to salaries by looking at representative companies. Salary.com shows data for different salary percentiles, but it’s tricky to know where in that distribution you’ll lie. I’ll think about how we could incorporate glassdoor data into expected earnings estimations. Perhaps it is more accurate to simply look at a few companies whose requirements match your skills, rather than trying to make estimations from salary.com data.
Matt’s argument was fairly general, but here’s one concrete model of how it could work. Suppose it takes exactly two years for you, or someone like you, to convince one other person to become an EA like yourself. After two years, you’ve created one EA. After another two years, you’ve together created two more EAs, giving a total of four. After two more years, you’re up to eight. And so on, exponentially. If you start two years later, you’ll grow exponentially too, but at any given time, you’ll always be half what you would have been.
Incidentally, this reminds me of exponential paradoxes in inflationary cosmology (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=3950), although the problems aren’t exactly the same.
“so on average founding teams in this sample earned over $2 million per year, or a little over $1.4 million per year for each entrepreneur (some solo, some in teams).”This is earnings per year during venture funding? How long, on average, did it take to get venture funding? What if we include those who never got venture funding? This might give a more accurate estimate of the time taken to earn those dollars. We might also make an adjustment for the longer working hours for startup founders.
The Hall and Woodward paper suggests there aren’t excess expected returns from venture-capital investing the way there are from founding a company. The authors conclude by saying, “General partners are sufficiently diversified across companies that their earnings are not nearly as exposed to idiosyncratic risk as entrepreneurs. Investors receive risk-adjusted returns comparable to those available from the stock market and other investments.” Phew! At least financial-economic theory isn’t always wrong. :)
Great stuff, Patrick! I personally prefer to donate in one big chunk so that I have to do as little paperwork as possible for tax-deduction purposes. OTOH, I’ve heard that some charities prefer a regular stream of donations to make planning easier?
Thanks, Will! I agree with other commenters that the highest value for philosophers like Singer has been to popularize rather than to do novel research. Also, as Zander said, some people feel some of these questions are already solved. (I have pretty firm opinions on most of them.)
One question we might add to the list is to more generally understand what types of minds are sentient in the sense of having morally relevant emotions. This applies to the question of whether insects can suffer, as well as to various types of in silico minds that we may build in the next centuries.
Quibble: The number of people killed by governments in the 20th century was over 100 million (http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/total4.doc). This is more than 42 million abortions per year, although added up over all years, abortions clearly preponderate.
This reminds me of the “paradox of the indefinitely postponed splurge”: How long do you keep investing in expansion and building resources before starting to use those resources? The analogous question here is how long to dwell on creating new EAs before starting to do direct altruistic work.
I hadn’t before heard the claim about 4.5-5.5% equity returns going forward. Do you know how widely accepted that view is? Keep in mind that it’s a 4.5-5.5% real rate of return, so the nominal returns without inflation adjustment might be more like 8%.
Overvaluation of equity relative to bonds in the past makes sense as a reason why future returns might be lower. Concerns about slower economic growth don’t make sense to my probably-over-theoretical model of capital markets, because if people expect lower growth, then they should have already accounted for that by shifting away from stocks to other investments. As a result, stock prices should have fallen, and now, at the margin, stocks should once again be on par with other investments (in risk-adjusted returns). That said, I suppose expected returns for everything could be lower than before.
And in practice, markets can be less efficient than one might expect….
Is there any research the idea of efficiency with respect to taxes vs. earnings among countries and localities? That is, in places with higher tax rates, companies would have to pay more in order to get people to live there? Or are migration patterns / location decisions not that efficient?
If worldwide taxes were efficient in that sense, then altruists who could deduct taxes would benefit from going to places with the highest tax rates, because they would get more tax break than their colleagues. That said, if efficiency is not true, this would be a very bad strategy to pursue. In any event, hopefully you could get a sense of compensation levels as well as tax rates before you moved somewhere.
The point about donating to startup causes is a good one. A Donor Advised Fund can help (
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) when you want to wait to decide where to donate (or want to donate to a future charity that hasn’t yet been created), but it can’t help if you plan to donate to a bunch of small projects for which it’s not worth the effort of registering a charity. (OTOH, maybe you could get an existing charity to fund that work for you.)
Agree with Ben Todd! In view of replaceability, the relevant consideration is how much more you’ll contribute to the evilness (or goodness) of banking compared with the person who would have been hired in your place. Maybe because you were hired and the other person wasn’t, you should expect yourself to be slightly better at accomplishing the goals of the banking system, but given the competition involved, that difference is tiny. However, the difference in your generosity compared with the next guy is huge – not to mention the difference in your wisdom about where to extend that generosity (e.g., look at Romney’s “charitable donations” to the Mormon Church).
Thanks, Ben! If you had been talking about easy unexploited gains in the capital markets, I would have been skeptical. But unfortunately, there’s no efficient market for altruism.
“Altruism means wanting to help other people.”And non-human animals.
“Does her calculation mean she should suck it up and go work at the hedge fund? Of course not.”
It’s always a hard line to walk regarding how hard to push in the direction of the ostensibly optimal action vs. what you would selfishly prefer to do. If you push too hard, you might burn out and scare others away from getting involved. If you don’t push hard enough, you might rationalize away your own inaction. It’s always a tough personal choice.
I think it’s helpful to allow yourself some areas where you know you’re not doing what’s “optimal” so as to reduce epistemic distortions caused by cognitive dissonance. That is, if you pretend that you’re always doing the best thing you can, then you’ll be tempted to believe things that aren’t true in order for the calculations to come out the way you want.
The programming-startup example is a nice illustration of how important good epistemology and clear thinking can be, and it shows nicely that many times being more effective doesn’t have to come at a personal cost.
Great points, Katja. #3 is perhaps the core idea behind professional philanthropy.
As far as #2, one area where this might show up is in the case of fundraising. I’ve heard that good fundraisers can bring in millions of dollars to a charity per year, so being even 10% better than the next guy is a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. (I think this would be a useful career path for 80K Hours to write about.)
Regarding galaxy colonization, yes, all the other points basically only matter insofar as they instrumentally relate to this one. However, some of us disagree about the sign of the value of colonization. :) Filling the Virgo Supercluster with computational power has the potential to create astronomical amounts of suffering (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic....
I completely agree, Hedonic Treader. Creating official responsibilities where none yet exist (e.g., for wild animals) is possibly the most sustainable long-term social and psychological mechanism to ensure that someone takes action.
There’s a quote: “Justice, not charity.” While “justice” isn’t exactly the word I would use because it doesn’t always align with reducing suffering, I do like the general sentiment expressed.
Possibly one other reason why people underestimate how much difference their path can make is the intuition that “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” In semi-efficient markets, you’re not going to easily find an investment that has 3 times the expected returns of the standard investments that most people choose. So people may doubt whether you can really get a job that pays 3 times as much as other “high earning” jobs without too much difference in working hours and the required intelligence/skill level. I think empirical realities militate against this assumption somewhat for careers, although the intuition is still something to keep in mind.
Similar thinking may apply to differential charity cost-effectiveness, but here the “efficient market” intuition is even less strong, both because people don’t optimize charity as much as they do their income and because different people have different values, so what’s optimal for one person may be wastefully ineffective for another.
One final consideration is that some people (including me somewhat) are psychologically overwhelmed by demanding of themselves that they do the most they possibly can. In order to stay sane, we mere mortals sometimes have to make compromises. “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” etc. Of course, if the best is many times better than the good, then it can be worth taking a chance to achieve the best even at the risk of losing the good.
Excellent points, Ben! Anecdotally, I find that I can enjoy pretty much any white-collar job to roughly the same degree. Things like work hours, level of stress, and company culture matter more than the particular subject material.
Jesper asks an interesting question about bringing up complicating issues. First, I think we should never lie to or deceive people (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uw/entangled_truths_contagious_lies/). If tricky issues come up, let’s address them head-on.
That said, it can make sense to focus on some points more than others depending on where the audience is. If we’re approaching an audience that is just beginning to wonder if it should act altruistically, then it might be unwise to stress how complicated these issues can be. Human brains are de-motivated when issues are very much not black and white, even when the expected value of action is the same.
However, we shouldn’t refrain from discussing these topics forever. It’s important that we do bring up “poor meat eater” and the like when the audience is ready, because EAs make better decisions when they learn more. If poor meat eater is decisive against international aid, then so be it. If it’s not (perhaps because of other factors, like wild-animal suffering), then we can explain that too.
Maybe. But I guess I also have a higher tolerance than others I know for uninteresting work; I don’t get bored easily. :) So yes, you might be right that challenging work is pretty important in the general case.
Yes, it’s hard to believe this is all happening so quickly! The movement to emphasize cost-effectiveness in animal advocacy (including potentially a long-term focus on wild animals) has grown faster than I ever imagined. Many thanks to Eitan, 80K Hours, and all the volunteers who helped to jumpstart this project.
Nice list, Will! I personally think many of the theoretical questions have obvious answers, but not everyone agrees with my answers, so at the very least, there’s work to be done in coming up with more persuasive arguments. :)
A few questions I would add:
Do insects suffer? Which future computer programs will suffer? In general, what criteria determine the boundaries of our considering something to be suffering? (http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/consciousness.html)
Should we care more about suffering by more powerful brains? (
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) If so, what are the relevant factors? I personally think maybe we should not weight by brain size, but this has its own set of objections.
What are scenarios that might result in astronomical amounts of future suffering? (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=4454) What can we do now to best reduce the likelihood of these possibilities?
I only record donations to actual charities on 80K. I don’t know what the standard guidance is. I see the donations tracking as a way to promote my favorite charities, but it also serves the function of showing how much money 80K members are donating in total.
Microsoft is well known for having lots of Program Manager positions. Sometimes these are as technical as developer jobs, while other times they require no programming expertise at all. As you suggest, there will also be roles in marketing, sales, etc.
I don’t have ideal contacts offhand, but I could put you in touch with people at Microsoft who might have further suggestions if you’re interested.
Thanks, Niel! I haven’t read Keith’s book, though I did listen to a podcast episode with him. I agree that networking is extremely useful (not to mention fun most of the time). I’m fond of saying that socializing in the right ways can be more productive than just about anything else you could possibly be doing. :)
Actually, good point: I hadn’t thought about degree requirements. I was just noting that in the actual job, CS knowledge is unnecessary.
Browsing some PM job descriptions online, I see things like, “BA/BS/BSE in computer science, math, MIS or technical disciplines or equivalent education or experience required.”
“filtering for the sake of filtering” Yes, exactly.
“I can’t apply for an advertised job - I have to build a network and get in that way.” Yeah, could be. I wonder if smaller companies would have looser formal requirements. OTOH, smaller companies might also have fewer product-manager positions.
The Humane League just finished a survey of the impact of campus leafleting, with quite impressive results. The findings aren’t public yet as far as I know, but I think they’ll be posted online soon. You can ask Nick Cooney for more details.
”Nick: because a lot of the basic research already has been or will be done by people who would not otherwise spend their time doing great things for the world”
Yes, exactly. This is why I think outreach and spreading better values are usually more important than gaining more knowledge. Exceptions include (a) when you have to do some internal research just to know where to begin advocating and how best to do that, like with Effective Animal Activism and (b) cases like Robert Elwood’s research on crab sentience where the research itself can be one of the most compelling ways to make people care more about the topic and can serve as a way to channel and build concern for invertebrate suffering. In general, I think high-leverage research will usually look like activism (e.g., Peter Singer’s writings or the advice of 80,000 Hours).
I agree about choice of college. I often say that college is first about signalling your intelligence / work ethic, second about networking, and third about actually learning. It’s not that you don’t learn some insightful things in college, but you could learn those anywhere (reading textbooks, Wikipedia, etc.), and you don’t need to pay big money to do that.
I agree with the comments about majors too. If you’re entering a specialized field that requires a certain undergrad degree, it matters for that reason. If not, then major doesn’t matter much, except again for signalling reasons. So it’s generally good to choose a quantitative major for more effective signalling, although choosing something you enjoy and in which you’ll get good grades is important too.
My experience is that for almost any job outside of academia, the actual content that you learn in college is mostly irrelevant. You learn what you need to know on the job itself. So college is basically an exercise gym and testing ground.
I’m not sure I agree that academics have almost no impact. It depends a lot on the field and the kind of work they do. It seems possible that Peter Singer has indirectly helped more animals than anyone else in world history, maybe several times more than the next person. Some fields of advocacy, like reducing wild-animal suffering or averting computational suffering in the far future, are heavily academic at this point because so little is known about the correct approach. Once a cause becomes more practical (like veg outreach is), at that point academic theories matter less. Still, they must be relevant, or else you wouldn’t have relied on academic studies for “Change of Heart.” :)
One additional reason why veg groups don’t do more measurement could be not realizing the positive externalities of research for everyone else. If you do research and publish the results, then all other veg groups can benefit from your findings. Information is a public good. Alas, sometimes evaluations are not made public, but that’s a story for another day. :)
Perhaps we should model the growth of EAs not as exponential but as logistic, since the maximum number of EAs can’t be greater than the human population (at least until AI EAs come along). If we assume there’s a maximum possible number of EAs, then the value of creating new ones earlier is just the extra area under the curve you get by shifting the logistic curve left a little bit. Once the maximum is reached, you’ll just keep milking value from the existing EAs.
But this model seems to give too little credit to creating new EAs. For one thing, it’s not guaranteed that the world will eventually be filled with EAs (or that the maximum will be reached, even if the maximum is far smaller than the world population). Maybe creating EAs helps to increase the probability that the world reaches a stable max level of EAs, rather than letting the EA population fall to zero.
In general, I feel confused about the right way to model the spread our influence into the future. Once we have this, Matt’s question will become a lot easier.
(Yes, I know it’s overly simplistic to talk about EAs and non-EAs in this binary fashion and to talk about them dying out or remaining at a max level forever. Such a model would be more appropriate for something more concrete and more fragile, like membership of a particular religion.)
Another excellent post! I’ve grown convinced of the value of project management, such that more and more of my altruism work has moved in this direction, especially in the last year. (See ”Teamwork over envy.”) In general, I find that people love doing concrete things, but there aren’t as many who do big-picture planning, organizing, tracking and follow-up, cross-team communication, etc. For example, I can coordinate to get a series of essays written with less time than it would take me to write them myself. Coordinating with others builds a volunteer labor pool, friendships, training, etc. that can bear further fruits later. And there are often low-hanging fruit in using the work of other groups rather than reinventing the wheel.
Also, as you say, it can be really useful for the manager to know the technical details of what’s going on. In my team at Microsoft, the managers are often also some of the most technically skilled people. This background can give intuition about what projects to pursue and how to guide others in the right directions.
That’s a good point. It does tip the scales toward waiting, though you’ll still want to consider the other factors of the calculation: The internal rates of return of your particular charity, your “rate of return on wisdom” during the coming years, your risk of becoming selfish later, the small chance of world economic collapse rendering your wealth useless, etc. Also, in the US, you can only deduct a total of up to 50% of your adjusted gross income, so you may not want to donate huge amounts to charity in a single year. On the other hand, if you do exceed 50%, you can “carry forward” missed deductions to future years, so it’s not a huge problem either.
Thanks, Matt. This is a thought-provoking post and an important topic.
First, I’ll say that I think it may actually be fairly difficult to change someone else’s life course, especially to persuade someone who counterfactually would have done little to help others to go on and become more effective than you are. What’s probably more likely is that you’ll shift the course of someone who is already an altruist toward more effective charities and strategies. If you do this for enough people, maybe it adds up to being equivalent to creating a new effective altruist from scratch.
I – and probably others – have an intuitive revulsion to your argument at face value, because it feels like a pyramid scheme. These arguments about going meta can be tricky. You can do good, but maybe it would be better to convince others to do good, as you say. However, maybe it would be better to convince others to convince others to do good. (That seems to be the purpose of your writing this post.) How about convincing others to write articles to convince others to convince others to do good?
Still, even if going meta isn’t always the best thing to do, I think that empirically it can be a pretty good choice given the current state of things. There is lots of opportunity to expand the reach of ideas that we care about (effective altruism, or things like animal welfare in my case). If all but one person in the world were an effective altruist, then it would no longer pay off to do convincing. But we’re very far from that, and given how things look now, it does seem that convincing others can have huge payoff.
I’ll add one final point that applies to all of these donate-vs-invest decisions. A very strong reason to wait to donate (or, correspondingly, wait to convince others) is if you think you might become significantly wiser in the intervening years. If you find a cause that’s 1000 times better than the one you support now, then waiting and learning more is the much better strategy. Who knows – you might even decide that your current cause has negative value. (This can easily be the case when we get into uncertain waters like existential risk.) Of course, you could argue that if you inspire someone else to research these questions more effectively than you would do, then that’s even better. But at some point, the superiority of going meta has to stop…
“eg political lobbying, editing Wikipedia, discussing politics with friends or on internet forums or blogs, studying for an hour as an undergrad student (vs blagging), voting, etc. It might be quite powerful to be able to show people just how irrelevant some of their good deeds are”
Thanks, Zander. As a matter of fact, I think some of those are quite valuable, especially when done with effective causes in mind. It’s astounding how many people I’ve influenced by having discussions with friends and on Internet forums. And what are we doing now? :)
Yes, talking politics can often be not especially useful, but some targeted political actions may rank near the top of the effectiveness list. In any event, socializing is not necessarily a waste of time, since those connections will be valuable in other contexts (careers, soliciting donations, getting advice). I guess your point is just that people shouldn’t derive undue feelings of accomplishment from merely socializing.
Editing Wikipedia may sometimes be an astonishingly effective use of time (http://reducing-suffering.blogspot.com/2009/04/save-notes-to-wikipedia.html), especially if you highlight important information that’s missing or create a new page for an organization that doesn’t exist. Just think of how many people read Wikipedia articles and trust the content. And search engines usually rank Wikipedia high, so your SEO comes for free. Anyone up for writing a Wikipedia article about 80,000 Hours? ;)
Nice piece, Jess. You develop the ideas very clearly.
I agree that it’s tricky to use a formula here because we don’t yet have studies telling us what the relevant factors are to look for. Until we have a set of inputs and weights that we know works (and is more than just overfitting of existing data sets), then either (a) we might make up something that feels arbitrary and go with it even though it doesn’t have a track record of being successful, or (b) we could choose what we wanted to do anyway by gerrymandering the inputs and weights to our favor. It might feel more rational to use a formula, but if we’re just making up factors out of thin air, that’s not obviously better than the global synthesizing that the neural networks in our brains would do, unless we have reason to suspect being biased by particular irrelevant factors (like attractiveness for non-public-facing careers).
This is one of those blog posts that I expect to link to a lot going forward. :)
As far as Roman’s point, “surely Joe is not the only force shaping individuals towards becoming vegetarians,” here’s a comment I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago:
“Yes, some of the people we convince were already on the border, but there might be lots of other people who get pushed further along and don’t get all the way to vegism by our influence. If we picture the path to vegism as a 100-yard line, then maybe we push everyone along by 20 yards. 1/5 of people cross the line, and this is what we see, but the other 4/5 get pushed closer too. (Obviously an overly simplistic model, but it illustrates the idea.)”
Here’s an elaboration on the 100-yard-line model for veg conversion. Say there are K influences encouraging people toward vegism (e.g., The Humane League’s veg ads, work by other veg groups, movies like Food, Inc., influence by friends, religious sentiments, etc.). Say there are N total veg conversions due to all these factors combined. Let p_i, i = 1, …, K be the relative amount by which each influence pushes people along the 100-yard line. For example, if The Humane League’s veg ads push people twice as far or push twice as many people as hearing news stories about factory farming does, then p_{THL} = 2 p_{news stories}. Let f_i = p_i / (sum_i p_i). If the influences come in a random order (e.g., sometimes veg ads happen before influence by friends and sometimes influence by friends happens first), then the number of observed conversions due to the i’th influence will have the expected value f_i * N, because, for example, an influence that pushes people twice as far along will result in them crossing the finish line twice as much, and an influence that reaches twice as many people will result in twice as many crosses of the finish line. In other words, in apportioning responsibility for veg conversions, the actual number of people that you cause to cross the finish line is an unbiased estimator of your fractional causal contribution to all N veg conversions.
The intuition is that, yes, some of the people you convert with veg ads would have gone veg due to other reasons. But some of the people you don’t convert will now go veg due to something else because you helped them along the road.
Love this post. Discussions are great for two reasons: (1) They allow other people to be persuaded through more Socratic means and (2) you can learn things at the same time. Point (2) is not trivial, especially in conversations with people whose ideas you haven’t heard before. We ourselves don’t have all the answers.
As far as the three methods of resolving cognitive dissonance, #1 is best if we can do it, but sometimes we can’t. I’ve begun adopting a policy whereby, when I’m fairly sure I won’t do #1, I at least do #2 instead of #3. That is, I admit that I’m acting immorally, but I’m okay with this, because I realize that’s better than distorting my epistemology in order to justify the immorality. I feel better about myself knowing that I’m not messing up my beliefs.
Great discussion! Even if charities do mainly steal from one another, it remains the case that good charities may want to do a lot of fundraising to steal from the less good ones, at least unless the competitive dynamic changes. I agree that creating a movement targeted at increasing total giving rather than giving more to a particular cause could be useful.
I think there’s also a question about what kinds of fundraising to do. Mass mailings may indeed turn people away, and the same for street fundraisers, but maybe more strategic, relationship-building fundraisers who cultivate friendships with high-net-worth donors is a different ballgame. This doesn’t necessarily leave a negative impression on the public (indeed, most of the public won’t see it).
I’m scared of attempts to put fundraising into commercial products because people might think “if I spend $1 on buying a gift that’s partly directed toward a charity, I don’t have to donate $1 to that charity anymore,” when in fact this reduces total donations. Whether this actually happens is a question for further study, but I would want to be careful before allowing people to feel good about buying products they don’t need.
Posted a comment in How to find out earnings for different jobs:
My favorite is GlassDoor.com, although I haven’t used Salary.com much since ~2008. Do you not like GlassDoor.com as much because it’s individuals who enter the data? I myself have found that GlassDoor.com matches very well with what I earn and what friends earn.
From a brief glance, it looks like Salary.com only shows averages for the job, while GlassDoor.com shows them for individual companies. The latter could be more useful because your specific skill level can be better expressed by a company you could work for than by the general pool for your industry. It’s also obviously useful when picking specific companies once you’ve chosen a field.
This post is more meant for the stage when you’re choosing between major career options e.g. accountant vs software developer. That’s when you’ll want to do expected earnings estimations for different broad options to compare them. I thought that GlassDoor was less useful for this because it doesn’t have data for broad career options.
Good point about matching skill-sets to salaries by looking at representative companies. Salary.com shows data for different salary percentiles, but it’s tricky to know where in that distribution you’ll lie. I’ll think about how we could incorporate glassdoor data into expected earnings estimations. Perhaps it is more accurate to simply look at a few companies whose requirements match your skills, rather than trying to make estimations from salary.com data.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
Matt’s argument was fairly general, but here’s one concrete model of how it could work. Suppose it takes exactly two years for you, or someone like you, to convince one other person to become an EA like yourself. After two years, you’ve created one EA. After another two years, you’ve together created two more EAs, giving a total of four. After two more years, you’re up to eight. And so on, exponentially. If you start two years later, you’ll grow exponentially too, but at any given time, you’ll always be half what you would have been.
Incidentally, this reminds me of exponential paradoxes in inflationary cosmology (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=3950), although the problems aren’t exactly the same.
Posted a comment in Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers:
Great post, Carl! Very compelling.
“so on average founding teams in this sample earned over $2 million per year, or a little over $1.4 million per year for each entrepreneur (some solo, some in teams).”This is earnings per year during venture funding? How long, on average, did it take to get venture funding? What if we include those who never got venture funding? This might give a more accurate estimate of the time taken to earn those dollars. We might also make an adjustment for the longer working hours for startup founders.
The Hall and Woodward paper suggests there aren’t excess expected returns from venture-capital investing the way there are from founding a company. The authors conclude by saying, “General partners are sufficiently diversified across companies that their earnings are not nearly as exposed to idiosyncratic risk as entrepreneurs. Investors receive risk-adjusted returns comparable to those available from the stock market and other investments.” Phew! At least financial-economic theory isn’t always wrong. :)
Posted a comment in Donation methods: credit vs cheque:
Great stuff, Patrick! I personally prefer to donate in one big chunk so that I have to do as little paperwork as possible for tax-deduction purposes. OTOH, I’ve heard that some charities prefer a regular stream of donations to make planning easier?
It’s also relevant whether you’re going to participate in matching drives (http://robertwiblin.com/2012/03/21/why-doesnt-everyone-use-matching-donations/) or not (http://blog.givewell.org/2011/12/16/leverage-in-charity/).
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
+1 for Ruairi’s reply. Movements that only work on making themselves bigger can be hard to get people to rally behind. :)
That said, there’s still a question of where to draw the line for marginal use of resources – whether on “investment” or “consumption.”
Posted a comment in How to be a high impact philosopher:
Thanks, Will! I agree with other commenters that the highest value for philosophers like Singer has been to popularize rather than to do novel research. Also, as Zander said, some people feel some of these questions are already solved. (I have pretty firm opinions on most of them.)
One question we might add to the list is to more generally understand what types of minds are sentient in the sense of having morally relevant emotions. This applies to the question of whether insects can suffer, as well as to various types of in silico minds that we may build in the next centuries.
Quibble: The number of people killed by governments in the 20th century was over 100 million (http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/total4.doc). This is more than 42 million abortions per year, although added up over all years, abortions clearly preponderate.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
This reminds me of the “paradox of the indefinitely postponed splurge”: How long do you keep investing in expansion and building resources before starting to use those resources? The analogous question here is how long to dwell on creating new EAs before starting to do direct altruistic work.
Posted a comment in Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate:
Nice post, Patrick!
I hadn’t before heard the claim about 4.5-5.5% equity returns going forward. Do you know how widely accepted that view is? Keep in mind that it’s a 4.5-5.5% real rate of return, so the nominal returns without inflation adjustment might be more like 8%.
Posted a comment in How to be a high impact philosopher:
Thanks, Will. Yes, I think many of us would be very interested in your list of unsolved questions. (That is, “Please tell us all your problems!”)
Posted a comment in Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate:
Overvaluation of equity relative to bonds in the past makes sense as a reason why future returns might be lower. Concerns about slower economic growth don’t make sense to my probably-over-theoretical model of capital markets, because if people expect lower growth, then they should have already accounted for that by shifting away from stocks to other investments. As a result, stock prices should have fallen, and now, at the margin, stocks should once again be on par with other investments (in risk-adjusted returns). That said, I suppose expected returns for everything could be lower than before.
And in practice, markets can be less efficient than one might expect….
Posted a comment in How much do taxes matter if you're giving to charity?:
Thanks, Ben!
Is there any research the idea of efficiency with respect to taxes vs. earnings among countries and localities? That is, in places with higher tax rates, companies would have to pay more in order to get people to live there? Or are migration patterns / location decisions not that efficient?
If worldwide taxes were efficient in that sense, then altruists who could deduct taxes would benefit from going to places with the highest tax rates, because they would get more tax break than their colleagues. That said, if efficiency is not true, this would be a very bad strategy to pursue. In any event, hopefully you could get a sense of compensation levels as well as tax rates before you moved somewhere.
The point about donating to startup causes is a good one. A Donor Advised Fund can help (
) when you want to wait to decide where to donate (or want to donate to a future charity that hasn’t yet been created), but it can’t help if you plan to donate to a bunch of small projects for which it’s not worth the effort of registering a charity. (OTOH, maybe you could get an existing charity to fund that work for you.)Posted a comment in Is banking harmful?:
Agree with Ben Todd! In view of replaceability, the relevant consideration is how much more you’ll contribute to the evilness (or goodness) of banking compared with the person who would have been hired in your place. Maybe because you were hired and the other person wasn’t, you should expect yourself to be slightly better at accomplishing the goals of the banking system, but given the competition involved, that difference is tiny. However, the difference in your generosity compared with the next guy is huge – not to mention the difference in your wisdom about where to extend that generosity (e.g., look at Romney’s “charitable donations” to the Mormon Church).
Posted a comment in Idea for a blog post:
I like the idea of providing just a few top suggestions to reduce analysis paralysis.
Posted a comment in The Road Less Travelled: Replaceability and Neglected Causes:
Thanks, Ben! If you had been talking about easy unexploited gains in the capital markets, I would have been skeptical. But unfortunately, there’s no efficient market for altruism.
Posted a comment in What is an effective altruist?:
“Altruism means wanting to help other people.”And non-human animals.
“Does her calculation mean she should suck it up and go work at the hedge fund? Of course not.”
It’s always a hard line to walk regarding how hard to push in the direction of the ostensibly optimal action vs. what you would selfishly prefer to do. If you push too hard, you might burn out and scare others away from getting involved. If you don’t push hard enough, you might rationalize away your own inaction. It’s always a tough personal choice.
I think it’s helpful to allow yourself some areas where you know you’re not doing what’s “optimal” so as to reduce epistemic distortions caused by cognitive dissonance. That is, if you pretend that you’re always doing the best thing you can, then you’ll be tempted to believe things that aren’t true in order for the calculations to come out the way you want.
The programming-startup example is a nice illustration of how important good epistemology and clear thinking can be, and it shows nicely that many times being more effective doesn’t have to come at a personal cost.
Posted a comment in Heuristics for a good life:
Great points, Katja. #3 is perhaps the core idea behind professional philanthropy.
As far as #2, one area where this might show up is in the case of fundraising. I’ve heard that good fundraisers can bring in millions of dollars to a charity per year, so being even 10% better than the next guy is a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. (I think this would be a useful career path for 80K Hours to write about.)
Regarding galaxy colonization, yes, all the other points basically only matter insofar as they instrumentally relate to this one. However, some of us disagree about the sign of the value of colonization. :) Filling the Virgo Supercluster with computational power has the potential to create astronomical amounts of suffering (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic....
Posted a comment in On triage:
Thanks, Xio! What a great reply. I agree with everything you said.
Posted a comment in On triage:
I completely agree, Hedonic Treader. Creating official responsibilities where none yet exist (e.g., for wild animals) is possibly the most sustainable long-term social and psychological mechanism to ensure that someone takes action.
There’s a quote: “Justice, not charity.” While “justice” isn’t exactly the word I would use because it doesn’t always align with reducing suffering, I do like the general sentiment expressed.
Posted a comment in Biases in career choice: Don't be misled by the category 'high impact career' when deciding between careers:
Nice post, Richard!
Possibly one other reason why people underestimate how much difference their path can make is the intuition that “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” In semi-efficient markets, you’re not going to easily find an investment that has 3 times the expected returns of the standard investments that most people choose. So people may doubt whether you can really get a job that pays 3 times as much as other “high earning” jobs without too much difference in working hours and the required intelligence/skill level. I think empirical realities militate against this assumption somewhat for careers, although the intuition is still something to keep in mind.
Similar thinking may apply to differential charity cost-effectiveness, but here the “efficient market” intuition is even less strong, both because people don’t optimize charity as much as they do their income and because different people have different values, so what’s optimal for one person may be wastefully ineffective for another.
One final consideration is that some people (including me somewhat) are psychologically overwhelmed by demanding of themselves that they do the most they possibly can. In order to stay sane, we mere mortals sometimes have to make compromises. “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good,” etc. Of course, if the best is many times better than the good, then it can be worth taking a chance to achieve the best even at the risk of losing the good.
Posted a comment in Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 2:
Excellent points, Ben! Anecdotally, I find that I can enjoy pretty much any white-collar job to roughly the same degree. Things like work hours, level of stress, and company culture matter more than the particular subject material.
Posted a comment in What questions do you have about making a difference?:
Jesper asks an interesting question about bringing up complicating issues. First, I think we should never lie to or deceive people (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uw/entangled_truths_contagious_lies/). If tricky issues come up, let’s address them head-on.
That said, it can make sense to focus on some points more than others depending on where the audience is. If we’re approaching an audience that is just beginning to wonder if it should act altruistically, then it might be unwise to stress how complicated these issues can be. Human brains are de-motivated when issues are very much not black and white, even when the expected value of action is the same.
However, we shouldn’t refrain from discussing these topics forever. It’s important that we do bring up “poor meat eater” and the like when the audience is ready, because EAs make better decisions when they learn more. If poor meat eater is decisive against international aid, then so be it. If it’s not (perhaps because of other factors, like wild-animal suffering), then we can explain that too.
Posted a comment in Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 2:
Maybe. But I guess I also have a higher tolerance than others I know for uninteresting work; I don’t get bored easily. :) So yes, you might be right that challenging work is pretty important in the general case.
Posted a comment in Project Launch: Effective Animal Activism:
Yes, it’s hard to believe this is all happening so quickly! The movement to emphasize cost-effectiveness in animal advocacy (including potentially a long-term focus on wild animals) has grown faster than I ever imagined. Many thanks to Eitan, 80K Hours, and all the volunteers who helped to jumpstart this project.
Posted a comment in The most important unsolved problems in ethics:
Nice list, Will! I personally think many of the theoretical questions have obvious answers, but not everyone agrees with my answers, so at the very least, there’s work to be done in coming up with more persuasive arguments. :)
A few questions I would add:
Do insects suffer? Which future computer programs will suffer? In general, what criteria determine the boundaries of our considering something to be suffering? (http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/consciousness.html)
Should we care more about suffering by more powerful brains? (
) If so, what are the relevant factors? I personally think maybe we should not weight by brain size, but this has its own set of objections.What are scenarios that might result in astronomical amounts of future suffering? (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=4454) What can we do now to best reduce the likelihood of these possibilities?
Posted a comment in Distributions from DAFs:
I only record donations to actual charities on 80K. I don’t know what the standard guidance is. I see the donations tracking as a way to promote my favorite charities, but it also serves the function of showing how much money 80K members are donating in total.
Posted a comment in Non technical roles in tech companies (esp. product management):
Microsoft is well known for having lots of Program Manager positions. Sometimes these are as technical as developer jobs, while other times they require no programming expertise at all. As you suggest, there will also be roles in marketing, sales, etc.
I don’t have ideal contacts offhand, but I could put you in touch with people at Microsoft who might have further suggestions if you’re interested.
Posted a comment in Interview with Brian Tomasik:
Thanks, Niel! I haven’t read Keith’s book, though I did listen to a podcast episode with him. I agree that networking is extremely useful (not to mention fun most of the time). I’m fond of saying that socializing in the right ways can be more productive than just about anything else you could possibly be doing. :)
Posted a comment in Non technical roles in tech companies (esp. product management):
Actually, good point: I hadn’t thought about degree requirements. I was just noting that in the actual job, CS knowledge is unnecessary.
Browsing some PM job descriptions online, I see things like, “BA/BS/BSE in computer science, math, MIS or technical disciplines or equivalent education or experience required.”
Posted a comment in Non technical roles in tech companies (esp. product management):
“filtering for the sake of filtering” Yes, exactly.
“I can’t apply for an advertised job - I have to build a network and get in that way.” Yeah, could be. I wonder if smaller companies would have looser formal requirements. OTOH, smaller companies might also have fewer product-manager positions.
Posted a comment in The power of effective activism:
Peter Hurford has a new blog post with more details on the input estimates for veg ads and leaflets. He mentions Jess’s piece. http://www.greatplay.net/vegan-outreach-cost-effectiveness-calculator
Posted a comment in The power of effective activism:
The Humane League just finished a survey of the impact of campus leafleting, with quite impressive results. The findings aren’t public yet as far as I know, but I think they’ll be posted online soon. You can ask Nick Cooney for more details.
Posted a comment in Career Advice for High-Impact Activism:
”Nick: because a lot of the basic research already has been or will be done by people who would not otherwise spend their time doing great things for the world”
Yes, exactly. This is why I think outreach and spreading better values are usually more important than gaining more knowledge. Exceptions include (a) when you have to do some internal research just to know where to begin advocating and how best to do that, like with Effective Animal Activism and (b) cases like Robert Elwood’s research on crab sentience where the research itself can be one of the most compelling ways to make people care more about the topic and can serve as a way to channel and build concern for invertebrate suffering. In general, I think high-leverage research will usually look like activism (e.g., Peter Singer’s writings or the advice of 80,000 Hours).
Posted a comment in The power of effective activism:
Nick Cooney’s survey results are published: http://www.facebook.com/groups/EffectiveAnimalActivism/permalink/120764684761078/
Posted a comment in Career Advice for High-Impact Activism:
I agree about choice of college. I often say that college is first about signalling your intelligence / work ethic, second about networking, and third about actually learning. It’s not that you don’t learn some insightful things in college, but you could learn those anywhere (reading textbooks, Wikipedia, etc.), and you don’t need to pay big money to do that.
I agree with the comments about majors too. If you’re entering a specialized field that requires a certain undergrad degree, it matters for that reason. If not, then major doesn’t matter much, except again for signalling reasons. So it’s generally good to choose a quantitative major for more effective signalling, although choosing something you enjoy and in which you’ll get good grades is important too.
My experience is that for almost any job outside of academia, the actual content that you learn in college is mostly irrelevant. You learn what you need to know on the job itself. So college is basically an exercise gym and testing ground.
I’m not sure I agree that academics have almost no impact. It depends a lot on the field and the kind of work they do. It seems possible that Peter Singer has indirectly helped more animals than anyone else in world history, maybe several times more than the next person. Some fields of advocacy, like reducing wild-animal suffering or averting computational suffering in the far future, are heavily academic at this point because so little is known about the correct approach. Once a cause becomes more practical (like veg outreach is), at that point academic theories matter less. Still, they must be relevant, or else you wouldn’t have relied on academic studies for “Change of Heart.” :)
Thanks for the post, Nick!
Posted a comment in Vegetarian Research – The Value and the Need:
This is a great introductory post!
One additional reason why veg groups don’t do more measurement could be not realizing the positive externalities of research for everyone else. If you do research and publish the results, then all other veg groups can benefit from your findings. Information is a public good. Alas, sometimes evaluations are not made public, but that’s a story for another day. :)
Posted a comment in Common Mistakes In Careers Advice: When Should You Trust Sayings?:
True not just for careers.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
Perhaps we should model the growth of EAs not as exponential but as logistic, since the maximum number of EAs can’t be greater than the human population (at least until AI EAs come along). If we assume there’s a maximum possible number of EAs, then the value of creating new ones earlier is just the extra area under the curve you get by shifting the logistic curve left a little bit. Once the maximum is reached, you’ll just keep milking value from the existing EAs.
But this model seems to give too little credit to creating new EAs. For one thing, it’s not guaranteed that the world will eventually be filled with EAs (or that the maximum will be reached, even if the maximum is far smaller than the world population). Maybe creating EAs helps to increase the probability that the world reaches a stable max level of EAs, rather than letting the EA population fall to zero.
In general, I feel confused about the right way to model the spread our influence into the future. Once we have this, Matt’s question will become a lot easier.
(Yes, I know it’s overly simplistic to talk about EAs and non-EAs in this binary fashion and to talk about them dying out or remaining at a max level forever. Such a model would be more appropriate for something more concrete and more fragile, like membership of a particular religion.)
Posted a comment in Bringing it all together: high impact research management:
Another excellent post! I’ve grown convinced of the value of project management, such that more and more of my altruism work has moved in this direction, especially in the last year. (See ”Teamwork over envy.”) In general, I find that people love doing concrete things, but there aren’t as many who do big-picture planning, organizing, tracking and follow-up, cross-team communication, etc. For example, I can coordinate to get a series of essays written with less time than it would take me to write them myself. Coordinating with others builds a volunteer labor pool, friendships, training, etc. that can bear further fruits later. And there are often low-hanging fruit in using the work of other groups rather than reinventing the wheel.
Also, as you say, it can be really useful for the manager to know the technical details of what’s going on. In my team at Microsoft, the managers are often also some of the most technically skilled people. This background can give intuition about what projects to pursue and how to guide others in the right directions.
Posted a comment in Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate:
That’s a good point. It does tip the scales toward waiting, though you’ll still want to consider the other factors of the calculation: The internal rates of return of your particular charity, your “rate of return on wisdom” during the coming years, your risk of becoming selfish later, the small chance of world economic collapse rendering your wealth useless, etc. Also, in the US, you can only deduct a total of up to 50% of your adjusted gross income, so you may not want to donate huge amounts to charity in a single year. On the other hand, if you do exceed 50%, you can “carry forward” missed deductions to future years, so it’s not a huge problem either.
Posted a comment in The haste consideration:
Thanks, Matt. This is a thought-provoking post and an important topic.
First, I’ll say that I think it may actually be fairly difficult to change someone else’s life course, especially to persuade someone who counterfactually would have done little to help others to go on and become more effective than you are. What’s probably more likely is that you’ll shift the course of someone who is already an altruist toward more effective charities and strategies. If you do this for enough people, maybe it adds up to being equivalent to creating a new effective altruist from scratch.
I – and probably others – have an intuitive revulsion to your argument at face value, because it feels like a pyramid scheme. These arguments about going meta can be tricky. You can do good, but maybe it would be better to convince others to do good, as you say. However, maybe it would be better to convince others to convince others to do good. (That seems to be the purpose of your writing this post.) How about convincing others to write articles to convince others to convince others to do good?
Still, even if going meta isn’t always the best thing to do, I think that empirically it can be a pretty good choice given the current state of things. There is lots of opportunity to expand the reach of ideas that we care about (effective altruism, or things like animal welfare in my case). If all but one person in the world were an effective altruist, then it would no longer pay off to do convincing. But we’re very far from that, and given how things look now, it does seem that convincing others can have huge payoff.
I’ll add one final point that applies to all of these donate-vs-invest decisions. A very strong reason to wait to donate (or, correspondingly, wait to convince others) is if you think you might become significantly wiser in the intervening years. If you find a cause that’s 1000 times better than the one you support now, then waiting and learning more is the much better strategy. Who knows – you might even decide that your current cause has negative value. (This can easily be the case when we get into uncertain waters like existential risk.) Of course, you could argue that if you inspire someone else to research these questions more effectively than you would do, then that’s even better. But at some point, the superiority of going meta has to stop…
Posted a comment in What questions do you have about making a difference?:
I second all the questions on animal-welfare charities. :) One of my current favorite groups is The Humane League (http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/veg-ads.html).
“eg political lobbying, editing Wikipedia, discussing politics with friends or on internet forums or blogs, studying for an hour as an undergrad student (vs blagging), voting, etc. It might be quite powerful to be able to show people just how irrelevant some of their good deeds are”
Thanks, Zander. As a matter of fact, I think some of those are quite valuable, especially when done with effective causes in mind. It’s astounding how many people I’ve influenced by having discussions with friends and on Internet forums. And what are we doing now? :)
Yes, talking politics can often be not especially useful, but some targeted political actions may rank near the top of the effectiveness list. In any event, socializing is not necessarily a waste of time, since those connections will be valuable in other contexts (careers, soliciting donations, getting advice). I guess your point is just that people shouldn’t derive undue feelings of accomplishment from merely socializing.
Editing Wikipedia may sometimes be an astonishingly effective use of time (http://reducing-suffering.blogspot.com/2009/04/save-notes-to-wikipedia.html), especially if you highlight important information that’s missing or create a new page for an organization that doesn’t exist. Just think of how many people read Wikipedia articles and trust the content. And search engines usually rank Wikipedia high, so your SEO comes for free. Anyone up for writing a Wikipedia article about 80,000 Hours? ;)
Posted a comment in A formula for the perfect job?:
Nice piece, Jess. You develop the ideas very clearly.
I agree that it’s tricky to use a formula here because we don’t yet have studies telling us what the relevant factors are to look for. Until we have a set of inputs and weights that we know works (and is more than just overfitting of existing data sets), then either (a) we might make up something that feels arbitrary and go with it even though it doesn’t have a track record of being successful, or (b) we could choose what we wanted to do anyway by gerrymandering the inputs and weights to our favor. It might feel more rational to use a formula, but if we’re just making up factors out of thin air, that’s not obviously better than the global synthesizing that the neural networks in our brains would do, unless we have reason to suspect being biased by particular irrelevant factors (like attractiveness for non-public-facing careers).
Posted a comment in The power of effective activism:
This is one of those blog posts that I expect to link to a lot going forward. :)
As far as Roman’s point, “surely Joe is not the only force shaping individuals towards becoming vegetarians,” here’s a comment I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago:
“Yes, some of the people we convince were already on the border, but there might be lots of other people who get pushed further along and don’t get all the way to vegism by our influence. If we picture the path to vegism as a 100-yard line, then maybe we push everyone along by 20 yards. 1/5 of people cross the line, and this is what we see, but the other 4/5 get pushed closer too. (Obviously an overly simplistic model, but it illustrates the idea.)”
Posted a comment in The power of effective activism:
Here’s an elaboration on the 100-yard-line model for veg conversion. Say there are K influences encouraging people toward vegism (e.g., The Humane League’s veg ads, work by other veg groups, movies like Food, Inc., influence by friends, religious sentiments, etc.). Say there are N total veg conversions due to all these factors combined. Let p_i, i = 1, …, K be the relative amount by which each influence pushes people along the 100-yard line. For example, if The Humane League’s veg ads push people twice as far or push twice as many people as hearing news stories about factory farming does, then p_{THL} = 2 p_{news stories}. Let f_i = p_i / (sum_i p_i). If the influences come in a random order (e.g., sometimes veg ads happen before influence by friends and sometimes influence by friends happens first), then the number of observed conversions due to the i’th influence will have the expected value f_i * N, because, for example, an influence that pushes people twice as far along will result in them crossing the finish line twice as much, and an influence that reaches twice as many people will result in twice as many crosses of the finish line. In other words, in apportioning responsibility for veg conversions, the actual number of people that you cause to cross the finish line is an unbiased estimator of your fractional causal contribution to all N veg conversions.
The intuition is that, yes, some of the people you convert with veg ads would have gone veg due to other reasons. But some of the people you don’t convert will now go veg due to something else because you helped them along the road.
Posted a comment in Encourage discussion, not defensiveness:
Love this post. Discussions are great for two reasons: (1) They allow other people to be persuaded through more Socratic means and (2) you can learn things at the same time. Point (2) is not trivial, especially in conversations with people whose ideas you haven’t heard before. We ourselves don’t have all the answers.
As far as the three methods of resolving cognitive dissonance, #1 is best if we can do it, but sometimes we can’t. I’ve begun adopting a policy whereby, when I’m fairly sure I won’t do #1, I at least do #2 instead of #3. That is, I admit that I’m acting immorally, but I’m okay with this, because I realize that’s better than distorting my epistemology in order to justify the immorality. I feel better about myself knowing that I’m not messing up my beliefs.
Posted a comment in Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?:
Great discussion! Even if charities do mainly steal from one another, it remains the case that good charities may want to do a lot of fundraising to steal from the less good ones, at least unless the competitive dynamic changes. I agree that creating a movement targeted at increasing total giving rather than giving more to a particular cause could be useful.
I think there’s also a question about what kinds of fundraising to do. Mass mailings may indeed turn people away, and the same for street fundraisers, but maybe more strategic, relationship-building fundraisers who cultivate friendships with high-net-worth donors is a different ballgame. This doesn’t necessarily leave a negative impression on the public (indeed, most of the public won’t see it).
I’m scared of attempts to put fundraising into commercial products because people might think “if I spend $1 on buying a gift that’s partly directed toward a charity, I don’t have to donate $1 to that charity anymore,” when in fact this reduces total donations. Whether this actually happens is a question for further study, but I would want to be careful before allowing people to feel good about buying products they don’t need.