Decius comments on Earning to Give vs. Altruistic Career Choice Revisited - Less Wrong

34 Post author: JonahSinick 02 June 2013 02:55AM

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Comment author: Decius 29 May 2013 03:02:36AM 6 points [-]

Isn't the most effective way to leverage large amounts of money politics? Would it be possible for the effective altruist movement to create or subvert a political party and influence enough money at the government level to be cost-effective?

Comment author: [deleted] 30 May 2013 11:22:46AM 5 points [-]

The EA community is beginning to look into this in a serious way - trying to go beyond simply describing political advocacy as 'high reward, high risk'. There should be quite a few blog posts coming out about this topic in the next few weeks and months.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 29 May 2013 07:02:42AM 4 points [-]

Lobbying seems more standard. I've been wondering if there were any "lobbyist-as-a-service" firms for a while now.

Comment author: nielbowerman 05 June 2013 01:11:20PM 6 points [-]

One of the more promising routes that I've seen working well here is people who have put themselves inside organisations with large budgets and helped decide where that money goes. For example, if you are concerned with global poverty you could become a programme manager at the World Bank and quite plausably move $100m to more effective causes. If you cared about x-risk, an option would be to work for DARPA or IARPA and move $10m's to more effective research, and to help prioritise the research so that technolgoies are developed in an order that we think is less likely to cause x-risk. Another example would be to locate yourself within a large grant-making foundation.

The big downside with this approach is that the funds are usually less fungable than personal funds. How to weigh this against earning to give depends on your beliefs on the relative value of different activities that you would or wouldn't be able to fund. Through this approach you are typically able to control larger amounts of money than you would through earning to give.

Comment author: Decius 29 May 2013 08:48:03AM 1 point [-]

Lobbyist as an altruistic endeavor: Telling other people to use other people's money for good things.