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Benquo comments on Why CFAR? - Less Wrong
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I can give you a proof of concept, actual numbers and examples omitted.
Considered a simplified model where there are only two efficient charities, a direct one and CFAR, and no other helping is possible. If you give your charity budget to the direct charity, you help n people. If instead you give that money to CFAR they transform two inefficient givers to efficient givers (or doubles the money an efficient giver like you can afford to give), helping 2n people. The second option gives you more value for money.
In addition CFAR is explicitly trying to build a network of competent rational do-gooders, with the expectation that the gains will be more than linear, because of division of labor.
Finally, neither CEA nor GiveWell is working (AFAIK) on the problem of creating a group of people who can identify new, nonobvious problems and solutions in domains where we should expect untrained human minds to fail.
CEA and GiveWell are both building communities, GiveWell to the point of more than doubling its community (by measures such as number of donors, money moved, with web traffic slightly slower) every year, year after year. Giving What We Can's growth has been more linear, but 80,000 hours has also had good growth (albeit somewhat less and over a shorter time).
That makes the bar for something like CFAR much, much higher than your model suggests, although there is merit in experimenting with a number of different models (and the Effective Altruism movement needs to cultivate the "E"/ element as well as the "A", which something along the lines of CFAR may be especially helpful for).
ETA: I went through more GiveWell growth numbers in this post. Absolute growth excluding Good Ventures (a big foundation that has firmly backed GiveWell) was fairly steady for the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 comparisons, although growth has looked more exponential in other years.
It would be nice if all that doubling helped save the world somehow, after all.
On reflection, this is an opportunity for me to be curious. The relevant community-builders I'm aware of are:
Whom am I leaving out?
My model for what they're doing is this:
GiveWell isn't trying to change much about people at all directly, except by helping them find efficient charities to give to. It's selecting people by whether they're already interested in this exact thing.
80,000 Hours is trying to intervene in certain specific high-impact life decisions like career choice as well as charity choice, effectively by administering a temporary "rationality infusion," but isn't trying to alter anyone's underlying character in a lasting way beyond that.
CFAR has the very ambitious goal of creating guardians of humanity with hero-level competence, altruism, and epistemic rationality, but has so far mainly succeeded in some improvements in personal effectiveness for solving one's own life problems.
Leverage has tried to directly approach the problem of creating a hero-level community but doesn't seem to have a track record of concrete specific successes, replicable methods for making people awesome, or a measure of effectiveness
Do any of these descriptions seem off? If so, how?
PS I don't think I would have stuck my neck out & made these guesses in order to figure out whether I was right, before the recent CFAR workshop I attended.
MIRI has been a huge community-builder, through LessWrong, HPMOR, et cetera.
Those predate the founding of CFAR; at that time MIRI (then SI) was doing double duty as a rationality organisation. It's explicitly pivoted away from that and community building since.
Some comments below.
And publishing detailed analysis and reasons that get it massive media attention and draw in and convince people who may have been persuadable but had not in fact been persuaded. Also in sharing a lot of epistemic and methodological points on their blogs and site. Many GIveWell readers and users are in touch with each other and with GiveWell, and GiveWell has played an important role in the growth of EA as a whole, including people making other decisions (such as founding organizations and changing their career or research plans, in addition to their donations).
I would add that counseled folk and extensive web traffic also get exposed to ideas like prioritzation, cause-neutrality, wide variation in effectiveness, etc, and ways to follow up. They built a membership/social networking functionality, but I think they are making it less prominent on the website to focus on the research and counseling, in response to their experience so far.
Separately, how much of a difference is there between a three-day CFAR workshop and a temporary "rationality infusion"?
The post describes a combination of selection for existing capacities, connection, and training, not creation (which would be harder).
As the post mentions, there isn't clear evidence that this happened, and there is room for negative effects. But I do see a lot of value in developing rationality training that works, as measured in randomized trials using life outcomes, Tetlock-type predictive accuracy, or similar endpoints. I would say that the value of CFAR training today is more about testing/R&D and creating a commercial platform that can enable further R&D than any educational value of their current offerings.
I don't know much about what they have been doing lately, but they have had at least a couple of specific achievements. They held an effective altruist conference that was well-received by several people I spoke with, and a small percentage of people donating or joining other EA organizations report that they found out about effective altruism ideas through Leverage's THINK.
They may have had other more substantial achievements, but they are not easily discernible from the Leverage website. Their team seems very energetic, but much of it is focused on developing and applying a homegrown amateur psychological theory that contradicts established physics, biology, and psychology (previous LW discussion here and here ). That remains a significant worry for me about Leverage.
Thank you, that's helpful.
That makes sense. It depends on whether the bar is much higher than what there already is for "competent, rational" etc. AND how much better (if at all) CFAR is at making people so and finding those people. I think the first is pretty likely, but at this point the second is merely at the level of plausibility. (Which is still really impressive!)
I agree with you on this, but I think CEA is that meta-charity you're talking about, not CFAR. The reason for this is that CFAR and CEA (via Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours) are both focused on building a community of do-gooders, but only CEA is doing it explicitly.
My understanding from current CFAR workshops is that CFAR doesn't have much content about effectively donating or effective altruism per se, though I could be missing something.
Is there any before / after analysis of CFAR attendees on metrics like amount of money donated or donation targets?
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I agree this is the key benefit of CFAR, though I think it's hard to know at the moment whether CFAR is going to adequately accomplish this (though I do agree that current CFAR material is high-quality and getting better).
That's pretty much why I wanted a commitment to certain epistemic rationality projects: to show that it's possible to train that better (which has high VOI) and to make sure CFAR gets some momentum in that direction.