gjm comments on Celebrating All Who Are in Effective Altruism - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Gleb_Tsipursky 20 January 2016 01:31AM

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Comment author: Viliam 21 January 2016 08:47:51AM *  0 points [-]

I haven't met them either, but I remember reading about them in some articles people shared on facebook. The articles didn't make any judgement about this subset, they merely mentioned that some of the EAs don't donate anything, because they were students.

And my reaction was: this is so bad for PR. I mean, the whole message of effective altruism is kinda "instead of donating to cute puppies, we use the same money to heal children with malaria". And the obvious reply in such case would be: "well, at least I donated to the cute puppies, while you only participate at the conferences talking about healing children with malaria". A less charitable reply would point out that participating at the EA conferences also costs money.

But maybe in real life the subset is negligible. Internet often exaggerates things.

Comment author: gjm 21 January 2016 11:52:33AM 3 points [-]

There's some discussion, including numbers and graphs, here. Fraction of self-reported EAs self-reporting as donating zero (this was in an LW survey) varies from ~13% to ~43% depending on age. (Younger people are more likely to report donating nothing, especially the under-20 category which is presumably full of impoverished students.)

Comment author: Gleb_Tsipursky 21 January 2016 05:54:25PM 0 points [-]

Would be curious to see the difference between donations and volunteering - statistics show that young people tend to volunteer more. Do you know of any information on EA volunteering?

Comment author: gjm 21 January 2016 07:36:48PM 0 points [-]

No. Sorry.