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ChristianKl comments on Informing Others: Maximally Efficient? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (22)
You can do earning to give and then donate towards another person doing the outreach. At the moment CFAR is probably the best address.
Yes. Imagine my life's goal is to maximize the quality of the house I will own in the year 2045. I almost certainly shouldn't seek to build this house myself, but rather try to maximize my income so I could buy the best house. I will have to know a lot about houses so I can know which is the best, but only through a remarkable coincidence would my path to maximum income be via home construction.
An engineering salary for mechanical engineering is ~ 100k/year (http://www.mtu.edu/engineering/outreach/welcome/salary/), After paying off student loans and rent and food I would donate maybe 70k of that each year. (assuming I satisfy none of my other values). If I could convince ten people to give 10k a year then I would have done better than working full time as an engineer. This seems reasonable given a year, no job and access to the internet. Even better still if I could instead convince five people to convince three people each.
Your example breaks down because I am not trying to build the house, but rather directing others' income towards its construction. I might also additionally direct others' career paths to create a high quality construction company such that when the time comes the quality of the house is even higher than it would be otherwise. We do have thirty years or so after all.
This post from Alyssa Vance might be helpful to you.
The argument seems to be: By becoming another level of meta I would simply be redirecting the flow of money rather than producing value.
I would argue however then that the vast majority of those charities are inefficient and therefore not worth donating to. Hence by directing money away from them value is actually being produced by the reduction of inefficiency. Thus if I can reduce the inefficiency by more than my donation amount I doing more social good than if I were to donate to them myself. Additionally, if I convert people to become more rational they may produce value which would have been lost to inefficiencies otherwise, and that might total greater than my personal work would.
Charitable fund raising is a tough, competitive industry and without evidence you shouldn't assume that you would be extremely successful at it. Keep in mind you would be competing against professional fund raisers who have massive institutional support. If you want to follow this path I suggest you try an experiment and see if you can get people you know to donate, say, $1000 to CFAR.
Also, I strongly suspect that CFAR would rather get 20k a year from you than receive your application as a fund raiser.
That may be harder than getting people on the Internet to donate, as in the latter case you have a much larger audience. Especially if you work on it full-time for one year with no other job.
If I were to do it professionally then you are correct on all fronts, but I was thinking of a far more informal approach.
Literally just talking to people, getting them to read the materials, and discussing the nuances of rational thought. The point here was supposed to be less about the money, and more about the value of producing more rational individuals. I don't necessarily have to convince people to donate to one charity over another, but by exposing them to the ideas of the site they would seek out such optimizations on their own.
I'll grant you that it is probably a minority of the population who would change, but the sum of the changes from people whose lives change dramatically could offset that 20k a year. For example, if I were to find one other person who then decides to donate 20k a year, I would have done as much good as if I were working. Even if I stopped talking to people entirely.
There is of course nothing stopping me from also doing this while working, but if it is actually more effective then if I were able to survive without working it would become the ideal. Realistically it ends up making a bit more sense to work for at least a decade while simultaneously doing this, build up enough cash to survive for a good long while, and then quit working and convert people with the rest of my life.
My impression was CEA was doing more outreach than CFAR and CFAR was focused more on improving the rationality, effectiveness, etc. of those already in the EA/rationality/etc. movement.
As far as I understand one of the core purposes of CFAR is to research how you can teach people to be more rational. If you want to raise the sanity line of the general population you do need that research.
SPARC is as far as I understand it about getting young kids to be rational.
I personally made the experience with Quantified Self movement building that while we did have a mainstream media presence most of the interesting people who came to our meetups didn't come over that channel.
I think that the level of immersion that SPARC provides is ideal for having a lasting impact.
My problem though is that if I were to instead convince others to do said donating, then I would overall push more dollars in that direction that the amount I personally could contribute by working. If that is indeed more effective, then more effective still would be to train advocates to convince people in my stead. I think it becomes a question on how much more effective. CFAR does look legit though. Thank you.
I think you underrate the difficulty of that task.
Probably.
I realized elsewhere my main pont wasn't so much about donating, but rather that by converting people to a more rational way of thinking would lead them to convince themselves to donate as an optimal strategy. Then again, if it really is most rational to improve the rationality of others, then that is what they would do rather than donating. (One also has to work enough to eat, but constraints are different for everyone so I am ignoring that)
There is an additional issue in that we are not totally rational, and also value other things than the reduction of human suffering.