This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and was cross-posted on the EA forum

Why separate effective giving from Effective Altruism? Isn't the whole point of EA about effective giving, meaning giving to the most impactful charities to advance human flourishing? Sure, effective giving is the point of EA, but there might be a lot of benefit to drawing a distinct line between the movement of Effective Altruism itself, and the ideas of effective giving that it promotes. That's something that Kerry Vaughn, the Executive Director of Effective Altruism Outreach, and I, the President of Intentional Insights, discussed in our recent phone call, after having an online discussion on this forum. To be clear, Kerry did not explicitly endorse the work of Intentional Insights, and is not in a position to do so - this just reflects my recollection of our conversations.

Why draw that line? Because there's quite a bit of danger in rapid movement growth of attracting people who might dilute the EA movement and impair the building of good infrastructure down the road (see this video and paper). This exemplifies the dangers of simply promoting Effective Altruism indiscriminately, and just trying to grow the movement as fast as possible.

Thus, what we can orient toward is using modern marketing strategies to spread the ideas of effective altruism - what Kerry and I labeled effective giving in our conversations - without necessarily trying to spread the movement. We can spread the notion of giving not simply from the heart, but also using the head. We can talk about fighting the drowning child problem. We can talk about researching charities and using GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, and other evidence-based charity evaluators to guide one's giving. We can build excitement about giving well, and encourage people to think of themselves as Superdonors or Mega-Lifesavers. We can use effective marketing strategies such as speaking to people's emotions and using stories, and contributing to meta-charities such as EA Outreach and others that do such work.  That's why we at Intentional Insights focus on spending our resources on spreading the message of effective giving, as we believe that getting ten more people to give effectively is more impactful than us giving of our resources to effective charities ourselves. At the same time, Kerry and I spoke of avoiding heavily promoting effective altruism as a movement or using emotionally engaging narratives to associate positive feelings with it - instead, just associating positive feelings with effective giving, and leaving bread crumbs for people who want to explore Effective Altruism through brief mentions and links.

Let's go specific and concrete. Here's an example of what I mean: an article in The Huffington Post that encourages people to give effectively, and only briefly mention Effective Altruism. Doing so balances the benefits of using marketing tactics to channel money to effective charities, while not heavily promoting EA itself to ameliorate the dangers of rapid movement growth.

Check out the sharing buttons on it, and you'll see it was shared quite widely, over 1K times. As you'll see from this Facebook comment on my personal page, it helped convince someone to decide to donate to effective charities. Furthermore, this comment is someone who is the leader of a large secular group in Houston, and he thus has an impact on a number of other people. Since people rarely make actual comments, and far from all are fans of my Facebook page, we can estimate that many more made similar decisions but chose not to comment about it.

Another example. Here is a link to the outcome of an Intentional Insights collaboration with The Life You Can Save to spread effective giving to the reason-oriented community through Giving Games. In a Giving Game, participants in a workshop learn about a few pre-selected charities, think about and discuss their relative merits, and choose which charity will get a real donation, $10 per participant. We have launched a pilot program with the Secular Student Alliance to bring Giving Games to over 300 secular student groups throughout the world, with The Life You Can Save dedicating $10,000 to the pilot program, and easily capable of raising more if it works well. As you'll see from the link, it briefly mentions Effective Altruism, and focuses mainly on education in effective giving itself.

Such articles as the one in The Huffington Post, shared widely in social media, attest to the popularity of effective giving as a notion, separate from Effective Altruism itself. As you saw, it is immediately impactful in getting some people to give to effective charities, and highly likely gets others to think in this direction. I had a conversation with a number of leaders of local EA groups, for example with Alfredo Parra in Munich, excited about the possibility of translating and adapting this article to their local context, and all of you are free to do so as well - I encourage you to cite me/Intentional Insights in doing so, but if you can't, it's fine as well.

That gets to another point that Kerry and I discussed, namely the benefits of having some EAs who specialize in promoting ideas about effective giving, and more broadly integrating promotion of effective giving as something that EAs do in general. Some EAs can do the most good by working hard and devoting 10% of their money to charity. Some can do the most good by thinking hard about the big issues. Some can do the most good by growing the internal capacity and infrastructures of the movement, and getting worthy people on board. Others can do the most good by getting non-EAs to channel their money toward effective charities through effective marketing and persuasion tactics.

Intentional Insights orients toward providing the kind of content that can be easily adapted and shared by these EAs widely. It's a work in progress, to create and improve this content. We are also working with other EA meta-charities such as The Life You Can Save and others. Another area to work on is not only content creation, but content optimization and testing - I talked with Konrad Seifert from Geneva about testing our content at a university center there. Moreover, we should develop the infrastructure to integrate spreading effective giving into EA activities, something EA Outreach may potentially collaborate with us on, depending on further discussions.

So these are some initial thoughts, which I wanted to bring to the community for discussion. What do you think of this line of work, and what are your ideas for optimization? Thanks!

**EDIT** Edited to clarify that Kerry Vaughn did not explicitly endorse the work of Intentional Insights.

Related to: Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently

There has been a slightly increased focus on the use of search engines lately. I agree that using Google is an important skill - in fact I believe that for years I have came across as significantly more knowledgeable than I actually am just by quickly looking for information when I am asked something.

However, There are obviously some types of information which are more accessible by Google and some which are less accessible. For example distinct characteristics, specific dates of events etc. are easily googleable¹ and you can expect to quickly find accurate information on the topic. On the other hand, if you want to find out more ambiguous things such as the effects of having more friends on weight or even something like the negative and positive effects of a substance - then googling might leave you with some contradicting results, inaccurate information or at the very least it will likely take you longer to get to the truth.

I have observed that in the latter case (when the topic is less 'googleable') most people, even those knowledgeable of search engines and 'science' will just stop searching for information after not finding anything on Google or even before² unless they are actually willing to devote a lot of time to find it. This is where my recommendation comes - consider doing a scholarly search like the one provided by Google Scholar.

And, no, I am not suggesting that people should read a bunch of papers on every topic that they discuss. By using some simple heuristics we can easily gain a pretty good picture of the relevant information on a large variety of topics in a few minutes (or less in some cases). The heuristics are as follows:

1. Read only or mainly the abstracts. This is what saves you time but gives you a lot of information in return and this is the key to the most cost-effective way to quickly find information from a scholary search. Often you wouldn't have immediate access to the paper anyway, however you can almost always read the abstract. And if you follow the other heuristics you will still be looking at relatively 'accurate' information most of the time. On the other hand, if you are looking for more information and have access to the full paper then the discussion+conclusion section are usually the second best thing to look at; and if you are unsure about the quality of the study, then you should also look at the method section to identify its limitations.³

2. Look at the number of citations for an article. The higher the better. Less than 10 citations in most cases means that you can find a better paper.

3. Look at the date of the paper. Often more recent = better. However, you can expect less citations for more recent articles and you need to adjust accordingly. For example if the article came out in 2013 but it has already been cited 5 times this is probably a good sign. For new articles the subheuristic that I use is to evaluate the 'accuracy' of the article by judging the author's general credibilty instead - argument from authority.

4. Meta-analyses/Systematic Reviews are your friend. This is where you can get the most information in the least amount of time!

5. If you cannot find anything relevant fiddle with your search terms in whatever ways you can think of (you usually get better at this over time by learning what search terms give better results).

That's the gist of it. By reading a few abstracts in a minute or two you can effectively search for information regarding our scientific knowledge on a subject with almost the same speed as searching for specific information on topics that I dubbed googleable. In my experience scholarly searches on pretty much anything can be really beneficial. Do you believe that drinking beer is bad but drinking wine is good? Search on Google Scholar! Do you think that it is a fact that social interaction is correlated with happiness? Google Scholar it! Sure, some things might seem obvious to you that X but it doesn't hurt to search on google scholar for a minute just to be able to cite a decent study on the topic to those X disbelievers.

This post might not be useful to some people but it is my belief that scholarly searches are the next step of efficient information seeking after googling and that most LessWrongers are not utilizing this enough. Hell, I only recently started doing this actively and I still do not do it enough. Furthermore I fully agree with this comment by gwern:

My belief is that the more familiar and skilled you are with a tool, the more willing you are to reach for it. Someone who has been programming for decades will be far more willing to write a short one-off program to solve a problem than someone who is unfamiliar and unsure about programs (even if they suspect that they could get a canned script copied from StackExchange running in a few minutes). So the unwillingness to try googling at all is at least partially a lack of googling skill and familiarity.

A lot of people will be reluctant to start doing scholarly searches because they have barely done any or because they have never done it. I want to tell those people to still give it a try. Start by searching for something easy, maybe something that you already know from lesswrong or from somewhere else. Read a few abstracts, if you do not understand a given abstract try finding other papers on the topic - some authors adopt a more technical style of writing, others focus mainly on statistics, etc. but you should still be able to find some good information if you read multiple abstracts and identify the main points. If you cannot find anythinr relevant then move on and try another topic.

P.S. In my opinion, when you are comfortable enough to have scholarly searches as a part of your arsenal you will rarely have days when there is nothing to check for. If you are doing 1 scholarly search per month for example you are most probably not fully utilizing this skill.

1. By googleable I mean that the search terms are google friendly - you can relatively easily and quickly find relevant and accurate information.
2. If the people in question have developed a sense for what type of information is more accessible by google then they might not even try to google the less accessible-type things.
3. If you want to get a better and more accurate view on the topic in question you should read the full paper. The heuristic of mainly focusing on abstracts is cost-effective but it invariably results in a loss of information.