[Effective Altruism] Promoting Effective Giving at Conferences via Speed Giving Games
Conferences provide a high-impact opportunity to promote effective giving. This is the broad take-away from an experiment in promoting effective giving at two conferences in recent months: the Unitarian Universalist (UU) General Assembly and the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) National Convention. This was an experiment run by Intentional Insights (InIn), an EA meta-charity devoted to promoting effective giving and rational thinking to a broad audience, with financial sponsorship from The Life You Can Save.
The outcomes, as detailed below, suggest that conferences can offer cost-effective opportunities to communicate effective giving messages to important stakeholders. An especially promising way to do so is to use Speed Giving Games (SGG) as a low-threshold strategy since recent findings show GGs are an excellent means of promoting effective giving. This encourages participants to self-organize full-length Giving Games (GG) when they return back to their homes.
This article aims both to describe our experiences at UU and SSA and to serve as a guide to others who want to adopt these approaches to promote effective giving via conferences. The article is thus divided into several parts:
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Evaluating the demographic group you want to target;
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Evaluating the potential impact and cost of the conference;
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Steps to prepare for the conference;
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Outcomes of the conference;
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Assessment of the experiment and conclusions;
Picking the Right Conference: Consider Demographics
Before deciding on a conference, make sure you target the right demographic. We at InIn, in agreement with The Life You Can Save, picked the two conferences mentioned above for a couple of reasons.
First, the UU and SSA both unite people who we thought were well-suited for promoting effective giving. Members of these organizations already put a considerable value both on improving the world, and on using reason and evidence to inform their actions in doing so.
Our work at SSA is part of our broader effort, in collaboration with The Life You Can Save and the Local Effective Altruist Network, to promote effective giving to secular, humanist, and skeptic groups. We do so by holding GGs targeted to their needs: appearing on podcasts, writing articles in secular venues about effective giving, and collaborating with a number of national and international common-interest organizations. Besides the SSA, this includes the Foundation Beyond Belief, United Coalition of Reason, American Humanist Association, International Humanist Ethical Union, and others.
The UU religious denomination is a more experimental focus group. It builds upon the success of the above-mentioned project, and expands to promote effective giving to people who are still somewhat reason-oriented, even if reason is less central for them. Yet UU members are strongly committed to action to improve the world, and generally show more active efforts on the social justice and civic engagement front than members of the secular, humanist, and skeptic movement. Thus, we at InIn and The Life You Can Save decided to target them as well.
Second, picking the right demographic also means having at least some people who are familiar with the language, needs, desires, and passions of the niche group you are targeting, and have some connections within it. Knowing the interests and language of the demographics is really valuable for understanding how to frame the concept of effective giving to those demographics. Having people with pre-existing connections and networks within that demographic allows you to approach them as an insider, giving you instant credibility and much more leverage when introducing the audience to an unfamiliar concept.
For the SSA, we had it easy, due to our extensive connections in the secular/skeptic/humanist movement. The SSA Executive Director is on the Intentional Insights Advisory Board, our members regularly appear on podcasts and write for venues within that movement, and many of our members attend local humanist/secular/skeptic groups.
We had fewer connections in UU, but the ones that we did have were sufficient. Our two co-founders and some of our members attend UU churches. Intentional insights creates curriculum content for the UU movement, appears on relevant podcasts and writes for major venues. This proved to be more than enough familiarity from the perspective of knowing the language and interests.
Picking the Right Conference: Consider Impact and Costs
After choosing the right demographic, consider and balance the potential impact and effectiveness of each conference.
Number and influence of attendees:
Both the UU and the secular/skeptic/humanist movements hold a number of conferences. Fortunately, a single annual conference unites the whole UU movement, with over 3,500 UU leaders from around the world coming. Moreover, the people who come to the UU General Assembly constitute the most active members of the movement – Ministers, Religious Education Directors, church staff, lay leaders and prominent writers – in other words, those stakeholders most capable of spreading effective giving ideas into the UU community.
The SSA event had far fewer people, with just over 200 attendees. However, many movers and shakers from the secular/skeptic/humanist movement attend the conference. This makes it attractive from the perspective of spreading effective giving ideas in the movement.
Impact of your role at conference:
First, most conferences have tabling opportunities for exhibitors, and as an exhibitor, you can hold SGGs at your table. We did that both at the SSA and UU, and I doubt we would have gone to either without that opportunity, since we found it to be very effective at promoting effective giving.
Caption: Intentional Insights table at the Secular Student Alliance conference (courtesy of InIn)
Second, if you have an opportunity to be a speaker and can promote effective giving at your talk, this raises the impact you can make at a conference. That said, unless you can focus your talk on effective giving or at least give out relevant materials and sign-up sheets, simply mentioning effective giving may not be that impactful. It all depends on how you go about it, and whether the concept is relevant to your talk and memorable to the audience. I was a speaker at the SSA, and worked effective giving into my talk without focusing on it, as well as distributed relevant materials about effective giving.
Third, consider whether you have specific networking opportunities at a conference that are helpful for promoting effective giving. For instance, this might involve having small-group or one-on-one meetings with influencers where you can safely promote effective giving without seeming pushy. At both the SSA and UU, we had both pre-scheduled and spontaneous meetings with notable people, which allowed us to promote effective giving concepts.
Costs: One of the fundamental aspects of effective giving is cost-effectiveness, and it is important to apply this metric to marketing effective giving, as well.
For the experiment with promoting effective giving at conferences, we at InIn decided to collaborate with The Life You Can Save on the most low-cost opportunities. Thus, one of the reasons we chose the UU and SSA conventions is that they both happened in Columbus, where InIn is based. InIn provided the people who ran the table and did the networking, and The Life You Can Save covered fees for conference registration, tabling, and other miscellaneous fees.
The UUA conference registration is around $450 per participant, and $800 for a table. Fortunately, as InIn is a member of a UU organization through which we promote Giving Games and other InIn materials, we were able to use a table at a discount, for $200. Miscellaneous fees included parking and food, for around $20 per participant per day. We had 2 people at the conference each day, so for the 5-day conference, that was $200. We also had about $175 in marketing costs to design and print flyers. We registered only one person, as we got one free participant with a table, so the total cost came down to $1025.
The SSA conference registration fee is around $135 per participant, and $150 for a table. As a speaker, I got a free registration, and another free registration accompanied the table. Parking and food cost $140 for the 3-day conference, and marketing costs came out to $150, for a total of $340.
Prepare Well
To prepare for the conferences, we at InIn brainstormed about the appropriate ways to present effective giving at both conferences. We then prepared talking points relevant to each audience, and coordinated with all people who would table at both conferences to ensure they knew how to present effective giving to the two audiences well.
As an example, you can see the GGs packet adapted to the language and interests of the SSA here and UU here. The main modifications are in the “Activity Overview” section, and these changes represent the broad difference in the kind of language we used.
Besides the language, we put a lot of effort into designing attractive marketing materials for our table. We created a large sign, visible from a long distance, with “Free Money” in red. People are attracted both to the color red and to the phrase “Free Money,” and it is highly important to draw attention in the context of a busy conference.
Caption: SGG activity overview for both UU and SSA conferences (courtesy of InIn)
We hired a professional designer to compose an attractive layout for the SGG activity at our table. SGGs involve having people make a decision between two charities. Their vote results in a dollar each going to either charity, sponsored by an outside party, usually The Life You Can Save. It was important to create a nice layout that people could engage with quickly and easily, again due to distractions in the conference setting. We chose GiveDirectly as the effective charity, and the Mid-Ohio Food Bank as a local and not so effective charity.
For those who participated in SGGs, then aimed at getting them to sign up for the InIn newsletter and The Life You Can Save newsletter, and engaging with them in conversations about effective giving. We also printed out shorter versions of the UU and SSA Giving Games packets. These had brief descriptions of the full Giving Games, with links to the longer versions they could host back in their SSA student clubs or UU congregations.
Another thing we did is schedule meetings in advance with some influencers to discuss effective giving opportunities. We also made sure to schedule meetings spontaneously during the conference with notables who seemed interested in effective giving. For those who expressed an interest but did not have time to meet, we made sure to exchange contact information and follow up afterwards.
Finally, we applied to be speakers at both conferences. We succeeded with the SSA, but not with UU. Still, we decided to attend the UU conference, because the costs were low enough since we did not have to travel and The Life You Can Save judged the potential impact worthwhile.
Conference Outcomes
At the UU conference, we had around 75 people play the SGG, so around 2% of attendees. Of those, about 65% (just under 50 people) signed up for the newsletter. We had 50 packets with GG descriptions printed, and we ran out by the end of the conference. Additionally, about 70% of the people who played there voted for GiveDirectly.
We also had meetings with some notable parties interested in effective giving. Especially promising was a meeting with the Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association (UUHA), who expressed a strong interest in bringing GGs to her constituents. There are hundreds of UU Humanist groups within congregations around the world. We are currently working on testing a GG at a local UU Humanist group, and we will then write up the results for the UUHA blog. We had some other promising meetings as well, but no one was as interested as the UUHA.
At the SSA conference, we had 15 people play the SGG, so around 7.5% of attendees. Of those, 80% signed up for the newsletter, so about 12 people. The same proportion, 80%, voted for GiveDirectly.
We gave away around 35 GG packets with descriptions, as some people did not want to play the SGG, but were interested in having their clubs host it. Distributing packets was especially helped by the fact that I was a speaker at the SSA, and promoted and handed out packets at my presentation.
The meetings with notable parties proved more promising at the SSA. We met with staff from two national secular organizations, the American Ethical Union and the Center for Inquiry, who expressed an interest in promoting GGs to their members. A number of influencers expressed enthusiasm over the concept of effective giving, and wanted to promote it broadly in the secular/skeptic/humanist movement.
Assessment and Conclusion
We would have been satisfied at both conferences to have at least half of the people who played the SGG vote for GiveDirectly and have half the people sign up. We ended up with 70% voting for GiveDirectly at UU and 80% at SSA, and 65% signing up for the newsletter at UU and 80% at the SSA. So, these conferences strongly exceeded our baseline expectations. We did not have specific expectations for giving away packets or meetings with notables. Yet looking back, we certainly did not expect the level of interest we got for conference participants holding Giving Games back home - we would have printed more packets for the UU had we thought they might run out.
The evidence from GGs shows they are a great method to promote effective giving. Getting influencers from target demographics engaged with GGs not only gets the activists to give more effectively, but also encourages the activists to hold GGs back at their groups.
After all, holding GGs is a win-win for secular/skeptic/humanist groups and UU congregations alike. They get to engage in an activity that embodies their values of using reason and evidence. At the same time, they get to improve the world and build a sense of community without spending a penny.
For those of us promoting effective giving, it presents these ideas to a new audience, and enables the audience to continue engaging if they wish. The newsletter sign-ups are especially indicative of people’s interests. So are the numbers of people who took packets to host GGs back at their groups. We at InIn already heard from several people who are arranging Giving Games after being exposed to the adapted GG packets, including a UU church that is arranging to have a GG for all 500 members of the church. Based on these outcomes, we at InIn and The Life You Can Save decided it would be even worthwhile to invest into traveling to distant conferences given the right conditions - having a table, speaking role, potential influencers, etc.
So, consider promoting effective giving at conferences to audiences not directly related to existing effective altruism communities. Hopefully, the steps I outlined above will help you decide on the best opportunities to do so. I would be glad to chat with you about specifics and share more details; email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org.
Acknowledgments: For feedback on earlier stages of this draft, my gratitude to Jon Behar, Laura Gamse, Ryan Carey, Malcolm Ocean, Matthijs Maas, Yaacov Tarko, Dony Christie, Jake Krycia, Remmelt Ellen, Alexander Semenychev, Ian Pritchford, Ed Chen, Lune Nekesa, Jo Duyvestyn, and others who wished to remain anonymous.
[EA relevant] Announcing "Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving" Series
We have so many great people involved in the EA movement, people who think hard and well about what cause to prioritize and who dedicate a significant portion of their money and time to advancing global flourishing in the most cost-effective manner. However, articles about EA participants typically feature the most dedicated folks, which contributes to those who don't reach such levels reluctant to call themselves EA members.
So to advance the cause of celebrating all in the EA movement and recognizing the value of all movement members appropriately, we at Intentional Insights are launching the "Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving" video series. This series of brief videos, around 10 minutes each, will showcase folks from across the movement, including from around the world, as we do the filming through videoconference (Google hangouts). We ask participants four questions:
1) How would you define effective giving and what makes you passionate about it?
2) What is your story of getting involved in effective giving?
3) What are you doing now in the area of effective giving?
4) What do you plan to do in the future and what do you envision as the mark you want to leave on the world?
Why do we frame the title and questions in terms of "effective giving?" Well, these videos are meant to be available as a resource to be shared with anyone and create a sense of narrative, identification, and emotional appeal, which are part of broader effective outreach strategies. Thus, using the terminology of effective giving decreases the likelihood of non-value aligned people trying to join the EA movement, while encouraging such people to give to more effective charities. Note that participants usually mention the EA movement in their comments, which provides a potential trail to the EA movement for those who would be interested in thinking hard about doing the most good.
We already released three videos. The first features Boris Yakubchik, who was involved in the EA movement before it was a movement as such. The second one is with Scott Weathers, an EA health policy expert who is currently interning at the WHO and is going on for a PhD in public health this Fall. The third features Alfredo Parra, the main organizer of EA Munich. Since the videos are short, I will post future videos on the EA Forum when we have finished doing a set of three.
FYI, the fact that the first three happened to be with men is a fluke. I extended an invitation for videotaping to three men and three women, and the women simply were not available until later. We already did two with the women, and are currently processing them.
For future developments with this series, we are planning to improve the backdrop situation for the interviewer by getting a black screen. We have also secured the domain http://www.givingeffectively.org/, and we plan to put these videos and other content there after we decide how to structure the website - we want to make it a key part of the EA Marketing Resource Bank as a venue for content about effective giving. If anyone wants to support these endeavors (the website or video series) with their programming/visual design/video skills, or with donations, please shoot me an email at gleb@intentionalinsights.org
I welcome your feedback about this project, in private emails to me or in comments here. My hope is that these videos will show the broad range of diversity across the EA movement, and help people understand that, even if they are not the most dedicated EA participants, they are making a welcome and valuable contribution to the cause of doing the most good effectively.
June Outreach Thread
Please share about any outreach that you have done to convey rationality and effective altruism-themed ideas broadly, whether recent or not, which you have not yet shared on previous Outreach threads. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline, a form of cognitive altruism that contributes to creating a flourishing world. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
Review and Thoughts on Current Version of CFAR Workshop
Outline: I will discuss my background and how I prepared for the workshop, and then how I would have prepared differently if I could go back and have the chance to do it again; I will then discuss my experience at the CFAR workshop, and what I would have done differently if I had the chance to do it again; I will then discuss what my take-aways were from the workshop, and what I am doing to integrate CFAR strategies into my life; finally, I will give my assessment of its benefits and what other folks might expect to get who attend the workshop.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to fellow CFAR alumni and CFAR staff for feedback on earlier versions of this post
Introduction
Many aspiring rationalists have heard about the Center for Applied Rationality, an organization devoted to teaching applied rationality skills to help people improve their thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns. This nonprofit does so primarily through its intense workshops, and is funded by donations and revenue from its workshop. It fulfills its social mission through conducting rationality research and through giving discounted or free workshops to those people its staff judge as likely to help make the world a better place, mainly those associated with various Effective Altruist cause areas, especially existential risk.
To be fully transparent: even before attending the workshop, I already had a strong belief that CFAR is a great organization and have been a monthly donor to CFAR for years. So keep that in mind as you read my description of my experience (you can become a donor here).
Preparation
First, some background about myself, so you know where I’m coming from in attending the workshop. I’m a professor specializing in the intersection of history, psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, and cognitive neuroscience. I discovered the rationality movement several years ago through a combination of my research and attending a LessWrong meetup in Columbus, OH, and so come from a background of both academic and LW-style rationality. Since discovering the movement, I have become an activist in the movement as the President of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to popularizing rationality and effective altruism (see here for our EA work). So I came to the workshop with some training and knowledge of rationality, including some CFAR techniques.
To help myself prepare for the workshop, I reviewed existing posts about CFAR materials, with an eye toward being careful not to assume that the actual techniques match their actual descriptions in the posts.
I also delayed a number of tasks for after the workshop, tying up loose ends. In retrospect, I wish I did not leave myself some ongoing tasks to do during the workshop. As part of my leadership of InIn, I coordinate about 50ish volunteers, and I wish I had placed those responsibilities on someone else during the workshop.
Before the workshop, I worked intensely on finishing up some projects. In retrospect, it would have been better to get some rest and come to the workshop as fresh as possible.
There were some communication snafus with logistics details before the workshop. It all worked out in the end, but I would have told myself in retrospect to get the logistics hammered out in advance to not experience anxiety before the workshop about how to get there.
Experience
The classes were well put together, had interesting examples, and provided useful techniques. FYI, my experience in the workshop was that reading these techniques in advance was not harmful, but that the techniques in the CFAR classes were quite a bit better than the existing posts about them, so don’t assume you can get the same benefits from reading posts as attending the workshop. So while I was aware of the techniques, the ones in the classes definitely had optimized versions of them - maybe because of the “broken telephone” effect or maybe because CFAR optimized them from previous workshops, not sure. I was glad to learn that CFAR considers the workshop they gave us in May as satisfactory enough to scale up their workshops, while still improving their content over time.
Just as useful as the classes were the conversations held in between and after the official classes ended. Talking about them with fellow aspiring rationalists and seeing how they were thinking about applying these to their lives was helpful for sparking ideas about how to apply them to my life. The latter half of the CFAR workshop was especially great, as it focused on pairing off people and helping others figure out how to apply CFAR techniques to themselves and how to address various problems in their lives. It was especially helpful to have conversations with CFAR staff and trained volunteers, of whom there were plenty - probably about 20 volunteers/staff for the 50ish workshop attendees.
Another super-helpful aspect of the conversations was networking and community building. Now, this may have been more useful to some participants than others, so YMMV. As an activist in the moment, I talked to many folks in the CFAR workshop about promoting EA and rationality to a broad audience. I was happy to introduce some people to EA, with my most positive conversation there being to encourage someone to switch his efforts regarding x-risk from addressing nuclear disarmament to AI safety research as a means of addressing long/medium-term risk, and promoting rationality as a means of addressing short/medium-term risk. Others who were already familiar with EA were interested in ways of promoting it broadly, while some aspiring rationalists expressed enthusiasm over becoming rationality communicators.
Looking back at my experience, I wish I was more aware of the benefits of these conversations. I went to sleep early the first couple of nights, and I would have taken supplements to enable myself to stay awake and have conversations instead.
Take-Aways and Integration
The aspects of the workshop that I think will help me most were what CFAR staff called “5-second” strategies - brief tactics and techniques that could be executed in 5 seconds or less and address various problems. The stuff that we learned at the workshops that I was already familiar with required some time to learn and practice, such as Trigger Action Plans, Goal Factoring, Murphyjitsu, Pre-Hindsight, often with pen and paper as part of the work. However, with sufficient practice, one can develop brief techniques that mimic various aspects of the more thorough techniques, and apply them quickly to in-the-moment decision-making.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the longer techniques are not helpful. They are very important, but they are things I was already generally familiar with, and already practice. The 5-second versions were more of a revelation for me, and I anticipate will be more helpful for me as I did not know about them previously.
Now, CFAR does a very nice job of helping people integrate the techniques into daily life, as this is a common failure mode of CFAR attendees, with them going home and not practicing the techniques. So they have 6 Google Hangouts with CFAR staff and all attendees who want to participate, 4 one-on-one sessions with CFAR trained volunteers or staff, and they also pair you with one attendee for post-workshop conversations. I plan to take advantage of all these, although my pairing did not work out.
For integration of CFAR techniques into my life, I found the CFAR strategy of “Overlearning” especially helpful. Overlearning refers to trying to apply a single technique intensely for a while to all aspect of one’s activities, so that it gets internalized thoroughly. I will first focus on overlearning Trigger Action Plans, following the advice of CFAR.
I also plan to teach CFAR techniques in my local rationality dojo, as teaching is a great way to learn, naturally.
Finally, I plan to integrate some CFAR techniques into Intentional Insights content, at least the more simple techniques that are a good fit for the broad audience with which InIn is communicating.
Benefits
I have a strong probabilistic belief that having attended the workshop will improve my capacity to be a person who achieves my goals for doing good in the world. I anticipate I will be able to figure out better whether the projects I am taking on are the best uses of my time and energy. I will be more capable of avoiding procrastination and other forms of akrasia. I believe I will be more capable of making better plans, and acting on them well. I will also be more in touch with my emotions and intuitions, and be able to trust them more, as I will have more alignment among different components of my mind.
Another benefit is meeting the many other people at CFAR who have similar mindsets. Here in Columbus, we have a flourishing rationality community, but it’s still relatively small. Getting to know 70ish people, attendees and staff/volunteers, passionate about rationality was a blast. It was especially great to see people who were involved in creating new rationality strategies, something that I am engaged in myself in addition to popularizing rationality - it’s really heartening to envision how the rationality movement is growing.
These benefits should resonate strongly with those who are aspiring rationalists, but they are really important for EA participants as well. I think one of the best things that EA movement members can do is studying rationality, and it’s something we promote to the EA movement as part of InIn’s work. What we offer is articles and videos, but coming to a CFAR workshop is a much more intense and cohesive way of getting these benefits. Imagine all the good you can do for the world if you are better at planning, organizing, and enacting EA-related tasks. Rationality is what has helped me and other InIn participants make the major impact that we have been able to make, and there are a number of EA movement members who have rationality training and who reported similar benefits. Remember, as an EA participant, you can likely get a scholarship with a partial or full coverage of the regular $3900 price of the workshop, as I did myself when attending it, and you are highly likely to be able to save more lives as a result of attending the workshop over time, even if you have to pay some costs upfront.
Hope these thoughts prove helpful to you all, and please contact me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org if you want to chat with me about my experience.
May Outreach Thread
Please share about any outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly, whether recent or not, which you have not yet shared on previous Outreach threads. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline, a form of cognitive altruism that contributes to creating a flourishing world. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
[Link] Salon piece analyzing Donald Trump's appeal using rationality
I'm curious about your thoughts on my piece in Salon analyzing Trump's emotional appeal using rationality-informed ideas. My primary aim is using the Trump hook to get readers to consider the broader role of Systems 1 and 2 in politics, the backfire effect, wishful thinking, emotional intelligence, etc.
Monthly Outreach Thread
Please share about any outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly, whether recent or not, which you have not yet shared on previous Outreach threads. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline, a form of cognitive altruism that contributes to creating a flourishing world. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
The Science of Effective Fundraising: Four Common Mistakes to Avoid
This article will be of interest primarily for Effective Altruists. It's also cross-posted to the EA Forum.
Summary/TL;DR: Charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. Drawing on academic research across different fields, this article highlights four common mistakes that fundraisers for effective charities should avoid and suggests potential solutions to these mistakes. 1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics; 2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors; 3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors; 4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.
Co-written by Gleb Tsipursky and Peter Slattery
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Stefan Schubert, Scott Weathers, Peter Hurford, David Moss, Alfredo Parra, Owen Shen, Gina Stuessy, Sheannal Anthony Obeyesekere and other readers who prefer to remain anonymous for providing feedback on this post. The authors take full responsibility for all opinions expressed here and any mistakes or oversights. Versions of this piece will be published on The Life You Can Save blog and the Intentional Insights blog.
Intro
Charities that use their funds effectively to make a social impact frequently struggle to fundraise effectively. Indeed, while these charities receive plaudits from those committed to measuring and comparing the impact of donations across sectors, many effective charities have not successfully fundraised large sums outside of donors focused highly on impact.
In many cases, this situation results from the beliefs of key stakeholders at effective charities. Some think that persuasive fundraising tactics are “not for them” and instead assume that presenting hard data and statistics will be optimal as they believe that their nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself.
The belief that a nonprofit’s effectiveness can speak for itself can be very harmful to fundraising efforts as it overlooks the fact that donors do not always optimise their giving for social impact. Instead, studies suggest that donors’ choices are influenced by many other considerations, such as a desire for a warm glow, social prestige, or being captured by engrossing stories. Indeed, charities that have the biggest social impact often get significantly less financial support than rivals that tell better stories but have a smaller social impact. For example, while one fundraiser collected over $700,000 to remove a young girl from a well and save a single life, most charities struggle to raise anything proportionate for causes that could save many more lives or lift thousands out of poverty.
Given these issues, the aim of this article is to use available science on fundraising and social impact to address some of the common misconceptions that charities may have about fundraising and, hopefully, make it easier for effective charities to also become more effective at fundraising. To do this it draws on academic research across different fields to highlight four common mistakes that those who raise funds for effective charities should avoid and suggest potential solutions to these mistakes.
Don’t forget individual victims
Many fundraisers focus on using statistics and facts to convey the severity of the social issues they tackle. However, while fact and statistics are often an effective way to convince potential donors, it is important to recognise that different people are persuaded by different things. While some individuals are best persuaded to do good deeds through statistics and facts, others are most influenced by the closeness and vividness of the suffering. Indeed, it has been found that people often prefer to help a single identifiable victim, rather than many faceless victims; the so-called identifiable victim effect.
One way in which charities can cover all bases is to complement their statistics by telling stories about one or more of the most compelling victims. Stories have been shown to be excellent ways of tapping emotions, and stories told using video and audio are likely to be particularly good at creating vivid depictions of victims that compel others to want to help them.
Don’t overemphasise the problem
Focusing on the size of the problem has been shown to be ineffective for at least two reasons. First, most people prefer to give to causes where they can save the greatest portion of people. This means that rather than save 100 out of 1,000 victims of malaria, the majority of people would rather use the same or even more resources to save all five out of five people stranded on a boat or one girl stranded in a well with the same amount of resources, even if saving 100 people is clearly the more rational choice. People being reluctant to help where they feel their impact is not going to be significant is often called the drop in the bucket effect.
Second, humans have a tendency to neglect the scope of the problem when dealing with social issues. This is called scope insensitivity: people do not scale up their efforts in proportion to a problem’s true size. For example, a donor willing to give $100 to help one person might only be willing to give $200 to help 100 people, instead of the proportional amount of $10,000.
Of course charities often need to deal with big problems. In such cases one solution is to break these big problems into smaller pieces (e.g., individuals, families or villages) and present situations on a scale that the donor can relate to and realistically address through their donation.
Don’t assume that matching donations is always a good way to spend funds
Charitable fundraisers frequently put a lot of emphasis on arranging for big donors to offer to match any contributions from smaller donors. Intuitively, donation matching seems to be a good incentive for givers as they will generate twice (sometimes three times) the social impact for donating the same amount. However, research provides insufficient evidence to support or discourage donation matching: after reviewing the evidence, Ben Kuhn argues that its positive effects on donations are relatively small (and highly uncertain), and that sometimes the effects can be negative.
Given the lack of strong supporting research, charities should make sure to check that donation matching works for them and should also consider other ways to use their funding from large donors. One option is to use some of this money to cover experiments and other forms of prospect research to better understand their donors’ reasons for giving. Another is to pay various non-program costs so that a charity may claim that more of the smaller donors’ donations will go to program costs, or to use big donations as seed money for a fundraising campaign.
Don't forget to empower donors and help them feel good
Charities frequently focus on showing tragic situations to motivate donors to help. However, charities can sometimes go too far in focusing on the negatives as too much negative communication can overwhelm and upset potential donors, which can deter them from giving. Additionally, while people often help due to feeling sadness for others, they also give for the warm glow and feeling of accomplishment that they expect to get from helping.
Overall, charities need to remember that most donors want to feel good for doing good and ensure that they achieve this. One reason why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was such an incredibly effective approach to fundraising was that it gave donors the opportunity to have a good time, while also doing good. Even when it isn’t possible to think of a clever new way to make donors feel good while donating, it is possible to make donors look good by publicly thanking and praising them for their donations. Likewise it is possible to make them feel important and satisfied by explaining how their donations have been key to resolving tragic situations and helping address suffering.
Conclusion
Remember four key strategies suggested by the research:
1) Focus on individual victims as well as statistics
2) Present problems that are solvable by individual donors
3) Avoid relying excessively on matching donations and focus on learning about your donors
4) Empower your donors and help them feel good.
By following these strategies and avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will not only provide high-impact services, but will also be effective at raising funds.
[Link] Op-Ed on Brussels Attacks
Trigger warning: politics is hard mode.
"How to you make America safer from terrorists" is the title of my op-ed published in Sun Sentinel, a very prominent newspaper in Florida, one of the most swingiest of the swing states in the US for the presidential election, and the one with the most votes. The maximum length of the op-ed was 450 words, and it was significantly edited by the editor, so it doesn't convey the full message I wanted with all the nuances, but such is life. My primary goal with the piece was to convey methods of thinking more rationally about politics, such as to use probabilistic thinking, evaluating the full consequences of our actions, and avoiding attention bias. I used the example of the proposal to police heavily Muslim neighborhoods as a case study. Hope this helps Floridians think more rationally and raises the sanity waterline regarding politics!
EDIT: To be totally clear, I used guesstimates for the numbers I suggested. Following Yvain/Scott Alexander's advice, I prefer to use guesstimates rather than vague statements.
[Video] The Essential Strategies To Debiasing From Academic Rationality
Newsjacking for Rationality and Effective Altruism
Summary: This post describes the steps I took to newsjack a breaking story to promote Rationality and Effective Altruism ideas in an op-ed piece, so that anyone can take similar steps to newsjack a relevant story.
Introduction
Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story. It should be done as early as possible in the life cycle of a news story for maximum impact for drawing people's attention to your ideas.

Some of you may have heard about the Wounded Warrior Project scandal that came to light five days ago or so. This nonprofit that helps wounded veterans had fired its top staff for excessively lavish spending and building Potemkin village-style programs that were showpieces for marketing but did little to help wounded veterans.
I scan the news regularly, and was lucky enough to see the story as it was just breaking, on the evening of March 10th. I decided to try to newsjack this story for the sake of Rationality and Effective Altruist ideas. With the help of some timely editing by EA and Rationality enthusiasts other than myself - props to Agnes Vishnevkin, Max Harms, Chase Roycraft, Rhema Hokama, Jacob Bryan, and Yaacov Tarko - TIME just published my piece. This is a big deal, as now one of the first news stories people see when they type "wounded warrior" into Google, as you can see from the screenshot below, is a story promoting Rationality and EA-themed ideas. Regarding Rationality proper, I talk about horns effect and scope neglect, citing Eliezer's piece on it in the post itself, probably the first link to Less Wrong from TIME. Regarding EA, I talked about about effective giving, and also EA organizations such as GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, Animal Charity Evaluators, and effective direct-action charities such as Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly. Many people are searching for "wounded warrior" now that the scandal is emerging, and are getting exposure to Rationality and EA ideas.
Newsjacking a story like this and getting published in TIME may seem difficult, but it's doable. I hope that the story of how I did it and the steps I lay out, as well as the template of the actual article I wrote, will encourage you to try to do so yourself.
Specific Steps
1) The first step is to be prepared mentally to newsjack a story and be vigilant about scanning the headlines for any story that is relevant to Rationality or EA causes. The story I newsjacked was about a scandal in the nonprofit sector, a breaking news story that occurs at regular intervals. But a news story about mad cow disease spreading spreading from factory farms might be a good opportunity to write about Animal Charity Evaluators, or a news story about the Zika virus might be a good opportunity to write about how we still haven't killed off malaria (hint hint for any potential authors). While those are specifically EA-related, you can inject Rationality into almost any news story by pointing out biases, etc.
2) Once you find a story, decide what kind of angle you want to write about, write a great first draft, and get it edited. You are welcome to use my TIME piece as an inspiration and template. I can't stress getting it edited strong enough, the first draft is always going to be only the first draft. You can get friends to help out, but also tap EA resources such as the EA Editing and Review FB group, and the .impact Writing Help Slack channel. You can also get feedback on the LW Open Thread. Get multiple sets of eyes on it, and quickly. Ask more people than you anticipate you need, as some may drop out. For this piece, for example, I wrote it on the morning and early afternoon of Friday March 11th, and was lucky enough to have 6 people review it by the evening, but 10 people committed to actually reviewing it - so don't rely on all people to come through.
3) Decide what venues you will submit it to, and send out the piece to as many appropriate venues as you think are reasonable. Here is an incomplete but pretty good list of places that accept op-eds. When you decide on the venues, write up a pitch for the piece which you will use to introduce the article to editors at various venues. Your pitch should start with stating that you think the readers of the specific venue you are sending it to will be interested in the piece, so that the editor knows this is not a copy-pasted email but something you specifically customized for that editor. Then continue with 3-5 sentences summarizing the article's main points and any unique angle you're bringing to it. Your second paragraph should describe your credentials for writing the piece. Here's my successful pitch to Time:
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Good day,
I think TIME readers will be interested in my timely piece, “Why The Wounded Warrior Fiasco Hurts Everyone (And How To Prevent It).” It analyzes the problems in the nonprofit sector that lead systematically to the kind of situation seen with Wounded Warrior. Unlike other writings on this topic, the article provides a unique angle by relying on neuroscience to clarify these challenges. The piece then gives clear suggestions for how your readers as individual donors can address these kinds of problems and avoid suffering the same kind of grief that Wounded Warrior supporters are dealing with. Finally, it talks about a nascent movement to reform and improve the nonprofit sector, Effective Altruism.
My expertise for writing the piece comes from my leadership of a nonprofit dedicated to educating people in effective giving, Intentional Insights. I also serve as a professor at Ohio State, working at the intersection of history, psychology, neuroscience, and altruism, enabling me to have credibility as a scholar of these issues. I have written for many popular venues, such as The Huffington Post, Salon, The Plain Dealer, Alternet, and others, which leads me to believe your readership will enjoy my writing style.
Hope you can use this piece!
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4) I bet I know what at least some of you are thinking. My credentials make it much easier for me to publish in TIME than someone without those credentials. Well, trust me, you can get published somewhere :-) Your hometown paper or university paper is desperately looking for good content about breaking stories, and if you can be the someone who provides that content, you can get EA and Rationality ideas out there. Then, you can slowly build up a base of publications that will take you to the next level.
Do you think I started with publishing in The Huffington Post? No, I started with my own blog, and then guest blogging for other people, then writing op-eds for smaller local venues which I don't even list anymore, and slowly over time got the kind of prominence that leads me to be considered for TIME. And it's still a crapshoot even for me: I sent out more than 30 pitches to editors at different prominent venues, and a number turned down the piece, before TIME accepted it. When it's accepted, you have to let editors at places that prefer original content, which is most op-ed venues, who get back to you and express interest, know that you piece has already been published - they may still publish it, or they may not, but likely not. So the fourth step is to be confident in yourself, try and keep trying, if you feel that this type of writing is a skill that you can contribute to spreading Rationality/EA.
5) There's a fifth step - repurpose your content at venues that allow republication. For instance, I wrote a version of this piece for The Life You Can Save blog, for the Intentional Insights blog, and for The Huffington Post, which all allow republication of other content. Don't let your efforts go to waste :-)
Conclusion
I hope this step-by-step guide to newsjacking a breaking story for Rationality or EA will encourage you to try it. It's not as hard as it seems, though it requires effort and dedication. It helps to know how to write well for a broad public audience in promoting Rationality and EA ideas, which is what we do at Intentional Insights, so email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org if you want training in that or to discuss any other aspects of marketing such ideas broadly. You're also welcome to get in touch with me if you'd like editing help on such a newsjacking effort. Good luck spreading these ideas broadly!
P.S. To amplify the signal and get more people into EA and Rationality modes of thinking, you are welcome to share the story I wrote for TIME.
Outreach Thread
Based on an earlier suggestion, here's an outreach thread where you can leave comments about any recent outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
9 Strategies for Effective Donors
Summary: This piece is mainly of relevance to EA-oriented Less Wrongers. It provides 9 strategies meant to help donors be more effective. It's prompted by conversations about the desire for more introductory-style pieces on various issues aimed at newer members of the EA movement who are trying to get up to speed on both intellectual and pragmatic issues around becoming full-fledged participants. I welcome you to suggest improvements on the strategies described here, and also add other strategies that you think are important.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Rhema Hokama for providing feedback on this post. Any mistakes or oversights and I take full responsibility for all opinions expressed here. Versions of this piece will be published on The Life You Can Save blog and the Intentional Insights blog.
Introduction
You're generous and kind. You care about other people and want to help them have great lives. You want to make a positive impact on the world and give from your heart to worthy causes. You're a great person!
Yet there's a niggling feeling of doubt at the back of your head when you donate. How do you know that you're giving to the right causes? How do you know that you're giving the right amount and at the right time? How do you know that your generous gifts of time and money actually have the kind of impact you want on the world?
Yet some donors don't have that doubt. They are confident that they give to the right causes, the right amount, and that they are getting what they paid for with their generosity and kindness. They are effective donors!
What are their secrets? They still listen to their heart -- that's why they want to give in the first place -- but they combine the heart and the head to give effectively and avoid giving regret. You can be an effective donor too, and be truly confident that you're making the best decisions with your giving by following nine simple strategies.
1. Be Intentional
Knowledge is power! Effective donors are intentional about figuring out their aims and strategies for giving. They take the time to sit down and decide what goals they want to achieve through their generosity. They think about the kind of impact they want to have in the world. They decide what causes are most important to them - poverty, disease, animal welfare - and rank them by order of importance. Consider the benefit of donations to meta-charities that promote effective giving in the first place. Now, this ranking can be quite difficult to achieve, and there's no right answer, as it depends on your values. Follow this strategy, and you'll know that you are giving to the causes that are right for you!
2. Listen To Yourself
Another rule that effective donors use to give to the right causes is to make sure to listen to themselves above everyone else. They know that they themselves should determine their giving decisions. While they don't let anyone dictate to them what to do, they listen to and consider the opinions of others, and shift their mental maps of reality based on new information they did not know before. Indeed, effective donors are masters at changing their minds with appropriate evidence. However, the key is that they do so for their own reasons, not to please others.
3. Budget Well
There are so many great causes out there that you can't reasonably contribute to all of them. Effective donors prevent that problem by preparing a giving budget! They decide in advance how much resources they want to spend, of both time and money. They distribute their resources to the causes they outlined above by order of importance to themselves. If you do so yourself, you'll be confident that you are giving the right amount!
4. Plan Ahead
Effective donors plan their giving in advance. They know that most people tend to give during the winter holidays, but charities need money throughout the year. So they time their giving to counter the "holiday effect." They also know that charities most benefit from monthly donors who automate monthly donations from their bank accounts or credit cards. Monthly donors enable charities to plan ahead themselves and make the most effective use of each dollar. Another benefit of monthly donations is that effective donors get to feel positive emotions every month when they get a warm thank-you note from the nonprofit. Since both giving and experiencing gratitude are science-based strategies for improving happiness, effective donors are happier! Likewise, effective donors take advantage of holidays to give to nonprofits. By using this strategy, you can ensure that you are giving at the right time, for your own happiness and satisfaction, and for the charities to which you give.
5. Be Flexible
Effective donors are flexible about their giving. They know that their resources change over time in unexpected ways. For example, they might get an unexpected bonus, and decide they have more to give each month. However, they might be laid off and then have less money to give, but more time. They revise their giving budget and plan to make sure it aligns with their resources and priorities. You can commit to giving something every month but allow yourself to change this plan as your circumstances change. Doing so will enable you to make sure you keep giving the right amount and at the right time, no matter what happens.
6. Be Smart
You're a smart shopper. You don't buy the first thing you see on television or in the store window. You take the time to gain confidence that you'll get what you want, for example by reading reviews from well-known websites. Similarly, effective donors don't give to the first charity that puts a commercial on television, or has volunteers going door-to-door or standing in the street and asking for money. In fact, super-donors know that the charity that spends its money on commercials and volunteer time on gathering donations is not using those resources to make an impact in the world. Super-donors read reviews of charities by reputable charity evaluators. For example, GiveWell provides extensive research and makes recommendations for the kind of charities that make the most powerful and positive impact on the world in various cause areas. The Life You Can Save provides not only recommendations, but also an Impact Calculator that can help you see right away what kind of impact your giving can make! Using such tactics will help you make sure that you make the impact you want on the world with your generosity and kindness.
7. Be Effective
You can also gain confidence about your shopping decisions by talking to other smart shoppers. Those shoppers are generally glad to give you advice - they feel good helping you make wise shopping decisions and get to share their knowledge! Similarly, you can talk to effective donors to ensure that your generous donations are going to the best place. More broadly, they can share lots of strategies for being an effective donor. To get some good tips online, you can check out the Effective Altruism Facebook group, read the Effective Altruism Wiki, or simply put the phrase "Effective Altruism" into a search engine and see what comes up. Even better is joining in-person meetings, and you can find a local one near you at the Effective Altruism Hub, or by contacting the Local Effective Altruism Network.
8. Be Committed
It’s not easy to keep remembering to make donations and overcoming that part of us that wants to keep the money for ourselves. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that used by effective donors! Precommitment is a psychological strategy to help us ensure that our future selves will act in accordance with our current desires. In other words, you can help ensure that your future you will keep making the kind of donations that you want to make. The easiest way of doing so is to take a pledge, such as the Giving What We Can or The Life You Can Save pledge, to commit a portion of your income to charity.
9. Be Proud
Effective donors are not only committed to giving intentionally, but also proud of doing so! They spread this message of the benefits of being an effective donor to others they know. They know that doing so helps other people have better lives by getting rid of that niggling doubt at the back of their heads, and also channels their giving in the most effective fashion. Following this strategy by starting conversations with friends and family, being public about your good deeds, as well as sharing this article with others, can help you multiply the kind of positive impact you have on the world!
Conclusion
I hope these strategies prove helpful to you. I welcome your thoughts about this piece, and encourage you to suggest improvements on the strategies described here, and also add other strategies that you think are important.
Religious and Rational?
Reverend Caleb Pitkin, an aspiring rationalist and United Methodist Minister, wrote an article about combining religion and rationality which was recently published on the Intentional Insights blog. He's the only Minister I know who is also an aspiring rationalist, so I thought it would be an interesting piece for Less Wrong as well. Besides, it prompted an interesting discussion on the Less Wrong Facebook group, so I thought some people here who don't look at the Facebook group might be interested in checking it out as well. Caleb does not have enough karma to post, so I am posting it on his behalf, but he will engage with the comments.
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Religious and Rational?
“Wisdom shouts in the street; in the public square she raises her voice.”
Proverbs 1:20 Common English Bible
The Biblical book of Proverbs is full of imagery of wisdom personified as a woman calling and extorting people to come to her and listen. The wisdom contained in Proverbs is not just spiritual wisdom but also contains a large amount of practical wisdom and advice. What might the wisdom of Proverbs and rationality have in common? The wisdom literature in scripture was meant to help people make better and more effective decisions. In today’s complex and rapidly changing world we have the same need for tools and resources to help us make good decisions. One great source of wisdom is methods of better thinking that are informed by science.
Now, not everyone would agree with comparing the wisdom of Proverbs with scientific insights. Doing so may not sit well with some in the secular rationality community who view all religion as inherently irrational and hindering clear thinking. It also might not sit well with some in my own religious community who are suspicious of scientific thinking as undermining traditional faith. While it would take a much longer piece to try to completely defend either religion or secular rationality I’m going to try and demonstrate some ways that rationality is useful for a religious person.
The first way that rationality can be useful for a religious person is in the living of our daily lives. We are faced with tasks and decisions each day that we try to do our best in. Learning to recognize common logical fallacies or other biases, like those that cause us to fail to understand other people, will improve our decision making as much as it improves the thinking of non-religious people. For example, a mother driving her kids to Sunday School might benefit from avoiding thinking that the person who cuts her off is definitely a jerk, one common type of thinking error. Some doing volunteer work for their church could be more effective if they avoid problematic communication with other volunteers. This use of rationality to lead our daily lives in the best way is one that most would find fairly unobjectionable. It’s easy to say that the way we all achieve our personal goals and objectives could be improved, and we can all gain greater agency.
Rationality can also be of use in theological commentary and discourse. Many of the theological and religious greats used the available philosophical and intellectual tools of their day to examine their faith. Examples of this include John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas and even the Apostle Paul when he debated Epicurean and Stoic Philosophers. They also made sure that their theologies were internally, rational and logical. This means that, from the perspective of a religious person, keeping up with rationality can help with the pursuit of a deeper understanding of our faith. For a secular person acknowledging the ways in which religious people use rationality within their worldview may be difficult, but it can help to build common ground. The starting point is different. Secular people start with the faith that they can trust their sensory experience. Religious people start with conceptions of the divine. Yet, after each starting point, both seek to proceed in a rational logical manner.
It is not just our personal lives that can be improved by rationality, it’s also the ways in which we interact with communities. One of the goals of many religious communities is to make a positive impact on the world around them. When we work to do good in community we want that work to be as effective as possible. Often when we work in community we find that we are not meeting our goals or having the kind of significant impact that we wish to have. It is my experience this is often a failure to really examine and gather the facts on the ground. We set off full of good intentions but with limited resources and time. Rational examination helps us to figure out how to match our good intentions with our limited resources in the most effective way possible. For example as the Pastor of two small churches money and people power can be in short supply. So when we examine all the needs of our community we have to acknowledge we cannot begin to meet all or even most of them. So we take one issue, hunger, and devote our time and resources to having one big impact on that issue. As opposed to trying to be a little bit to alleviate a lot of problems.
One other way that rationality can inform our work in the community is to recognize that part of what a scarcity of resources means is that we need to work together with others in our community. The inter-faith movement has done a lot of good work in bringing together people of faith to work on common goals. This has meant setting aside traditional differences for the sake of shared goals. Let us examine the world we live in today though. The amount of nonreligious people is on the rise and there is every indication that it will continue to do so. On the other hand religion does not seem to be going anywhere either. Which is good news for a pastor. Looking at this situation, the rational thing to do is to work together, for religious people to build bridges toward the non-religious and vice versa.
Wisdom still stands on the street calling and imploring us to be improved--not in the form of rationalist street preachers, though that idea has a certain appeal-- but in the form of the growing number of tools being offered to help us improve our capacity for logic, for reasoning, and for the tools that will enable us take part in the world we live in.
Everyone wants to make good decisions. This means that everyone tries to make rational decisions. We all try but we don’t always hit the mark. Religious people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions. Secular people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions. Yes, we have different starting points and it’s important to acknowledge that. Yet, there are similarities in what each group wants out of their lives and maybe we have more in common than we think we do.
On a final note it is my belief that what religious people and what non-religious people fear about each other is the same thing. The non-religious look at the religious and say God could ask them to do anything... scary. The religious look at the non-religious and say without God they could do anything... scary. If we remember though that most people are rational and want to live a good life we have less to be scared of, and are more likely to find common ground.
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Bio: Caleb Pitkin is a Provisional Elder with the United Methodist Church appointed to Signal Mountain United Methodist Church. Caleb is a huge fan of the theology of John Wesley, which ask that Christians use reason in their faith journey. This helped lead Caleb to Rationality and participation in Columbus Rationality, a Less Wrong meetup that is part of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio. Through that, Caleb got involved with Intentional Insights. Caleb spends his time trying to live a faithful and rational life.
Conveying rational thinking about long-term goals to youth and young adults
[Link] How I Escaped The Darkness of Mental Illness
The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruism-aligned Less Wrongers. Thanks to Agnes Vishnevkin, Jake Krycia, Will Kiely, Jo Duyvestyn, Alfredo Parra, Jay Quigley, Hunter Glenn, and Rhema Hokama for looking at draft versions of this post. At least one aspiring rationalist who read a draft version of this post, after talking to his girlfriend, decided to adopt this new Valentine's Day tradition, which is some proof of its impact. The more it's shared, the more this new tradition might get taken up, and if you want to share it, I suggest you share the version of this post published on The Life You Can Save blog. It's also cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and on the EA Forum.
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The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives
Last year, my wife gave me the most romantic Valentine’s Day gift ever.
We had previously been very traditional with our Valentine’s Day gifts, such as fancy candy for her or a bottle of nice liquor for me. Yet shortly before Valentine’s Day, she approached me about rethinking that tradition.
Did candy or liquor truly express our love for each other? Is it more important that a gift helps the other person be happy and healthy, or that it follows traditional patterns?
Instead of candy and liquor, my wife suggested giving each other gifts that actually help us improve our mental and physical well-being, and the world as a whole, by donating to charities in the name of the other person.
She described an article she read about a study that found that people who give to charity feel happier than those that don’t give. The experimenters gave people money and asked them to spend it either on themselves or on others. Those who spent it on others experienced greater happiness.
Not only that, such giving also made people healthier. Another study showed that participants who gave to others experienced a significant decrease in blood pressure, which did not happen to those who spent money on themselves
So my thoughtful wife suggested we try an experiment: for Valentine’s Day, we'd give to charity in the name of the other person. This way, we could make each other happier and healthier, while helping save lives at the same time. Moreover, we could even improve our relationship!
I accepted my wife’s suggestion gladly. We decided to donate $50 per person, and keep our gifts secret from each other, only presenting them at the restaurant when we went out for Valentine’s Day.
While I couldn’t predict my wife’s choice, I had an idea about how she would make it. We’ve researched charities before, and wanted to find ones where our limited dollars could go as far as possible toward saving lives. We found excellent charity evaluators that find the most effective charities and make our choices easy. Our two favorites are GiveWell, which has extensive research reports on the best charities, and The Life You Can Save, which provides an Impact Calculator that shows you the actual impact of your donation. These data-driven evaluators are part of the broader effective altruism movement that seeks to make sure our giving does the most good per dollar. I was confident my wife would select a charity recommended by a high-quality evaluator.
On Valentine’s Day, we went to our favorite date night place, a little Italian restaurant not far from our house. After a delicious cheesecake dessert, it was time for our gift exchange. She presented her gift first, a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. With her $50 gift in my name, she bought 20 large bed-size nets that would protect families in the developing world against deadly malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In turn, I donated $50 to GiveDirectly, in her name. This charity transfers money directly to recipients in some of the poorest villages in Africa, who have the dignity of using the money as they wish. It is like giving money directly to the homeless, except dollars go a lot further in East Africa than in the US.
We were so excited by our mutual gifts! They were so much better than any chocolate or liquor could be. We both helped each other save lives, and felt so great about doing so in the context of a gift for the other person. We decided to transform this experiment into a new tradition for our family.
It was the most romantic Valentine’s Day present I ever got, and made me realize how much better Valentine’s Day can be for myself, my wife, and people all around the world. All it takes is a conversation about showing true love for your partner by improving her or his health and happiness. Is there any reason to not have that conversation?
The Charity Impact Calculator
This will be of interest mainly to EA-friendly LWs, and is cross-posted on the EA Forum, The Life You Can Save, and Intentional Insights
The Life You Can Save has an excellent tool to help people easily visualize and quantify the impact of their giving: the Impact Calculator. It enables people to put in any amount of money they want, then click on a charity, and see how much of an impact their money can have. It's a really easy way to promote effective giving to non-EAs, but even EAs who didn't see it before can benefit. I certainly did, when I first played around with it. So I wrote a blog post, copy-pasted below, for The Life You Can Save and for Intentional Insights, to help people learn about the Impact Calculator. If you like the blog, please share this link to The Life You Can Save blog, as opposed to this post. Any feedback on the blog post itself is welcomed!
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How a Calculator Helped Me Multiply My Giving
It feels great to see hope light up in the eyes of a beggar in the street as you stop to look at them when others pass them by without a glance. Their faces widen in a smile as you reach into your pocket and take out your wallet. "Thank you so much" is such a heartwarming phrase to hear from them as you pull out five bucks and put the money in the hat in front of them. You walk away with your heart beaming as you imagine them getting a nice warm meal at McDonalds due to your generosity.
Yet with the help of a calculator, I learned how to multiply that positive experience manifold! Imagine that when you give five dollars, you don’t give just to one person, but to seven people. When you reach into your pocket, you see seven smiles. When you put the money in the hat, you hear seven people say “Thank you so much.”
The Life You Can Save has an Impact Calculator that helps you calculate the impact of your giving. You can put in any amount of money you want, then click on a charity of your choice, and see how much of an impact your money can have.
When I learned about this calculator, I decided to check out how far $5 can take me. I went through various charities listed there and saw the positive difference that my money can make.
I was especially struck by one charity, GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that enables you to give directly to people in East Africa. When I put in $5, I saw that what GiveDirectly does is transfers that money directly to poor people who live on an average of $.65 per day. You certainly can’t buy a McDonald’s meal for that, but $.65 goes far in East Africa.
That really struck me. I realized I can get a really high benefit from giving directly to people in the developing world, much more than I would from giving to one person in the street here in the US. I don’t see those seven people in front of me and thus don’t pay attention to the impact I can have on them, a thinking error called attentional bias. Yet if I keep in mind this thinking error, I can solve what is known as the “drowning child problem” in charitable giving, namely not intuitively valuing the children who are drowning out of my sight. If I keep in my mind that there are poor people in the developing world, just like the poor person I see on the street in front of me, I can remember that my generosity can make a very high impact, much more impact per dollar than in the US, in developing countries through my direct giving.
GiveDirectly bridges that gap between me and the poor people across the globe. This organization locates poor people who can benefit most from cash transfers, enrolls them in its program, and then provides each household with about a thousand dollars to spend as it wishes. The large size of this cash transfer results in a much bigger impact than a small donation. Moreover, since the cash transfer is unconditional, the poor person can have true dignity and spend it on whatever most benefits them.
Helida, for example, used the cash transfer she got to build a new house. You wouldn’t intuitively think that was most useful thing for her to do, would you? But this is what she needed most. She was happy that as a result of the cash transfer “I have a metal roof over my head and I can safely store my farm produce without worries.” She is now much more empowered to take care of herself and her large family.
What a wonderful outcome of GiveDirectly’s work! Can you imagine building a new house in the United States on a thousand dollars? Well, this is why your direct donations go a lot further in East Africa.
With GiveDirectly, you can be much more confident about the outcome of your generosity. I know that when I give to a homeless person, a part of me always wonders whether he will spend the money on a bottle of cheap vodka. This is why I really appreciate that GiveDirectly keeps in touch and follows up with the people enrolled in its programs. They are scrupulous about sharing the consequences of their giving, so you know what you are getting by your generous gifts.
GiveDirectly is back by rigorous evidence. They conduct multiple randomized control studies of their impact, a gold standard of evidence. The research shows that cash transfer recipients have much better health and lives as a result of the transfer, much more than most types of anti-poverty interventions. Its evidence-based approach is why GiveDirectly is highly endorsed by well-respected charity evaluators such as GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, which are part of the Effective Altruist movement that strives to figure out the best research-informed means to do the most good per dollar.
So next time you pass someone begging on the street, think about GiveDirectly, since you can get seven times as much impact, for your emotional self and for the world as a whole. What I do myself is each time I choose to give to a homeless person, I set aside the same amount of money to donate through GiveDirectly. That way, I get to see the smile and hear the “thank you” in person, and also know that I can make a much more impactful gift as well.
Check out the Impact Calculator for yourself to see the kind of charities available there and learn about the impact you can make. Perhaps direct giving is not to your taste, but there are over a dozen other options for you to choose from. Whatever you choose, aim to multiply your generosity to achieve your giving goals!
[Link] Video Presentation: Rationality 101 for Secular People
Secular people are a natural target group for pitching rationality, since they don't suffer from one of the most debilitating forms of irrationality and also because they have warm fuzzies toward the concept of reason. From reason, it's easy to transition toward what it would be reasonable to do, namely be reasonable about how our minds work and how we should improve them. I did a Rationality 101 for Secular People presentation that was pretty successful, with a number of people following up and showing an interest in gaining further rationality knowledge. Here's a video of the presentation I made, and it has the PP slides I made uploaded into SlideShare. Anyone who wishes to do so is free to use these materials for their own needs, whether sharing the video with secular friends or doing a version of this workshop for local secular groups.
Spreading rationality through engagement with secular groups
The Less Wrong meetup in Columbus, OH is very oriented toward popularizing rationality for a broad audience (in fact, Intentional Insights sprang from this LW meetup). We've found that doing in-person presentations for secular groups is an excellent way of attracting new people to rationality, and have been doing that for a couple of years now, through a group called "Columbus Rationality" as part of the local branch of the American Humanist Association. Here's a blog post I just published about this topic.
Most importantly for anyone who is curious with experimenting doing something like this, we at Intentional Insights have put together a “Rationality” group starter package, which includes two blog posts describing “Rationality” events, three videos, a facilitator’s guide, an introduction guide, and a feedback sheet. We've been working on this starter package for about 9 months, and finally it's in a shape that we think it's ready for use. Hope this is helpful for any LWs who want to do something similar with a secular group where you live. You can also get in touch with us at info@intentionalinsights.org to get connected to current participants in “Columbus Rationality” who can give you tips on setting up such a group in your own locale.
[Link] Lifehack article promoting rationality-themed ideas, namely long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency
Here's my article in Lifehack, one of the most prominent self-improvement websites, bringing rationality-style ideas to a broad audience, specifically long-term orientation, mere-exposure effect, consider-the-alternative, and agency :-)
P.S. Based on feedback from the LessWrong community, I made sure to avoid mentioning LessWrong or rationality in the article.
[Link] Huffington Post article about dual process theory
Published a piece in The Huffington Post popularizing dual-process theory in layman's language.
P.S. I know some don't like using terms like Autopilot and Intentional to describe System 1 and System 2, but I find from long experience that these terms resonate well with a broad audience. Also, I know dual process theory is criticized by some, but we have to start somewhere, and just explaining dual process theory is a way to start bridging the inference gap to higher meta-cognition.
Intentional Insights and the Effective Altruism Movement – Q & A
This post is cross-posted on the EA forum and is mainly of interest to EAs. It focuses on the engagement of Intentional Insights with the EA movement, and does not address the engagement of InIn with promoting rationality-informed strategies, which is a hotly-debated issue.
Introduction
I wanted to share InIn’s background and goals and where we see ourselves as fitting within the EA movement. I also wanted to allow all of you a chance to share your opinions about the benefits and drawbacks of what InIn is doing, put forth any reservations, concerns, and risks, and provide suggestions for optimization.
Background
InIn began in January 2014, when my wife and I decided to create an organization dedicated to marketing rational, evidence-based thinking in all areas of our lives, especially charitable giving, to a broad audience. We decided to do so because we looked around for organizations that would provide marketing resources for our own local activism in Columbus, OH, trying to convey these ideas to a broad public and found no such organizations. So we decided – if not us, then who? If not now, then when? My wife would use her experience in nonprofits to run the organisation, while I would use my experience as a professor to work on content and research.
We gathered together a group of local aspiring rationalists and Effective Altruists interested in the project, and launched the organization publicly in 9/2014. We got our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, began running various content marketing experiments, and established the internal infrastructure. We also built up a solid audience in the secular and skeptical market, who we saw as the easiest-to-reach audience with promoting effective giving and rational thinking. By the early fall of 2015, we had established some connections and reputation, a solid social media following, and our articles began to be accepted in prominent venues that reach a broad audience, such as The Huffington Post and Lifehack. At that point, we felt comfortable enough to begin our active engagement with the EA movement, as we felt we could provide added value.
Fit in EA Movement
As an Effective Altruist, I have long seen opportunities of optimization in the marketing of EA ideas using research-based, modern content marketing strategies. I did not feel comfortable speaking out about that until I had built up InIn enough to be able to speak from a position of some expertise in the early fall of 2015, and to demonstrate right away the benefit we could bring through publishing widely-shared articles that promoted EA messages.
Looking back, I wish I had started engaging with the EA Forum sooner. It was a big mistake on my part that caused some EAs to treat InIn as a sudden outsider that burst on the scene. Also, our early posts were perceived as too self-promotional. I guess this is not surprising, looking back – although the goal was simply to demonstrate our value, the content marketing nature of our work does show through. Ah well, lessons learned and something to update on for the future.
As InIn has become more engaged in various projects within the EA movement, we have begun to settle on how to add value to the EA community and have formulated our plans for future work.
1) We are promoting EA-themed effective giving ideas to a broad audience through publishing shareable articles in prominent venues.
1A) Note: we focus on spreading ideas like effective giving without associating them overtly with the movement of Effective Altruism, though leaving buried hooks to EA in the articles. This approach has the benefit minimizing the risk of diluting the movement with less value-aligned members, while leaving opportunities for those who are more value-aligned to find the EA movement. Likewise, we don’t emphasize EA as we believe that overt uses of labels can lead some people to perceive our messages as ideological, which would undermine our ability to build rapport with them.
2) We are specifically promoting effective giving to the secular and skeptic community, as we see this audience as more likely to be value aligned, and also have strong existing connections with this audience.
3) We are providing content and social media marketing consulting to the EA movement, both EA meta-charities and prominent direct-action charities.
4) We are collaborating with EA meta-charities in boosting the marketing capacities of the EA movement as a whole being.
5) We are helping build EA capacity around effective decision-making and goal achievement through providing foundational rationality knowledge.
6) By using content marketing to promote rationality to a broad audience, we are aiming to help people be more clear-thinking, long-term oriented, empathetic, and utilitarian. This not only increases their own flourishing, but also expands their circles of caring beyond biases based on geographical location (drowning child problem), species (non-human animals), and temporal distance (existential risk).
Conclusion
InIn is engaged in both EA capacity-building and movement-building, but movement-building of a new type, not oriented toward directing people into the EA movement, but getting EA habits of thinking into the broader world. I specifically chose not to include our achievements in doing so in this post, as I had previously fallen into the trap of including too much and being perceived as self-promotional as a result. However, if you wish, you can learn more about the organization and its activities at this link.
What are your impressions on the value of this fit of InIn within the EA movement and our plans, including advantages and disadvantages, as well as suggestions for improvement? We are always eager to learn and improve based on feedback from the community.
Why You Should Be Public About Your Good Deeds
(This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and is cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the EA Forum)
When I first started donating, I did so anonymously. My default is to be humble and avoid showing off. I didn’t want others around me to think that I have a stuffed head and hold too high an opinion of myself. I also didn’t want them to judge my giving decisions, as some may have judged them negatively. I also had cached patterns of associating sharing about my good deeds publicly with feelings that I get from commercials, of self-promotion and sleaziness.
I wish I had known back then that I could have done much more good by publicizing my donations and other goods deeds, such as signing the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of my income to effective charities, or being public about my donations to CFAR on this LW forum post.
Why did I change my mind about being public? Let me share a bit of my background to give you the appropriate context.
As long as I can remember, I have been interested in analyzing how and why individuals and groups evaluated their environment and made their decisions to reach their goals – rational thinking. This topic became the focus of my research as a professor at Ohio State in the history of science, studying the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields.
While most of my colleagues focused on research, I grew more passionate about sharing my knowledge with others, focusing my efforts on high-quality, innovative teaching. I perceived my work as cognitive altruism, sharing my knowledge about rational thinking, and students expressed much appreciation for my focus on helping them make better decisions in their lives. Separately, I engaged in anonymous donations to causes such as poverty alleviation.
Yet over time, I realized that by teaching only in the classroom, I would have a very limited impact, since my students were only a small minority of the population I could potentially reach. I began to consult academic literature on how to spread my knowledge broadly. Through reading classics in the field of social influence such as Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Made To Stick, I learned a great many strategies to multiply the impact of my cognitive altruism work, as well as my charitable giving.
One of the most important lessons was the value of being public about my activities. Both Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and subsequent research showed that our peers deeply impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We tend to evaluate ourselves based on what our peers think of us, and try to model behaviors that will cause others to have positive opinions about us. This applies not only to in-person meetings, but also online communities.
A related phenomenon, social proof, illustrates how we evaluate appropriate behavior based on how we see others behaving. However, research also shows that people who exhibit more beneficial behaviors tend to avoid expressing themselves to those with less beneficial behaviors, resulting in overall social harm.
Learning about the importance of being public, including in online communities that reach far more people than in-person communities, especially by people engaging in socially beneficial habits, led to a deep transformation in my civic engagement. While it was not easy to overcome my shyness, I realized I had to do it if I wanted to optimize my positive impact on the world – both in cognitive altruism and in effective giving.
I shared this journey of learning and transformation with my wife, Agnes Vishnevkin, an MBA and non-profit professional. Together, we decided to co-found a nonprofit dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective giving to a broad audience using research-based strategies for maximizing social impact, Intentional Insights. Uniting with others committed to this mission, we write articles, blogs, make videos, author books, program apps, and collaborate with other organizations to share these ideas widely.
I also rely on research to make other decisions, such as my decision to take the Giving What We Can pledge. The strategy of precommitment is key here – we make a decision in a state where we have the time to consider their consequences in the long term, and specifically wish to constrain the options of our future selves. That way, we can plan within a narrowed range of options and make the best possible use of the resources available to us.
Thus, I can plan to live on 90% of my income over my lifetime, and plan to decrease some of my spending in the long term so that I can give to charities that I believe are most effective for making the kind of impact I want to see in the world.
Knowing about the importance of publicizing my good deeds and commitments, I recognize that I can do much more good by sharing my decision to take the pledge with others. All of us have friends, and the large majority of us have social media channels and we all have the power to be public about our good deeds. You can also consider fundraising for effective charities, and being an advocate for effective altruism in your community.
According to the scholarly literature, by being public about our good deeds we can bring about much good in the world. Even though it may not feel as tangible as direct donations, sharing with others about our good deeds and supporting others doing so may in the end allow us to do even more good.
"The Difference Between Medicine and Poison is Dosage" Shirts and Bags
Happy to share that, after multiple rounds of feedback, here is the set of rationality-themed T-shirts and bags with the slogan that got most support from the community, "The Difference Between Medicine and Poison is Dosage."

These t-shirts and bags are an effort to update based on the feedback received on the original set of rationality shirts and optimizing suggestions. This includes use of graphic images in the words, use of more professional designers, etc. We went back to the drawing board, and tried to design a new shirt that used a slogan that was quite popular. We ran the design by the Less Wrong FB group a couple of times (1, 2) and this is the final product.
As you can see, there are two styles available, one with "Dosage" empty and with the image of the dropper, and one with "Dosage" filled in and without the dropper. Various colors, sizes, and materials are available for each shirt/bag.
The first style is available for purchase on CafePress here.
The second style is available for purchase on CafePress here.
Look forward to hearing about your experience and thoughts about these t-shirts and bags, and the impact they make in carrying good rationality-themed memes into the world! We will be making more shirts and running them by the community as we did with these. All revenue will go into promoting rational thinking strategies to a broad audience.
Support Promoting Effective Giving
This is cross-posted from the EA Forum and will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists
Brief Summary
This post describes the work of Intentional Insights to promote EA-style effective giving ideas to a broad audience in order to channel people's giving to effective charities. It does not address the kind of work that Intentional Insights does to promote rationality outside of Effective Altruism, which is a distinct topic, addressed in recent posts (1, 2, 3). InIn sees promoting effective giving as a really important area of our work, one that contributes both to promoting rational thinking and thus raising the sanity waterline, and to what CFAR refers to as "Do-Gooding," meaning making the world a better place and advancing human flourishing.
This post first shares the methods InIn uses to promote effective giving, describes the outcomes of InIn's work, presents various collaborations with other organizations, describes InIn's financials, and shares its plans for the future, within the sphere of EA. The post is explicitly a request for support, and makes a case for how by contributing your time and talents, and/or your money, to InIn as an EA meta-charity you can make a bigger difference in the world to advance human flourishing than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity. The point of doing so is that an EA you should not contribute your resources to InIn as a meta-charity if you don't think that by doing so you can do more good for the world than by contributing to a GiveWell-recommended direct-action charity.
Full post
Introduction
Intentional Insights aims to spread EA-themed effective giving ideas to a broad audience, and channel the giving activities of non-EAs into effective charities endorsed by GiveWell. In other words, by contributing time and money to Intentional Insights, EAs can get the outcome of non-EAs giving to effective charities, multiplying the impact of their support to effective charities manifold. Moreover, you can support InIn with time as well as with money, while GiveWell-endorsed charities are generally best supported with money.
Methods
How does InIn promote effective giving? We use modern content marketing strategies and speak to people’s hearts as well as their heads. We distinguish promoting effective giving and individual EA organizations from promoting EA as a movement, to avoid the threat of rapid movement growth, while still leaving hidden hooks that would enable those interested to find the movement. We orient toward being quite transparent about what we are doing, getting feedback from members of the EA community and updating based on that feedback, including acknowledging mistakes and trying to improve going forward.
Specific Examples of Our EA Work
- As a specific example of our work, we published this article on The Huffington Post, which was shared on social media over 1K times. A general rule of thumb is that for every person who shares an article on social media, about 100 people read it thoroughly, and many more skim it. This article is impactful for shifting people’s giving toward effective charities. 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 did not comment about it.
- Another example. Here is a link to the outcome of an Intentional Insights collaboration with The Life You Can Save and the Secular Student Alliance to spread effective giving to secular and skeptic-oriented communities through Giving Games. This article explains the strong impact of Giving Games, and shows how they direct people’s giving to effective charities.
These examples illustrate the kind of work that we do: publishing pieces that promote effective giving directly, and collaborating with other organizations to promote effective giving through their channels. Besides our direct work promoting effective giving, we also promote rational thinking and effective decision-making strategies, which helps EAs build their capacity, and has a variety of other robustly positive outcomes for human flourishing. To learn more about the methods, assumptions, and impact of Intentional Insights, check out our Theory of Change and our Annual Report.
I want to highlight that InIn is a new project, and promoting effective giving ideas, as opposed to EA as a movement, is a new field of endeavor for EAs. So I would be enthusiastic to learn about what reservations folks have. We are quite open to revising the nature of our work if it seems we are headed in a suboptimal direction, and want to learn more from the community about what the community thinks about what works, and proceeding forward in a collaborative truth-seeking spirit about what would most benefit human flourishing.
Future Plans
In the next year, we are planning to expand our activities in promoting effective giving in five major directions:
- We aim to experiment with new forms of content, such as list-style articles, memes, and short videos. We want to see what types of content works best for promoting effective giving messages for which specific audiences, and build up a knowledge bank on that topic.
- While experimenting, we also plan to test rigorously the impact of our content to see what kind of impact our content has on people’s giving behavior. We want to conduct randomized control studies to see whether people change their giving behavior after engaging with InIn content and InIn-sponsored activities such as the Giving Games for secular and skeptic audiences.
- We want to use our strong connections with US and international secular and skeptic organizations to spread effective giving ideas to these communities. Afterward, we want to spread effective giving to liberal churches such as the Unitarian Universalists, with whom we also have solid connections.
- We plan to expand our collaboration with EA meta-charities, as well as highly effective direct-action charities. We want to find areas where we can add the most value to the movement based on our internal expertise and capacities, and add that value in a way that benefits all parties. We have had a number of conversations with a variety of different organizations and more are scheduled in the next few weeks (The Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can, EA Action, GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation), and have some promising projects in the works. Likewise, by promoting direct-action charities such as GiveDirectly and AMF, we allow these organizations to save money on their marketing. This helps these organizations appear better in the eyes of less well-educated donors who do not understand the value of spending resources on marketing and want all their money to go toward programming.
- We would like to develop a resource bank that would enable EAs around the world to promote effective giving to a broad audience. This resource bank would enable EAs in local groups to learn content marketing strategies quickly, with guides for marketing strategies and other tools for this purpose. It would also hold a bank of direct content and templates that promotes effective giving ideas, such as articles, videos, memes, t-shirts, etc. Local EAs would then take whatever they need and adapt it to their local context – whether translating it to other languages, putting in a hook that ties it to a local event, etc.
Financials
Financially, we have just started our fundraising outside of a narrow circle of initial supporters, since we wanted to get our content to a level where it would be publishable in The Huffington Post. Our basic operations budget is $42050, and we are currently in the red, with the co-founders covering about 88% of the basic expenses, which is not sustainable past the next year. We also want funding to get a new website and integrated donor and financial database, and most importantly hire a staff member, since we are an all-volunteer organization, and that is not sustainable in the long run. You can see our funding breakdown and priorities at the bottom of the Annual Report.
Conclusion
To conclude, the reason you would support InIn as an EA meta-charity, over a direct-action charity endorsed by GiveWell, is that by doing so you would highly likely direct many more dollars into effective charities than by contributing to direct-action charities themselves. Likewise, you can support InIn effectively with your time and talents, while direct-action charities would generally benefit most from financial contributions. Of course, as the section on InIn financial needs discusses, it needs some financial contributions as well, so make your own decisions about what kind of impact you want to see in the world through your donations.
Next Steps
If you would like to support this work to promote effective giving to a broad audience, but are not sure yet how you would like to do so, please fill out this supporters form. If you are interested in contributing your time, for example to creating content, providing feedback, or developing the resource bank, please fill out this volunteers form. If you are capable of financial donations and are interested in using your dollars to channel the spending of others into effective giving, please donate. The next ten days are a very high-leverage opportunity to donate, as InIn was awarded a challenge grant – if we get 10 new donors and 10 monthly donors by the end of the year, we will get $2000. So donations from new monthly donors, which double-count, are particularly welcomed.
Thanks again, and I look forward to your thoughts and feedback! You can also PM me on the forum or email me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Feedback on op-ed highlighting the dangers of the OpenAI project
I'm really worried about the OpenAI project recently discussed on this forum, and want to use the platform and credibility I have with my leadership of Intentional Insights and public reputation to try to publish an op-ed in something like the Huffington Post highlighting the dangers of the OpenAI project. Now, most people don't think of AI as a threat: they either don't know much about it, or think of it as a futuristic thing that only nerds care about.
So the purpose of the op-ed is to use emotions, visualization, narrative, and other engaging tactics to do the following: tie AI to something people are concerned about, namely terrorism; highlight the dangers of a personal AI through framing it as a potential weapon; finally, provide people with clear next steps to take by encouraging people to learn about AI safety and donating to MIRI, as well as writing to OpenAI. This has the meta-goal, of course, of getting people to think about MIRI and AI safety.
I'd appreciate feedback on ways to optimize the op-ed to achieve the goals outlined above better. Keep in mind, the op-ed is limited to 700 words, and it's about at that limit, so if you suggest adding something, please keep it as succinct as possible, and ideally suggest taking something away as well. The op-ed draft is below the black line. Thanks!
EDIT Based on feedback from Eliezer Yudkowsy, Mack Hidalgo, and Eliot Redelman, it seems this is not the optimal path to pursue at this time, and I updated to avoiding publishing this. You can see the discussion here.
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Will Tomorrow's Terrorists Be Armed By Utopian Billionaires?
The horrible attacks in San Bernadino, in Paris, and in other western countries show the dangers of terrorism. Terrorists associated with ISIS used bombs and guns to murder dozens and hundreds of innocent people, at the expense of their own lives. Yet utopian billionaires have recently donated over a billion dollars to a project that can give the terrorists of tomorrow a much more powerful weapon, capable of killing dozens and hundreds of thousands, without sacrificing their own lives.
What is this futuristic weapon? It’s a personal artificial intelligence unit. This personal AI would have superhuman intelligence and capacity to manipulate the world.
Imagine what a terrorist could do with this weapon. Without any knowledge of programming, he could direct it to hack into the air traffic control system and cause hundreds of plane crashes. For another transportation example, he can cause all the lights in a city to turn green at once, leading to thousands of car crashes. Perhaps he can have it hack into a nuclear power plant and override its safety systems, resulting in a nuclear meltdown. There are so many other things that an AI can do.
Why would billionaires provide such a weapon to terrorists? For the noblest of reasons.
There are a number of governments and companies working on advancing AI research. Worried about the possibility of anyone getting there first and using the power of for themselves, a number of prominent tech luminaries – people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman – contributed over a billion dollars to found a non-profit called OpenAI. Their goal is to create advanced AI and provide it to the public freely, embodying the spirit of open technology.
In a recent interview with Steven Levy of Backchannel, Musk described the goal as follows: “we want AI to be widespread… to the degree that you can tie it to an extension of individual human will, that is also good. As in an AI extension of yourself, such that each person is essentially symbiotic with AI as opposed to the AI being a large central intelligence that’s kind of an other.”
Let’s take a step back and think about Musk’s statement rationally. On the one hand, it’s appealing to have a personal AI and not have it be under the control of a government entity. This model would work well if we assume all people are basically good. Yet the terrorist attacks provide definitive evidence they are not. What do we do about that?
Musk states: “I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.”
There is a huge problems with that position, what is known as the “attacker’s advantage.” Imagine two people with guns. If the first takes the gun out and shoots the other, it doesn’t matter if the second had the gun in their pocket. By the same token, if a terrorist’s AI hacks into an air traffic control tower and causes your plane to crash, it doesn’t matter if you had an AI too.
An AI is simply too dangerous to give to individuals who may have bad intentions. Terrorism is only the most extreme example. Imagine a bar fight with a room full of drunk people who tell their AIs to attack the other people. Imagine a riot after a football team loses with AIs involved. I shudder at the possibilities.
A much better scenario is for a central agency to have control over AI. Ideally, this central agency would orient toward creating a human-friendly AI that would serve human flourishing, a topic currently being researched by another non-profit organization, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Something you can do practically to counter the nightmare scenarios of OpenAI is to contribute to MIRI’s efforts, as well as write to OpenAI at info@openai.com and encourage them to change the nature of their project.
There is no doubt that artifical intelligence will come about, but it’s vital to make sure it comes about in a manner conducive to humanity’s wellbeing.
Promoting Effective Giving Using List-Style Articles
This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists and Cross-posted on the EA forum
Wanted to get community feedback and optimization suggestions on promoting effective giving using list-style articles.
The purpose for list-style articles would be similar to other types of effective giving content, namely to lead people to shift their giving toward more effective charities from less effective ones. To be clear, it is not to get people to join the Effective Altruism movement, to avoid the danger of rapid movement growth (see this video and paper). It is also not to get people to go down the Earning To Give path, as most likely only a small portion of people should go down that road, and moreover the EA movement as such faces a higher talent gap than funding gap. Instead, the goal is to redirect some of the hundreds of billions spent per year on charitable giving toward effective causes.
Now, getting to why use list-style articles as such. On the one hand, most list-style articles pattern-match with shallow content, not something that Less Wrongers typically appreciate - in fact, there has been some intense debate about this topic. On the other hand, list-style articles are one of the most widely read and shared types of content on the web, and there are specific strategies for doing high-quality list-style articles.
One concern is that these articles might be a turn-off for people who are oriented toward more high-brow content, and would not be inclined to learn about effective giving and especially effective altruism due to it being presented in a list-style article form. To address this concern, I think we should aim to avoid using the term "Effective Giving" and certainly "Effective Altruism" in the title of a list-style article. Thus, anyone just glancing at the headline would not be turned off by seeing this term in association with a list-style article. Only the people who click on the article and read it would learn about this term and the organizations associated with it. Since the readers of a list-style article are the ones who would enjoy list-style articles and not be put off by them, they would be highly unlikely to be negatively impacted by this type of article and the message of effective giving as conveyed by it, and instead would be impacted positively, on a weak to strong range.
To practice an experimental and data-gathering approach, I decided to try to publish a list-style article, and got this one, "8 Secrets of Savvy Donors," placed in The Huffington Post. It does not reference effective giving in the title, but talks about it in the body of the text. It is written in an engaging manner, has a clear narrative, conveys emotions, has a variety of images, and conveys a mixture of helpful ideas with promotion of EA organizations, such as Giving What We Can, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save. It briefly mentions effective altruism as a movement, but does not specifically tie positive emotions with it, and suggests readers contact effective altruists for strategies on donating effectively. I suspect this is the first EA-written and EA-themed list-style article, but please correct me if I'm wrong - I know EAs made other broad-type content, such as memes, but not list-style articles.
Posted less than 48 hours ago, this article is spreading organically on social media with minimum publicity. I have not yet shared it with any EA groups, but it has already been shared more than 160 times on StumbleUpon, for example, as of the time of this writing (most articles published at the same time as this one on The Huffington Post Impact section, where this article was published, have less than 20 social shares). Social media shares provide significant evidence of reader enthusiasm for this article, since people are willing to put their personal social capital into sharing the article for their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, StumbleUpon followers etc. to read. Of course, social media sharing also has the additional benefit of many more people getting exposed to the content - a general rule of thumb is that for every social media share, 100 people read the article thoroughly, and many more skim it.
Another benefit of list-style articles is that they are well suited for fellow EAs to share on their social media. This is because EAs who are social media savvy know that this type of article will be more likely to be read by non-EAs in their social circle, and shared by other EAs. Thus, EAs can help spur social sharing of this type of article strategically, knowing the positive consequences of doing so.
A more broad medium-term goal would be to provide a depository of such articles that EAs can draw from and adapt to their local context. All of you should feel free to do so as well. Another medium-term goal is to have some EAs who specialize in marketing effective giving ideas for a broad audience. This should help address one area of talent gap in the current EA movement. For more on promoting effective giving from a systematic perspective, see this post.
Now, I'd appreciate your thoughts on this article. Does it work to convey the benefits of effective giving in an easy-to-read and engaging manner? Knowing about the benefits of sharing this type of article, would you share this article on your social media?
Also, would appreciate your thoughts on the meta issues, the strategy of using list-style articles as a way of spreading EA-style ideas about effective giving. Thanks!
Effective Giving vs. Effective Altruism
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.
[Link] Video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, on dealing with the hindsight bias and overconfidence
Here's a video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, Emeritus Professor at Ohio State, and Intentional Insights Advisory Board member, on dealing with hindsight bias and overconfidence. This was at a presentation hosted by Intentional Insights and the Columbus, OH Less Wrong group. It received high marks from local Less Wrongers, so I thought I'd share it here.
Maximizing Donations to Effective Charities

Don’t you want your charitable efforts to do the utmost good they can in the world? Imagine how great it feels to know that you’re making the most difference with your gift. Yet how do you figure out how to bring about this outcome? Maximizing the impact of your money requires being intentional and strategic with your giving.
Let me share my personal perspective on giving intentionally. I am really passionate about using an evidence-based approach to do the most good with my donations. I take the time to research causes so that my money and time go to the best charities possible. Moreover, I have taken the Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save pledges to dedicate a sizable chunk of my income to effective charities. It felt great to take those pledges, and to commit publicly to effective giving throughout my life.
I am proud to identify as an effective altruist: a member of a movement dedicated to combining the heart and the head, using research and science to empower the urges of my emotional desire to make the world a better place. I pay close attention to data-driven charity evaluators such as GiveWell. The large majority of effective altruists closely follow its guidance. GiveWell focuses on charities that do direct activities to improve human life and alleviating suffering and have a clearly measurable impact. One example is Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), one of The Life You Can Save's recommended charities and one of four of GiveWell’s top choice charities for 2015.
Yet while I give to AMF, it and other highly effective charities represent only a small fraction of my donated time and money. This might sound surprising coming from an effective altruist. Why don’t I conform to the standard practice of most effective altruists and donate all of my money and time to these effective, research-based, well-proven charities?
First, let me say that I agree with most effective altruists that reducing poverty via highly effective charities that work directly on poverty alleviation is very worthwhile, and I do make donations to highly effective charities. In fact, this morning I donated enough money for AMF to buy two mosquito bed nets to protect families from malaria-carrying mosquitoes. I certainly got positive feelings from knowing that my gift will go directly towards saving lives, and have a very clear and measurable impact on the world
Yet when I make large or systematic contributions of money and time, effective charity is not where I give. I don't think donating to these direct-action charities is the best use of my own money and time. After all, my goal is to save lives and maximize cash flow to effective charities, whether or not I’m personally giving money to effective organizations. To evaluate the impulses coming from my heart to ensure that my actions match my actual goals, I take the time to sit down and consult my head.
I use rational decision-making strategies such as a MAUT analysis to evaluate where my giving would make the most difference in getting resources to effective charities. As a result, I have spent the majority of my money and time on higher-level, strategic giving that channels other people’s donations towards more effective charities, facilitating many more donations to them than I alone could provide.
This is why I am passionate about contributing to the kind of projects that spread widely the message of effective giving. Doing so doesn’t necessarily involve getting other people to become part of the effective altruist movement. Instead, it prompts them to adapt effective giving strategies such as taking the time to list their goals for giving, consider their giving budgets, research the best charities, and use data-based charity evaluators to choose the optimal charity that matches their giving goals.
What does spreading these messages involve? Since there are few organizations devoted to spreading effective giving strategies to a broad audience, I decided to practice charity entrepreneurship. Together with my wife, I co-founded a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to spreading effective giving and rational thinking strategies, Intentional Insights (InIn). InIn creates content devoted to this purpose, for example this article about how I became an effective altruist in the first place. Such articles, published in the organization’s own blog and places such as the Huffington Post and Lifehack, are shared widely online, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers. For example, a recent Lifehack article I published was shared over 2.5 thousand times on social media. A widely-used general estimate is that for every 1 person who shares an article, 100 people read an article thoroughly, while many more skim it. Plenty of people follow the links back to the organizations mentioned in the articles I publish, including organizations devoted to effective giving when the article deals with that topic.
For some, a single article that makes a strong enough case is sufficient to sway their thinking. For example, I published an article in The Huffington Post that combines an engaging narrative, emotions, and a rational argument to promote giving to effective charities as opposed to ineffective ones. This article explicitly highlighted the benefits of Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell's top choice for 2015. On a higher, meta level, it encouraged giving to effective charities, and using GiveWell and The Life You Can Save, including its Impact Calculator, to make decisions about giving. I also want to express gratitude to Elo and others who helped give suggestions to improve my writing in the future regarding this specific article.
Despite these opportunities for improvement, as you'll see from this Facebook comment on my personal page, it helped convince someone to decide to donate to an effective charity. 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. In fact, the article was shared quite widely on social media, so it made quite some impact, and still going - the StumbleUpon clicks went from 50ish to over 1K in the last couple of days, for example.
However, others need more than a single article. I place myself in that number - I generally want significant exposure to ideas and shift my mind gradually. Or perhaps the initial articles I read did not make a strong enough case. In any event, like many others, I first discovered the idea of effective giving through an article, and followed the breadcrumbs in the links to GiveWell, Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save, and other similar organizations. I was then intrigued enough to go to a presentation about it given by Max Harms. While already oriented toward effective giving by my previous reading, the presentation sold me on effective altruism as a movement. Presentations give people a direct opportunity to engage with and consider in-depth the big questions surrounding effective giving. This is why I devote my time and money not only into writing articles, but also into promoting effective altruist-themed presentations.
For example, I am collaborating with Jon Behar from The Life You Can Save to spread Giving Games. This participatory presentation educates the audience about effective giving by providing all participants with a pool of actual money, $10 per attendee, and has them discuss fundamental questions about where to give that money. In the course of the Giving Game, participants explore their values and motivations for donations, what kind of evidence they should use to evaluate charities, and how to avoid thinking errors in their giving. After the discussion, the group votes which charity should get the money. The Life You Can Save then donates that money on behalf of the group.
InIn has strong connections with reason-oriented organizations due to our focus on spreading rational thinking, and is partnering with The Life You Can Save to bring the Giving Game to these organizations, starting with the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). The SSA is an international organization uniting hundreds of reason-oriented student clubs around the world, but mainly in the United States. I proposed the idea to August Brunsman, the Executive Director of the SSA and a member of the InIn Advisory Board. He himself is passionate about promoting social justice, but had little familiarity with Effective Altruism. I told him more about Effective Altruism and the Giving Game model, and he and other SSA staff members decided to approve the event. Together, InIn and The Life You Can Save created a Giving Game event specifically targeted to SSA clubs, and the SSA is now actively promoting the Giving Game to its members.
I am delighted with this outcome. As a former member President of a SSA club, I can attest that my past self would have been very eager to host this type of event. Looking back, I would have greatly benefitted from taking the time to sit down, discuss, and reflect seriously on my giving in a context where my decision had real-world consequences. This is the type of activity that would have strongly impacted my thinking and behavior around donations going forward. The Life You Can Save has dedicated $10,000 to its initial pilot program for SSA members, and has promised to fundraise more if it works out, but at least 1000 students will participate in these games as a result of the collaboration between InIn and The Life You Can Save.
How much impact will this have on the world? I cannot say for sure. I do not have the kind of carefully defined measures of impact that GiveWell can provide for direct-action charities. Indeed, it is really difficult to measure the actual impact of any marketing efforts. The best we can do is to build chains of evidence. For example, this article that suggests a powerful long-term impact of donations to support Giving Games. Such estimates apply more broadly to contributions that promote effective giving to the public.
Sure, it is hard to know for sure the exact effects that my efforts spreading the message of effective giving has on the world. Yet when I sit down and think about it, and make my decisions rationally, I am very happy to dedicate my large donations, my monthly giving, as well as my systematic volunteer efforts to publicizing the message of effective giving. While it does not get me the same warm feelings as giving to direct action charities, when I use my head to direct my heart I realize that sponsoring such activities makes the most difference to maximizing donations to effective charities.
[Link] Huffington Post article promoting Effective Altruist ideas
Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers
Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The Huffington Post.
This piece is part of my broader work at Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to promoting effective altruism and rational thinking to a broad audience effectively, by using modern promotion and marketing methods. Our goals with this and similar articles is to channel both money to effective charities and encourage people to think about donations in a rational, science-based, data-driven manner. These articles are also aimed to be a good fit for those supportive of EA ideas to share with others on social media, to help encourage non-EAs to adopt effective giving strategies, since the articles are aimed to be easy to read and engaging.
I'd love your feedback on how well you think this article works in accomplishing the goals outlined above, both strengths and weaknesses, to help me improve my writing and to help Intentional Insights improve its efforts. For those of you who are EA-oriented, would you share this on your social media? Why or why not?
Also, I would value any ideas on how to evaluate the QALYs gained from channeling people's money and thinking toward effective giving, as that's something we at Intentional Insights are trying to figure out. For example, how many QALYs are gained from publishing an article like this in a broad venue such as The Huffington Post? What are good approaches to estimating this number? The best we came up with so far is a first-order intuitive gut reactions of how much would you pay to not have this article and its influence on people disappear, so I'd be curious about your response to this question.
P.S. Note that based on previously-expressed concerns about purity of content and the rationality/Less Wrong brand, we at Intentional Insights have updated and are no longer presenting ourselves publicly as promoting rationality or Less Wrong explicitly, though we are bringing up rationality and Less Wrong to those who have engaged with our content extensively and are guiding them first to ClearerThinking and then to Less Wrong.
P.P.S. I'd be glad to speak to anyone who wants to know more about and collaborate on promoting effective altruism and rationality to a broad audience by using modern promotion and marketing methods, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and the EA Forum.
Promoting rationality to a broad audience - feedback on methods
We at Intentional Insights, the nonprofit devoted to promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, are finalizing our Theory of Change (a ToC is meant to convey our goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics). Since there's recently been extensive discussion on LessWrong of our approaches to promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, one that was quite helpful for helping us update, I'd like to share our Theory of Change with you and ask for your feedback.
Here's the Executive Summary:
- The goal of Intentional Insights is to create a world where all rely on research-based strategies to make wise decisions and lead to mutual flourishing.
- To achieve this goal, we believe that people need to be motivated to learn and have broadly accessible information about such research-based strategies, and also integrate these strategies into their daily lives through regular practice.
- We assume that:
- some natural and intuitive human thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns are flawed in ways that undermine wise decisions.
- problematic decision making undermines mutual flourishing in a number of life areas.
- these flawed thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns can be improved through effective interventions.
- we can motivate and teach people to improve their thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns by presenting our content in ways that combine education and entertainment.
- Our intervention is helping people improve their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior to enable them to make wise decisions and bring about mutual flourishing.
- Our outputs, what we do, come in the form of online content such as blog entries, videos, etc., on our channels and in external publications, as well as collaborations with other organizations.
- Our metrics of impact are in the form of anecdotal evidence, feedback forms from workshops, and studies we run on our content.
Here is the full version.
I'd appreciate any feedback on the full version from fellow Less Wrongers, on things like content, concepts, structure, style, grammar, etc. I look forward to updating the organization's goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics based on your thoughts. Thanks!
[Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS
Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.
[Link] Lifehack Article Promoting LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Nice to get this list-style article promoting LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies, as part of a series of strategies for growing mentally stronger, published on Lifehack, a very popular self-improvement website. It's part of my broader project of promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, Intentional Insights.
EDIT: To be clear, based on my exchange with gjm below, the article does not promote these heavily and links more to Intentional Insights. I was excited to be able to get links to LessWrong, Rationality Dojo, and Rationality: From AI to Zombies included in the Lifehack article, as previously editors had cut out such links. I pushed back against them this time, and made a case for including them as a way of growing mentally stronger, and thus was able to get them in.
Optimizing Rationality T-shirts
Thanks again for all the feedback on the first set of Rationality slogan t-shirts, which Intentional Insights developed as part of our broader project of promoting rationality to a wide audience. As a reminder, the t-shirts are meant for aspiring rationalists to show their affiliation with rationality, to remind themselves and other aspiring rationalists to improve, and to spread positive memes broadly. All profits go to promoting rationality widely.
For the first set, we went with a clear and minimal style that conveyed the messages clearly and had an institutional affiliation, based on the advice Less Wrongers gave earlier. While some liked and bought these, plenty wanted something more stylish and designed. As an aspiring rationalist, I am glad to update my beliefs. So we are going back to the drawing board, and trying to design something more stylish.
Now, we are facing the limitation of working with a print on demand service. We need to go with POD as we can't afford to buy shirts and then sell them, it would cost way too much to do so. We decided on CafePress as the most popular and well-known service with the most variety of options. It does limit our ability to design things, though.
So for the next step, we got some aspiring rationalist volunteers for Intentional Insights to find a number of t-shirt designs they liked, and we will create t-shirts that use designs of that style, but with rationality slogans. I'd like to poll fellow Less Wrongers for which designs they like most among the ones found by our volunteers. I will list links below associated with numbers, and in comments, please indicate the t-shirt numbers that you liked best, so that we can make those. Also please link to other shirts you like, or make any other comments on t-shirt designs and styles.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Thanks all for collaborating on optimizing rationality t-shirts!
[Link] Mainstreaming Tell Culture
Mainstreaming Tell Culture and other rational relationship strategies in this listicle for Lifehack, a very popular self-improvement website, as part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of promoting rationality and science-based thinking to a broad audience. What are your thoughts about this piece?
“Be A Superdonor!”: Promoting Effective Altruism by Appealing to the Heart
(Cross-posted on The Life You Can Save blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the Effective Altruism Forum).
This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists
Effective Altruism does a terrific job of appealing to the head. There is no finer example than GiveWell’s meticulously researched and carefully detailed reports laying out the impact per dollar on giving to various charities. As a movement, we are at the cutting edge of what we can currently evaluate about the effectiveness of how we optimize QALYs, although of course much work remains to be done.
However, as seen in Tom Davidson’s recent piece, "EA's Image Problem," and my “Making Effective Altruism More Emotionally Appealing,” we currently do not do a very good job of appealing to the heart. We tend to forget Peter Singer’s famous quote that Effective Altruism “combines both the heart and the head.” When we try to pitch the EA movement to non-EAs, we focus on the head, not the heart.
Now, I can really empathize with this perspective. I am much more analytically oriented than the baseline, and I find this to be the case for EAs in general. Yet if we want to expand the EA movement, we can't fall into typical mind fallacy and assume that what worked to convince us will convince others who are less analytical and more emotionally oriented thinkers.
Otherwise, we leave huge sums of money on the table that otherwise could have gone to effective charities. For this reason, I and several others have started a nonprofit organization, Intentional Insights, dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective altruism to a wide audience using effective marketing techniques. Exploring the field of EA organizations, I saw that The Life You Can Save already has some efforts to reach out to a broad audience, through its Charity Impact Calculator and its Giving Games, and actively promoted its efforts.
I was excited when Jon Behar, the COO & Director of Philanthropy Education at TLYCS, reached out to me and suggested collaborating on promoting EA to a broad audience using contemporary marketing methods that appeal to the heart. In a way, this is not surprising, as Peter Singer’s drowning child problem is essentially an effort to appeal to people’s hearts in a classroom setting. Using marketing methods that aim to reach a broad audience is a natural evolution of this insight.
Jon and I problem-solved how to spread Effective Altruism effectively, and came up with the idea of a catchphrase that we thought would appeal to people’s emotions well: “Be a Superdonor!” This catchphrase conveys in a short burst crucial information about Effective Altruism, namely that one can have the most powerful impact of one’s donations through giving to the charities that optimize QALYs for the most.
More importantly, it appeals to the heart well. Superdonor conveys the feeling of power – you can be super in your donations! Superdonor conveys an especially strong degree of generosity. Superdonor conveys a feeling of superiority, as in better than other donors. In other words, even if you donate less, if you donate more effectively, you can still be better than other donors by donating more effectively. This appeals to the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” effect, a powerful force in guiding our spending.
Just as importantly, “Be a Superdonor!” is easily shareable on social media, a vital component of modern marketing in the form of social proof. People get to show their pride and increase their social status by posting on their Facebook or Twitter how they are a Superdonor. This makes their friends curious about what it means to be a Superdonor, since that is an appealing and emotionally resonant phrase. Their friends check out their links, and get to find out about Effective Altruism. Of course, it is important that the link go to a very clear and emotionally exciting description of how one can be a Superdonor through donating.
Likewise, people should get credit for being a Superdonor through getting others to donate through sharing about it on social media, through talking about it to friends, through getting their friends to go to their local EA groups. Thus, we get the power of social affiliation, a crucial aspect of motivation, working on behalf of Effective Altruism. A particularly effective strategy for social affiliation here might be to combine “Be A Superdonor” with Giving Games, both the in-person version that TLYCS runs now and perhaps a web app version that helps create a virtual community setting conducive to social affiliation.
Now, some EAs might be concerned that the EA movement would lose its focus on the head through these efforts. I think that is a valid concern, and we need to be aware of the dangers here. We still need to put energy into the excellent efforts of GiveWell and other effective charity evaluators. We still need to be concerned with existential risk, even if it does not present us in the best light to external audiences.
Therefore, as part of the Superdonor efforts, we should develop compassionate strategies to educate emotionally-oriented newcomers about more esoteric aspects of Effective Altruism. For example, EA groups can have people who are specifically assigned as mentors for new members, who can help guide for their intellectual and emotional development alike. At the same time, we need to accept that some of those emotionally-oriented thinkers will not be interested in doing so.
This is quite fine, as long as we remember our goal of making the strongest impact on the world by optimizing QALYs through not leaving huge sums of money on the table. Consider the kind of benefit you can bring to the EA movement if you can channel the giving of emotionally-oriented thinkers toward effective charities. Moreover, think of the positive network effect of them getting their friends to donate to effective charities. Think of whether you can make a much bigger difference in doing the most good per energy of effort by focusing more of your own volunteering and giving on EA outreach in comparison to other EA-related activities. This is what inspired my own activities at Intentional Insights, and the recent shifts of the TLYCS toward effective outreach.
What are your thoughts about reaching out to more emotionally-oriented thinkers using these and other modern marketing strategies? If you support doing so, what do you think you can do personally to promote Effective Altruism effectively? Would love to hear your thoughts about it in comments below, and happy to talk to anyone who wants to engage with the Intentional Insights project: my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org.
[Link] Rationality and Willpower in LifeHack
Diversifying the genres of spreading rationality as part of my broader project by publishing a listicle, and getting it published in Lifehack, a major online publication. Included a link to Less Wrong in it, guessing this is the first time there's a link to LessWrong in a listicle. What do you think about the article and this genre of spreading rationality?
"How To Become Less Wrong" - Feedback on Article Request
Would appreciate feedback on this article I plan to submit to a broad media publication as part of my broader project of promoting rationality and raising the sanity waterline. Can't make it much longer as I'm at word limit, so if you suggest adding something, also suggest taking something away. The article is below the black line and thanks for any feedback!
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Article - How I Became Less Wrong
On a sunny day in early August, my wife Agnes Vishnevkin and I came to a Rationality Dojo in Columbus, OH. Run by Max Harms, this group is devoted to growing mentally stronger through mental fitness practices. That day, the dojo’s activities focused on probabilistic thinking, a practice of assigning probabilities to our intuitive predictions about the world to improve our ability to evaluate reality accurately and make wise decisions to reach our goals. After learning the principles of probabilistic thinking, we discussed how to apply this strategy to everyday life.
We were so grateful for this practice in early September, when my wife and I started shopping for our new house. We discussed in advance the specific goals we had for the house, enabling us to save a lot of time by narrowing our options. We then spent one day visiting a number of places we liked, rating each aspect of the house important to us on a numerical scale. After visiting all these places, we sat down and discussed the probabilities on what house would best meet our goals. The math made it much easier to overcome our individual aesthetic preferences, and focus on what would make us happiest in the long run. We settled on our top choice, made a bid, and signed our contract.
This sounds like a dry and not very exciting process. Well, we were very excited!
Why? Because we were confident that we made the best decision with the information available to us. The decision to get a new house is one of the biggest financial decisions we will make in our lifetime. It felt great to know that we could not have done any better than we did through applying the principles of probabilistic thinking and other rationality-informed strategies. Of course, we could still be wrong, there are no guarantees in life. Yet we know we did the best we could - we grew less wrong.
These strategies are vital for improving our thinking because our brains are inherently irrational. Research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields from the middle of the twentieth century has discovered hundreds of thinking errors, called cognitive biases. These thinking errors cause us to make flawed decisions – in finances, relationships, health and well-being, politics, etc.
Recently, popular books by scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Chip and Dan Heath, and other scholars have brought these problems from the halls of academia to the attention of the broad public. However, these books have not focused on how we can address these problems in everyday life.
So far, the main genre dedicated to popularizing strategies to improve our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns has been in the field of self-improvement. Unfortunately, self-improvement is rarely informed by science, and instead relies on personal experience and inspiring stories. While such self-improvement activities certainly help many, it is hard to tell whether the impact comes from the actual effectiveness of the specific activities or a placebo effect due to people being inspired to work on improving themselves.
The lack of scientific popularization of strategies dealing with thinking errors in large part resulted from the fact that early scholarly efforts to address thinking errors on an individual level did not lead to lasting improvement. Consequently, the brunt of the scholarship and consequent efforts to address these problems focused on organizations and government policy creating nudges and incentives to get people to “do the right thing.” A recent example is Barack Obama issuing an Executive Order for the federal government to use behavioral science insights in all aspects of its work.
However, research in the last decade, from Keith Stanovich, Hal Arkes, and others revealed that we can fix our thinking, sometimes with a single training. For example, my own research and writing shows how people can learn to reach their long-term goals and find their life meaning and purpose using science-based strategies. This scientific approach does not guarantee the right decision, but it is the best method we currently have, and will improve in the future with more research.
This science is mostly trapped in academic books and articles. I teach on this topic to my college students, and they find it enriching: as one student stated, the class "helped me to see some of the problems I may be employing in my thinking about life and other people." Yet most people do not have university library access, and even if they did, would not be interested in making their way through dense academic writing.
Yet a budding movement called Rationality has been going through the complex academic materials and adapting them to everyday life, as exemplified by Rationality Dojo. This small movement has relatively few public outlets. The website LessWrong is dedicated to high-level discussions of strategies to improve thinking patterns and ClearerThinking offers some online courses on improving decision making. The Center for Applied Rationality offers intense in-person workshops for entrepreneurs and founders. Effective Altruism brings insights from rationality to philanthropy. Intentional Insights is a new nonprofit devoted to popularizing rationality-informed strategies to a broad public through blogs, videos, books, apps, and in-person workshops.
Right now, scholars such as myself are testing the strategies developed by Rationality. My probabilistic estimate is that these studies will show that this science-based form of self-improvement is more effective than self-improvement based on personal experience.
In the meantime, I encourage you to consider science-based strategies adapted to everyday life such as probabilistic thinking. You do not have to be nudged by policy makers and CEOs. Instead, you can be intentional and use rationality to make the best decisions for your own goals!
EDIT: Edited based on comments by Lumifer, NancyLebovitz, Romashka, ChristianKi, Vaniver, RichardKennway
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