Over the next few weeks, the Centre for Effective Altruism will be reaching out to the community to raise funds to support our next year of work.
So far, more than 300 effective altruists have contributed to CEA. If it were not for your help, we would not have been able to create a community of effective givers who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to charity, guide hundreds of graduates into careers that make a difference, advise policy-makers around the world on effective policy, or support the effective altruist movement through events like EA Global. Now we need your continued support to help us build on that work. You can find much more detail in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
As a whole, CEA is committed to making sure that effective altruist ideas reach their potential to shape the world's future for the better. Each of the parts of CEA addresses a different component of that challenge.
- Giving What We Can supports effective donation to charity
- 80,000 Hours helps people lead effective altruist careers
- EA Outreach enables the effective altruist community to grow healthily
- Global Priorities Project helps policy-makers apply EA ideas in their work
Supporting all of this is our operations team which delivers shared services that let each project focus on delivering their core objectives.
Each part of CEA will be raising more this winter to help us hire great people, cover our costs for the year ahead, and make our existing work better and bigger.
- Giving What We Can aims to raise £475,000 and still needs £282,000 to reach that goal.
- 80,000 Hours aims to raise £220,000 and still needs £48,000 to reach that goal.
- EA Outreach aims to raise £474,000 and still needs £274,000 to reach that goal.
- Global Priorities Project aims to raise £300,000 and still needs £160,000 to reach that goal.
- CEA shared services aim to raise £200,000 and still need £150,000 to reach that goal.
Each organisation will be communicating more about their plans and funding needs. You can find an overview of all of our work in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
I'm happy to answer any of your questions here. You can find details on how to donate here. You can also contact us to discuss donations. You can contact any of the project leaders directly using the details available in our prospectus.
This statement is interesting, because it suggests at least some of the disagreement is about priors/reference classes. My prior for the ratio achievable was really quite broad. It sounds like you had a much tighter prior, which would decrease the extent to which you want to update on evidence.
I don't know whether that disagreement is resolvable, but here are some of the thoughts that inform my prior:
You talk about 'profitable', which suggests businesses as a reference class. I agree that that kind of ratio is implausible for businesses, but I think that's a function of competition -- if it were available, someone would have been doing it already and got rich as a result. Monopolists can get much more profitable than non-monopolists. I think there are quite a lot of analogies with a business, so it's not ridiculous to consider them as a reference class, but I also think we understand the basic mechanism which stops them getting too profitable and it doesn't apply here, so we should not weigh this that strongly.
A closer reference class seems to be fundraising for charities. The institute of fundraising estimates median returns for different kind of fundraising activity to vary between around 1.5:1 and around 30:1, depending on the activity (link). The ratio for campaigns to encourage committed giving to the charity running the campaign is around 6:1. Note that these numbers are sustained despite what is probably some competition between charities (I'm mildly surprised by this).
The activity that GWWC is engaging in is not fundraising for itself, but encouraging people to give (and give effectively). Compared to charities fundraising for themselves, there is less competition, and the approach is also more novel: both of these could support more of the low-hanging fruit still being available. Moreover it may be easier to persuade people to give when there is no obvious conflict-of-interest of the charity receiving funds being the same as the people trying to persuade you.
Thanks, this is helpful (though as you predict not by itself not enough to resolve the issue). Fundraising seems a good reference class - not too broad (like 'all businesses' would be) and not too narrow. One comment/question, at least for now:
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