Influenced

Today, I participated in an art project which will be housed at the Brooklyn Art Library. I submitted a small amount of text to an artist who then drew the scene, bringing it to life. The piece is a book containing quotes, notes, and other such things by various people, each of which the artist, Katherine Hess, interpreted and illustrated within the confines of the sketchbook.

What follows is the text that I submitted to this art project:

Thirty years ago, my uncle rescued two people from a burning building. He’s not a firefighter, but he was in the right place at the right time. 

He became a hero that day. Although we don’t bring it up at family events, we know what he did, and we think better of him for it. He’s a hero because when he was put in a position to help, he did. I’d like to think that I would do the same. 

So when I learned about the effective altruism movement, that giving to the most effective charities could save a life just as real and just as important as those that my uncle saved, I decided to start giving a percentage of my income to effective altruism causes. 

For seven years, I’ve saved lives again and again. I don’t bring it up at family events, but I know what I do, and I think better of myself for it. I feel like a superhero, and it feels good. 

You, too, can feel this way. If you live in the developed world, you earn more than enough to donate and save lives every year. Visit effectivealtruism.org to learn more. 

Believe me: it’s worth the expense.

This and other sketchbooks by Katherine Hess are available at The Sketchbook Project. 

Animal Charity Evaluators Introduces the Recommended Charity Quiz

This entry was originally posted on Effective-Altruism.com. It is reposted here for reference only.

[Cross-posted from the ACE blog]

The following post was published on the Animal Charity Evaluators blog earlier this month. We've just released a new recommended charity quiz that allows users to enter in their specific preferences and outputs the best animal charities that correspond to those values. We believe that this is especially appropriate for effective animal advocacy charities, as there may be a higher level of variance depending on initial values than there would be with human-based charity comparisons.

When it comes to reaching out to non-EA audiences, we believe that using quizzes like this may allow us to connect more closely with existing animal advocates who are as-yet unfamiliar with EA ideas like focusing on just the "best" charity. We also want to be wary of relying too closely on expected value calculations, since the cost effectiveness estimates we use are approximations, fail to resolve uncertainty, and are subject to bias, even though we do think they are useful for intervention reports and charity evaluations. For these reasons, we believe that this new recommended charity quiz is both appropriate and useful.

The remainder of this post is copied verbatim from the ACE blog, authored by ACE Research Associate Jamie Spurgeon.

We are excited to announce the launch of our recommended charity quiz. This quiz will allow you to discover charities that match your interests and values, determined by some of the distinguishing features of our recommended charities.

At ACE we are always looking for new ways to engage with our community and help donors connect with the most effective charities. To this end, we recently released an update to our charity comparison chart and now you can use the quiz to receive a personalized recommendation of the three charities that best align with your goals and interests. While we think that reading our reviews is the best way to fully understand why we recommend our Top and Standout Charities, we recognize that reading all of our reviews may take more time than some readers have to invest. The charity quiz can help you to quickly identify charities that you may be particularly interested in, giving you more time to explore those organizations in depth.

TAKE THE QUIZ!

The following information is for those more interested in further explanations of the factors explored in the quiz. In general, the quiz aims to capture individual preferences about charity features that aren’t clearly good or bad. By measuring the relative importance individuals place on each of these features, we can identify charities that closely align with those preferences.

How important is a strong track record of success?

This factor is directly related to Criterion 4 in our comprehensive charity review process. Among the charities we evaluate, there is a large disparity in the strength of their track records, and this is an important consideration for some donors. A charity’s track record encompasses at least three factors: (i) the length of time that the charity has been achieving successes, (ii) the number of successes they’ve achieved, and (iii) the magnitude of effect those successes have had in creating change for animals.

The quiz question aims to determine how important the overall effect of these factors are to you, relative to the other traits that make for a promising charity. If you are a potential donor, charities with strong track records may seem to be a safer option as they appear more likely to achieve future successes similar to those seen in the past. However, some donors may not feel that track record is necessarily a strong indicator of future success, or they may simply prefer to support younger charities that could be working in a particularly promising area in which it is possible they will have an even larger impact if successful.

Do you prefer to support more established advocacy methods with a lower risk of failure, or would you like to support advocacy that is less established but may have a potentially larger impact?

There are other aspects of charities’ work beyond track record that affect the balance between risk (the chance of future success), and reward (the magnitude of that success). If we recommend a charity that we perceive to be higher risk, then it is often because we feel their potential reward is higher, so these two individual factors tend to remain relatively in balance across all of our charities.

For example, a charity working in regions where the animal advocacy movement is less developed, such as parts of South America, may be considered higher risk but also higher reward. They may find several advantages to their work:

• Wages may be lower, allowing them to achieve more with their budget
• Proven methods from countries with more established animal advocacy movements can be re-used (e.g., using corporate outreach campaigns to secure cage-free commitments for egg laying hens)
• Interventions such as investigations may have a higher impact, as they are less saturated in number1

However, there are unknown factors involved with work in some South American countries that may make it less tractable than it initially appears:

• The public attitudes towards vegan advocacy may be less favorable, or other unknown cultural differences may affect individuals’ receptivity to advocacy messaging
• The different legal situation may prohibit the success of some interventions (such as investigations and corporate outreach)
• The political climate may affect the likelihood that legal advocacy work will be successful

Other examples of charities that might be considered higher risk/higher reward include charities that work on longer-term goals and those that are focusing efforts on highly neglected groups of animals (such as fish). This quiz question aims to capture each donor’s preference for higher vs lower risk/reward.

Do you prefer to donate to charities with smaller budgets, or larger budgets?

During our charity evaluations, we have two main criteria in which we consider a charity’s budget—Criterion 1, which concerns the amount of room for more funding that a charity has, and Criterion 3, which concerns the cost effectiveness of the charity’s programs. As it is objectively better for a charity to have both a higher room for more funding and a higher cost effectiveness, these are not especially useful metrics for determining a preference that our audience may have. However, the absolute size of a charity’s budget often comes with advantages and disadvantages, and the charities we recommend span a large range in this regard. For example, donations to smaller charities will have a greater effect on that charity than a similar donation to a charity with a much larger budget. Additionally, smaller charities are more likely to be working in novel areas. On the other hand, charities that have a larger budget may be able to achieve things that smaller charities can’t, such as influencing large food producers in a corporate outreach campaign.

How important is it for a charity’s work to support the animal advocacy movement as a whole?

While most of our recommended charities work to directly cause change for animals, there are some that also (or sometimes solely) work to support the movement as a whole. This includes conducting and publishing research, either in collaboration with other charities or through evaluating their own programs. It also includes charities that take on a more organizational role, providing support to and helping coordinate the efforts of other charities in order to create a greater impact. Charities that are not as supportive of the movement, however, may be less so because they are working in particularly niche or neglected areas, and this may be of particular interest to some donors. Some donors may also simply prefer to support charities that work more directly to create change for animals.

Which types of animal advocacy do you want to support?

To measure donors’ preferences for particular interventions, we have divided up the types of animal advocacy interventions into three main groups: traditional advocacy, institutional advocacy, and innovative advocacy.2 Traditional advocacy includes interventions that have been commonly used by the movement for more than 10 years and often aim to create individual changes in attitudes or behavior—such as the adoption of veganism. These interventions include leafleting, protesting, and undercover investigations, among many others. Institutional advocacy includes any interventions that target institutions—from large international corporate food producers to smaller institutions such as schools and hospitals. Finally, innovative advocacy encompasses more novel areas of advocacy—including the development of cultured and plant-based meat, securing legal rights for animals, and conducting or facilitating research into wild animal suffering. These tend to be more ambitious approaches that have large potential for change, but that also have more uncertainty surrounding whether their end goals will be achieved.

Putting it all together

We have given each of our recommended charities featured in the quiz a subjective score for each topic that is covered by a question or a particular response. As you go through and specify your preferences, the quiz uses your responses to weight the scores given to each charity. It then recommends the three charities that most closely align with the preferences you indicated. Expressing a strong preference for a particular question puts a higher weight on that factor when calculating your matches.

If you have any further questions, please leave a comment here or submit a feedback form at the end of the quiz. Don’t forget to share your results!

TAKE THE QUIZ!

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1. We expect that the U.S. is reaching a point where the large number of investigations released means that future investigations are likely to start to have diminishing returns. 
2. It’s difficult to divide interventions into distinct categories, as often those categories will overlap. For example, while protesting and undercover investigations are examples of established advocacy interventions, they are both also used to support institutional campaigns. However, as multiple answers can be selected for this question, we hope this won’t significantly skew our quiz results. 

A Favor Owed

I can’t help but to think of Past Eric as more of an ancestor than merely an earlier version of myself. We are so very different. Not just in how we act and think, but in what we feel and value.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of this is my daughter, Adrianah Celes Herboso, who recently graduated from high school. It feels strange to call her my daughter. I never did any of the things that fathers normally do for their children, so I don’t think I deserve the honored term 'father'. ‘Sperm donor’ seems more accurate, given that I never gave care nor comfort to her throughout the entirety of her childhood nor adult life. The ‘father/daughter’ relationship is too special a term for me to just claim it simply because I contributed genetically to her life.

Although I feel no particularly special kinship there, I do genuinely care for her well-being today. When I think through thought experiments about my gut-feeling moral circle, I have to admit that she resides in a secondary ring, alongside all the other family members that I have not seen nor heard from in over a decade: my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins, nieces, and nephews, etc. These people are not a part of my life. I do not exchange correspondence with them nor interact with them in any way. I don’t think poorly of them; they are, for the most part, good people. I wish them well and hope they succeed in their particular path through life. It’s just that I don’t have a feeling of kinship beyond accepting them into my secondary moral circle.

It has been argued to me that my daughter is a special case. I owe duties there that I do not similarly owe to my other blood-related family members. By helping to bring my daughter into this world, I have a responsibility to give care beyond the minimal well-wishing I give to others in my fanily.

I honestly don’t know to what extent this may be true. I suppose that, if asked, I would grant reasonable accommodation to a request that she might ask of me. But seeing as how I have no existing relationship with her, I would be doing so only out of a sense of duty and well-wishing, rather than from emotion. I honestly believe that I would need to establish an ongoing dialogue with her before I could respond to her on the basis of something like love or deep care.

It’s difficult because I don’t really view the Past Eric who contributed to her birth as anything more than my ancestor. I have changed too much from that young age of 15. Back then, I did not comprehend the feeling of love as I do now. I was selfish and violent; uncaring and generally pitiful. Thankfully, most of the disarray I caused back then has been dissipated through the flow of time. But at least one action I took back then still reverberates today: the generation of my daughter. And so I must remain open to the possibility of being there for her, should she need it, at some point in the future.

[LINK] AMA by Animal Charity Evaluators on Reddit

This entry was originally posted on Effective-Altruism.com. It is reposted here for reference only.

Animal Charity Evaluators is currently doing an Ask Me Anything session on the /r/vegan subreddit. If you have any questions about ACE's 2017 charity recommendations, this would be an ideal place to directly ask the researchers at ACE.

Even if you come across this link after the AMA concludes, you may find the discussion there useful.

Counting My Blessings

Yesterday, I was diagnosed with a long-term illness. It's not life-threatening, but it is a chronic condition.

This reminder of my own likely mortality has understandably put me into a rather somber mood. I find myself counting my blessings and reminiscing over the arc of my life.

I earn enough to be comfortable.

It feels a little weird to bring up money first, but income really does determine many secondary blessings—enough so that it is the primary blessing I think of. I haven't always had what I'd consider a good income, but my life has been much richer monetarily than most people in the world. On the global rich list, I've pretty much always been in the top couple percent, though that isn't exactly difficult to do if you're born in an industrialized country. (A salary of $25k is sufficient.) There were times that were hard enough that I dropped to subsistence levels, but I've always had safety nets of various kinds to support me, so I've always bounced back.

Today, I earn more than I ever have, and I have multiple safety nets surrounding me in the form of friends and family. I'm happy to be able to donate around 25% of my gross income to effective altruism causes even while keeping up the relatively expensive hobbies of board gaming and Switch playing, where I buy pretty much whatever I think I might enjoy.

I am loved, and I love in return.

Once food, shelter, and other necessities are stable, the next most important thing I notice is love. Companionship is important to me, although it's something that I've had some trouble with in the past. Two of my siblings live nearby, and another plays with me weekly online, so I'm able to maintain relatively close relationships with them all. I receive much comfort from the best of my friends and family, and am extraordinarily grateful to have them around.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when friendships were difficult to maintain for me. As strange as it may sound, I learned many lessons about friendship from the My Little Pony series. It's helped me to become a better person and allowed me to maintain friendships that I traditionally would have allowed to fade.

I am relatively healthy.

Despite my diagnosis yesterday, I have no reason to suspect that my chronic condition will cause an undue amount of discomfort in my life. I am luckier in this respect than I have any right to be. I spent thirty-five years without seeing a dentist, and was found to have no cavities. I've never broken a bone, nor had any serious illness in the past, other than a bout of whooping cough when I was a young child that left no lasting damage. Although I am apprehensive about my recently diagnosed condition, I nevertheless feel as though I've had a very long time to live in such good health, and am accepting of the health condition I will have to endure moving forward.

Culture surrounds me.

Although I ultimately realize that I am mostly ignorant of the world and of humanity's culture so far, I nevertheless feel a great debt to those that first introduced me to the field of philosophy. Before then, I was so focused on basic science, games of power and control, and shallow story-telling, that I did not appreciate what the world truly has to offer. But one by one, philosophy has opened my mind to fields I never previously would spare a thought to. Most important is ethics, and how it led me to the effective altruism movement, but also great literature, art, economics, history, and much deeper story-telling mediums, such as hard science fiction and rational fiction. Philosophy also helped me to realize the importance of the less deep, strengthening my appreciation for bad tv shows, infantile humor, and naive artistic creation, just to name a few.

I know I am but only slightly aware of the depth of culture that surrounds us. So many things exist that I know I do not know: the beauty in how to understand a rifle so thoroughly that one can tear it down and build it back up again in one's head; the sublime nature of artistic pieces in famous museums that continue to elude me; the workings of various biological systems; the rites of honoring a family tradition that has gone on for long before I was born; the joy that some claim comes from a belief in a higher power. And I'm certain that there must be unknown unknowns that I can't even imagine at the moment. Yet I still so fully appreciate the awareness that philosophy and a liberal education has given me that I wish desperately that others might receive the same sort of study, even if they plan on going into an unrelated career.

I am able to control and remember many dreams.

Perhaps it is because I gloss over poor details at the time, but in my own mind it feels as though I may construct stories of any type and any depth on a whim. No book nor movie has ever come close to the situations and storylines that I imagine while I sleep. While I enjoy my waking life a great deal, I also am extremely appreciative of my sleeping hours. There is much in my imagination that is seemingly able to reference more exactly and build upon more dramatically than any fiction I've seen from any other author. Of course, I recognize that this is because my judgment while asleep is less discriminating than when I am awake, and that there is a selection bias where the references I insert are always recognized by me, while the references other authors use may sometimes go over my head. Nevertheless, the feeling I have is that my dreams are superior, and that is what matters to me in the end.

I am a super hero.

At least I feel like one. I imagine the pride a fireman feels when they save a life, and I consciously attempt to attach that imagined emotion to the result of whenever I donate an amount equivalent to saving a life. It was hard to do at first, and it feels a little weird to talk about it to other people, but, in my private life, when I'm thinking just to myself, I make a point to truly embrace the idea that I have done an equivalent amount of good whenever I donate effectively. This brings me far more happiness and well-being than if I were to spend that money elsewhere.

Evidence points to an upward trajectory.

Yes, there are existential risks. But whereas very few worked on them in the past, the effective altruism movement is mobilizing better and more able minds than my own to work on these problems. Yes, they have an uphill battle, and, on the whole, my expectation is that there is more human capital working toward xrisks than are working against it. But the derivative is positive: we are doing more and more each day to make the world a better place.

Wild animal suffering is a massive problem. People are dying every day for stupid reasons. And yet I feel a Pinker-esque optimism about the trajectory of some of our finest thinkers.



As you can see, I have many categories of blessings to count. I know that much of this is due to the evolution of my ancestors; that the values I care about mostly come about from the replication of genes and memes that started long ago for morally arbitrary reasons. And yet I feel comforted nevertheless.

Yesterday may have given me bad news, but I am happy today.