Thanks for writing this up. On X, Joey Politano points out that this destruction of USAID (or even PEPFAR alone) dwarfs EA’s contribution to global development by an order of magnitude: https://x.com/josephpolitano/status/1896186144070729847
David M
Karma: 2,003
Is it a good idea for me to adjust the letter, or should I stick to the template?
The AIM charity UK Voters for Animals appears to think (based on when I attended a work party they ran) that letters/emails count for more when they are not obviously copied and pasted, to the extent it’s worth customising letters. I don’t know their epistemic basis for this, but I trust them to have one (I suspect they know people who have worked for MPs). But it might still make sense to give less-motivated friends a template to copy if that’s all you think they’ll be willing to do, since a templated letter is better than none at all. Though NB writetothem.com does block copy-and-pasted messages.
Thank you for this post. I’d like to add some argument for considering this a very high priority, or at least potentially one, since in your post people might not appreciate the scale we are talking about (due to comparison with ‘last time’ and mention of ‘low effort’).
Briefly, the slash to UK foreign aid dwarfs all EA spending on global health and development to date, and it seems like we are at a crucial moment that could influence whether the government feels this is at all accepted by the electorate.Some quick figures from the Center for Global Development:
> In cash terms, the OBR projections of national income suggest this means an official development assistance (ODA) budget of £9.2 billion in 2027. The UK spent £15.3 billion on ODA in 2023
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/breaking-down-prime-minister-starmers-aid-cut
In total, EA is spending less than a billion on global health/dev each year (which makes up the majority of all EA spending). So this feels like a big lever to me, even given that not all UK aid spending will be as effective as Open Phil aid spending is.
Another lever to consider, rather than ‘punish government for cutting aid’, is ‘telling the government that effectiveness matters to me when they decide what to cut’. Don’t know how to compare those.
Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:
> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.Which makes it look like a potential failed case of cooperation: that no country wants to have the whole cost of international aid fall just on itself, so they try to establish international agreements so that others contribute too. Is that the right model, though? Perhaps countries don’t really experience pressure to adjust their contribution upwards when other countries drop out, and are happy to just continue doing the amount they were doing. I can think of a possible dynamic where ‘preventing bad runaway spillover effects like the spread of war and pandemics’ costs X billion dollars of aid (and has a threshold effect, where providing half of X billion is much less than half as effective as X), which no individual country is willing to stump up, but which is important to every rich country’s interest. In that dynamic, rich countries benefit from such UN-induced cooperation, by spreading the burden and getting the benefits of less instability and disease in the world.
If that’s the dynamic, then your idea of a race to the bottom in aid (a dis-‘alm’-ament, you could say) would not necessarily be what you expect after some country drops out — they’d possibly want to raise their contributions to make up the difference and still be able to reach the threshold of X. Alternatively, the UK now might expect that without the US it will be too difficult to reach that hypothetical threshold, and so there’s no point trying any more.
But if the incentives / dynamic of foreign aid is more about getting prestige for your country, then you could see a broad disalmament when the total pool of funding takes a hit — or alternatively you could see the second or third place players boosting their contribution to try and take the lead. So I’m not sure what determines what one would expect to see given this potential reputation-based dynamic.
Agreed, “linear increases” seems to be an incorrect reading of the graph.
Thanks for making the connection to Francois Chollet for me—I’d forgotten I’d read this interview with him by Dwarkesh Patel half a year ago that had made me a little more skeptical of the nearness of AGI.
Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.
In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: “At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone.”
Her conception of the good can include magnificence and meaning and abundance. But how can we make that available for everyone without the kinds of reasoning decried as ‘optimization’?
I feel like the people saying “you can’t put a price on a beautiful holy site” are trying to avoid saying “you can, and the holy site is worth more than the lives the money could have saved”—it’s not impossible that Notre Dame is worth the lives unsaved (with its millions of visitors a year), but it is impossible to refute the claim unless they are honest about how they’re valuing it.
It seems they’re missing the mood that our problems are larger than the resources we have to fix them, and so advocating for not facing the uncomfortable triage questions.
(My comments inspired by / plagiarised from https://x.com/trevposts/status/1865495961612542233 )
CAF charges a fee for its services. This seems crucial to deciding between GAYE/Payroll Giving vs Gift Aid — from the intro email when I registered to do GAYE:
For direct CAF Give As You Earn donors, we take a 4% fee of your total donation to cover our costs (the fee will never be more than £10 per pay period).
Many employers pay this fee for their employees, and you should contact your payroll team to confirm if this is the case.
My employer doesn’t cover it so I’m looking for an alternative method.
In 2022 I applied to the marketing department of 80000 Hours. After a compensated 2⁄3 day (I can’t remember) work test, which ultimately did not get me the job, I was offered a feedback call. I instead requested the feedback in an email and received detailed feedback.
The paper says:
Permissivism can take multiple forms. For instance, it might permit both fanatical and antifanatical preferences. Or it might permit (or even, its name notwithstanding, require) incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical. But apart from noting its existence, we will say no more about the permissivist alternative for now, returning to it only in the concluding section.
The takeaway, I think, is that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti-fanaticism but permissivism. More specifically, they should favor a version of permissivism that permits incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical.
Now I want to know what the hell permissivism is!
Thanks for the helpful summary. I feel it’s worth pointing out that these arguments (which seem strong!) defend only fanaticism per se, but not a stronger claim that is used or assumed when people argue for long-termism. The stronger claim being that we ought to follow Expected Value Maximization. It’s a stronger ask in the sense that we’re asked to take bets not of arbitrarily high payoffs, which can be ‘gamed’ to be high enough to be worth taking, but ‘only’ some specific astronomically high payoffs, which are derived from (as it were) empirically determined information, facts about the universe that ultimately give the payoff upper bounds. That said, it’s helpful to have these arguments to show that ‘longtermism depends on being fanatical’ is not a knock-down argument against longtermism. Here’s one example of that link being made: ”...the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism” (Tarsney, 2019).
Hi Ben, I’m curious if this public-facing report is out yet, and if not, where could someone reading this in the future look to check (so you don’t have to repeatedly field the same question)?
> I appreciate the push to get a public-facing version of the report published—I’m on it!
I found your description of applying effort to a really difficult task, and eventually making the hard decision to cut your losses, inspiring and moving. Thank you to CEAP’s founders, funders, and other supporters.
I think high X-risk makes working on X-risk more valuable only if you believe that you can have a durable effect on the level of X-risk—here’s MacAskill talking about the hinge-of-history hypothesis (which is closely related to the ‘time of perils’ hypothesis):
Or perhaps extinction risk is high, but will stay high indefinitely, in which case in expectation we do not have a very long future ahead of us, and the grounds for thinking that extinction risk reduction is of enormous value fall away.
If you’re attending the Leaders Forum or are a ‘key figure in EA’, you’re probably an EA, even if you don’t admit it to yourself.
How much of this advice is generally applicable outside the US?
Indeed not. I think that trying to appeal to those who chase prestige selects against truth-seeking and altruism, and I don’t think merely focusing on top unis has that effect. I’m responding to the part of the post about appealing to prestige chasers.
I believe the connection (which might or might not directly pick up on something you are defending?) is that if you go beyond merely starting your student community building with top universities first as a heuristic, and you further concentrate spending on the top universities to extreme degrees, you are in fact assuming a very strong distinction between those universities. David T has described the distinction in an approximate way as saying there are ‘only’ influential/high-earning-potential people at top universities.
The assumption of a strong distinction can be read from how the decision to concentrate implies it takes a huge amount of marginal funding before the diminishing returns of giving the next dollar to top unis is considered less valuable than giving a first dollar to a mid-range uni.
To defend large disparities between funding of different universities, it’s not enough to say ‘well you have to draw the line somewhere as you can only fund so many universities’; you need to further justify the choice to treat top universities as being in another class.
And arguably that’s an elitist worldview which sees a large difference between top unis and the rest — it’s more elitist if it talks about large talent gaps, implying top unis are able to filter students on intelligence very well; and it’s less elitist if it talks only about ‘people who will go on to be influential’, putting the blame of elitism on the society that rewards elite resumes.
That’s how I relate what David T has been saying, to what you said, DavidNash.
I’ve written to my MP, James Asser, with something very similar to Sanjay’s linked template.