Why top performers shouldn’t go to university. There are better ways to signal competence1/16/2019  In this post I am not going to argue that university is largely about signaling competence; Brian Caplan and many other writers have already provided a fairly in-depth look at that. What I am going to argue is that if your main reason for going to university is to signal competence, there are better ways to do it, particularly for EAs who have a lot of talent and dedication. These other ways to signal competence are less well known, but worth considering for EAs who are trying to build career capital or just their career in general (although I think this advice varies quite a bit based on what career paths you are considering). There are few routes to becoming, for example, a doctor without getting a lot of schooling, but if you are considering working in the nonprofit world, EA world, or a low-barrier-to-entry corporate job (including stuff like programming), a degree is far from the optimal move. People think of a degree as robust, but I think that is not as clear as it might first appear. Many of the EAs I have seen get a degree and later move into an area where the degree is much less useful, e.g. studying economics and getting into programing after a bootcamp, or studying poverty and then going into Animal Rights. I also think degrees give people some space to procrastinate and think about their ultimate career choice (something that is best to think about sooner rather than later). What do I mean by “better ways to signal competence”? Broadly, I mean “ways of signalling competence that are more effective at producing results to achieve your goals”, particularly EA type of goals. For example, if an action is about equally effective as a signal of competence, but also takes much less time or has more direct impact, I would consider that better. Generally, people will look at the most impressive couple of things you have done on your resume, and if these are good enough, your degree (or lack of one) won’t matter. For example, if you have written a very popular book, few people will look at what your degree is. If you apply for Charity Science and you have historically worked for Givewell, I barely notice the degree you have. Throughout this post I will cite the EA movement pretty heavily for examples, since it’s the area I know best and the area I think most people on this forum will care about. However, I have found the same trends to be true in (a lot of) other areas as well (e.g. I have worked in education NGOs and Animal Rights NGOs that used the same approach, and I know some folks who have used it in for-profits). The rest of this post will consist of examples of the kinds of things EAs could do to signal competence in lieu of a degree. Writing books and content in general  A lot of EAs have gotten their reputation from writing, whether on a personal blog or through contributing to something like the EA forum. Having high quality writing shows that you are competent and intelligent; it also gives me a sense of what kind of things you care about enough to write about. Putting written content together into something larger like a book can be/is a very effective demonstration of competence, though, of course, this takes a lot of time relative to random writing (but way less than the 4 years it takes to get a BA). And in addition to straight up signalling benefits, writing a useful book or useful blog posts contributes something to the world: for example, it can get new people to hear about an important cause or develop new frameworks for a movement. Another benefit of writing is that it can allow you to target the group you are interested in working for. For example, if you want to work in EA, writing a few good blog posts for the EA forum will help your applications a lot. The same goes for many other industries as well. Bootcamps and incubation programs  Attending something like a programing bootcamp or a incubation program can serve both to teach you many skills (in most cases more than a degree does per time invested), as well as be a great demonstration/signal of both intelligence and competence on a resume. Much like writing, it can also more easily be targeted towards industries you want to work in, although many programs (e.g. YC) will just be generally impressive across the board. Getting into these programs is hard, as is doing well in them, but they are almost always much quicker than getting a degree. Working or interning The first thing you should always be considering when thinking about a degree is: how does this compare to an equivalent amount of work experience? For example, a BA typically takes 4 years. That’s a lot of work experience. If you are comparing a degree to a basic service job, the degree looks pretty good, but if you’re comparing it to an entry level job in your industry of choice, it’s a lot less clear. 4 years of experience working and interning in the EA movement will go a lot further than a degree when trying to get a hard-to-get job in the movement. The same goes for direct work in poverty, AR, and, I would guess, x-risk. Many of Charity Science’s senior hires have been from our intern pool, when an intern was partially impressive. Some of them had degrees, others did not, but the demonstration of work ability on our direct project was much more predictive than their degree. On the flip side, I see a lot of EAs put in pretty much time and effort into a degree and then be disappointed by the relatively low status positions that are open to them in EA. You can, of course, combine these approaches (e.g. take an internship every summer), but generally, if you are strong enough to get into an Ivy League college, you can get an entry level job at an organization and prove your ability via working there. Often, your most recent and impressive work experience will overshadow your degree and be the main thing future employers look at. Founding organizations or projects Running a local chapter, founding a small project (even if unsuccessful), or starting a full-scale organization can make a huge difference on your resume. If you think of many folks running cool projects in the EA movement, you likely know them by their projects, not their degrees. Founding projects also demonstrates the ability to be self-motivated, a key element of many jobs that is much less tested by formal education. Many people think they need education to found these sorts of projects successfully, but it's much more about general ability and process than it is about a degree. And many in the EA movement are able to be helpful with advice, so it's not like you are on your own. Self-teaching via online courses  One of the things I love to see on applications, and which I know other EA organizations look for, is some evidence of self-teaching. Have you gone through a Coursera course on statistics? If so, that is a great sign for both competence and self-motivation. This is both quicker, cheaper, and more targeted than getting a full degree. Each of these methods will fit some people and not others, and I think a large percentage of people should still go to university. But I think not going, and doing other counterfactually prestigious and impactful things instead, should be seriously considered by very high ability EAs. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.
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 He quit! It was a tricky decision that Bill had been considering for months. He was an impact-focused EA, and although he thought his job was fairly high-impact he was pretty sure he was very replaceable. In fact, he was unsure he was even needed at the organization, since many of his tasks could have been done by a less experienced employee. And he was one of the five members of the senior team! There was about 3.5 members worth of highly difficult work and Bill figured that if the work was re-shifted they would not even notice his absence. When Bill told his team about it they were heartbroken. He was a great employee and they thought his work was not as replaceable as he was thinking. But Bill had done the math and he was set on his decision. The EA organization did not collapse; in fact, for 3 months everything went totally smoothly. The organization continued its work at a bit slower rate and with the 4 remaining senior team members working a bit harder to pull the extra weight. Some tasks were given to more junior employees and were done well, others seemed like juniors’ tasks but required senior staff knowledge to do efficiently, and were thus done poorly or slowly. All being said, the organization seemed fine and Bill was having a strong impact in another organization that needed him so much that work slowed down to a crawl on his every day off. Bill felt confident he had made the right choice. Sadly, on the 4th month after Bill had left things changed. The organization which was able to work effectively with 4 senior members ran into a problem. One of their employees, Sandy, had to leave suddenly, since their husband had fallen extremely ill and needed almost full-time attention. The work, which has been shouldered by 4 people now fell onto the shoulders of three employees, meaning that their organization had no slack; it had already been stretched to its very limits. Sandy loved the organization, but had little time. The other employees worked incredible hours and rapidly tried to hire a replacement, but, of course, that was just extra work that they did not have the capacity to handle. The remaining team did what they could: one of them got sloppy, getting everything done but at crappy quality, another simply could not handle the task load and was always weeks behind on every task, missing important deadlines, including legally mandated ones. The third employee barely slept and worked 12 hours a day, everyday, but after a few weeks burned out dramatically, and was only able to perform at 25% of their normal work ability. The organization groaned and limped on for another 4 months before finally shutting down, 8 months after Bill had left. Even more tragically, 12 months later Bill’s organization also had to grind to a halt, as their overstretched team could not work without him, and Bill needed to take 2 weeks off to fight a strong cold. No one blamed Bill. If anything, it was just bad luck, they said - him leaving and Sandy’s husband getting sick. But really, when Bill left he took much of the organizational slack with him, making the organization fragile to shocks and changes. If it was not for Sandy's husband, crisis would have occurred 3 months later, when one of their largest donors retired and the organization needed to invest much more senior staff time into fundraising than expected. An organization that has been stretched to its limits cannot handle the expected, predictable, and inevitable shocks that happen. Many EAs make the same mistake as Bill. Being crucially important to an organization does not mean you are crucially important every day, and an organization that needs every staff member performing at their peak (or even median) to function efficiently will break over time and often. Sometimes, the effects will be soon after, whereas at other times it might take years for the impact to be felt. However, there will always be variance and times will get tougher than people initially expect. A more ideal model to have, when considering an organization, is that at any time any single employee could disappear and your organization should still remain productive and able to stick to its deadlines. Taking into account organizational robustness when hiring and when changing careers is an important factor that could lead to different choices on both the organization’s and the individual’s part.  Many EAs are constantly considering their personal impact in an organization. A factor that is often under emphasised is the benefit of organizational slack. For example, many organizations are set up in such a way that if one employee was unable to work, the entire organization would slow down to a crawl. This obviously makes the organization very sensitive to both large shocks (like an employee falling majorly ill, being injured, or quitting) and small changes (e.g. an employee getting sick for a week or taking some time off without warning due to a family emergency).
No person can be available for a 100% of the time and unpredictable unavailability happens to both SR and JR staff. If an organization does not have alternative means for getting the work done, it can really harm the organization. The lack of accounting for this happens most often at the higher levels of an organization. For example, many CEOs make the organization dependent on them to the point where if they left, the organization would collapse. This is a suboptimal structure, even if the CEO has no plans to leave: what if they get sick, or what if their family member falls ill? It only takes one of the hundreds of possible (and some fairly frequently occuring) events to put a single member out of commission. CEOs are not the only ones who do not take organizational slack and robustness into account. I have seen multiple senior staff members feel as though their impact is not important due to the organization having some robustness. If you are so integral to your organization that it would collapse when you leave then that is not good for the organization. A high-impact position could be one where you have three talented staff members and, in theory, the job could be handled by two. This allows you to jump onto new opportunities or have the necessary robustness in the face of hardship. But often, I have seen employees leave strong, robust teams under concern that “the organization would survive without them”. This ask report focuses on improving the environmental conditions of factory farmed animals. Specifically, it is focused on improving management of dissolved oxygen levels for fish. Environmental factors can influence disease and injury rates as well as stress and anxiety levels. There is a wide variation of improvements possible in the environmental conditions for farmed animals, and many well-established charities tackling these. Among others, we explored interventions like improving light management or decreasing stocking density at broiler chicken and turkey farms. A relatively neglected area, however, is managing dissolved oxygen (DO) levels for farmed fish. Dissolved oxygen is the most important indicator of water quality and is critical for fish welfare. Evan small variations in DO levels can be associated with increasing cortisol levels in the blood. Preliminary research suggests that proper DO management can make impressively cost-effective improvements to animal lives. We estimated that this intervention can gain fish 21.5 welfare points, which is considerably more than what could be achieved by a charity aimed at increasing the space given to broiler chickens. We expect this to be in our top 5 most promising ask reports we will create in this research. This report considers why this is, and what bottlenecks this initiative may face.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.  There are billions of animals who live in extremely painful conditions, but there are also hundreds of ways to help them. From methods as direct as rescuing a single animal from a horrible life to means as wide-reaching as working with governments and corporations in order to set up long term policies for improving the lives of millions of animals. Given the ongoing suffering and all the possible ways to help, why would anyone concerned with animal issues choose to focus on something as abstract and long term as research? Hundreds of years ago, the state of medicine was very different. There were doctors, but their understanding of how the human body worked was rudimentary and their tools were limited. The health of the populations they worked with suffered as a result. Doctors would save hundreds, but hundreds would also die due to infection or complications that the medicine of the time could not handle. Thankfully, a few individuals, some of them doctors that could have been saving a life every day instead of taking a step back, considered the problem in the long term. What tools could help not just this patient, but patients everywhere? They asked themselves, what pieces of knowledge could change the field of medicine as we know it? These individuals did not save a life the day they asked that question, but they saved thousands and millions of lives over time via better methodologies and tools (e.g. germ theory). Hospital policy changed, doctors around the world utilized the new knowledge, and the world as a whole benefited, even if it meant that we lost those doctors’ contributions to more direct practice. In the long term, they made a bigger difference. Our current understanding of animal issues is, sadly, very similar to where medicine was hundreds of years ago. We can carry out some helpful interventions, but there are large gaps in our understanding and very few people working on research that is focused on improving animal activists’ techniques and abilities. A doctor from 500 years ago would not be allowed to practice medicine today, for so many patients would suffer under their care. On that note, medicine is not unique, and many fields, particularly young ones, can benefit from having a portion of the experts in their field working on research. As a movement, we owe it to animals to spend our money and time in the best way possible.  Consider the following. Maybe, as an activist, I learned about these issues from a documentary and feel most compelled to make a documentary myself in order to show the mistreatment of certain species, but who am I really trying to help here - myself, or the animals? Animals do not care if it is a documentary or a flyer or a government lobbyist group that eventually improves their lives. They only care that their lives actually improve. In addition, consider that maybe the animal that was focused on in the movie (e.g. cows) is not, in fact, the most important animal to help as an animal rights advocate. I, like you, am not alone in this endeavour of helping animals. There is a huge community spanning the globe with thousands of people who care just as much as you and I do. Therefore, I need to consider what the most important thing to do is, given that certain actions could have a far greater effect than just the ones I personally see as impactful. By doing research instead of aiming to help directly, animal activists can become far more effective. In case of animal issues, we currently have too few studies showing us what works and what does not, and it's hard to compare different interventions that an organization could undertake due to limited data. Of course, some research has been done. For example, in order to compare our charities’ interventions, we had to create a system to compare animal welfare. Also, Animal Charity Evaluators had to create an estimate for when clean meat might hit the market, and Open Philanthropy had to do research on animal consciousness to determine how to compare different animals. Still, much more is needed, and meta-research could and should be conducted in order to determine how animal advocates and organizations should be investing their time and money. This is not to say all research is equal, or that all research already done in the animal space is valuable; far from it. Our research needs to be as animal-focused and deliberate as our activism, if not more so. Doing good research and having animal activists update and upgrade their expectations and approaches could be the difference between a hundred or a thousand lives saved at the end of the day. Not everyone will be a perfect fit for research, but for those who are it is likely one of the most impactful things one could do to help animals in the long term. This reasoning is a big part of why CE is focusing on research, and why we might even recommend a separate research charity, solely focused on animal issues, in our 2019 recommendation round. Did you know that CharityEntrepreneurship can help you start
an effective charity for animals? If you want to be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list. This ask report focuses on providing free or discounted contraceptives. Contraceptives are a well-known global poverty intervention, but in so far as they affect human population they also have major effects on the environment and animals. This report primarily considers the effect that a contraceptive charity could have on animals, although more extensive reports would consider the full range of benefits, including its effects on humans. The intervention ended up looking surprisingly impactful for animals, particularly if conducted in countries with high need for contraceptives and high fish and poultry consumption.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our mailing list.
 Written by: Joey Savoie Time capping can be defined as fixing the number of hours for a certain task, research project or decision and keeping our research within those bounds. Most tasks can be completed at different levels of depth and research itself is never-ending - a single topic could often be researched in an hour or could equally have an entire PhD made out of it. The same can apply for website design, outreach, polishing or many other tasks that an organization engages in. Given tasks that are not time capped, people will generally spend more time on doing what they find fun or what they get absorbed in instead of what is best to put hours into in the long run. By setting a time cap on a task we are pre-determining how important that task is relative to other counterfactual tasks. This approach often results in more getting done at some cost of depth, as often 90% of the value of tasks is captured by the first 10% of the effort . There are a few specific kinds of tasks that benefit especially from time capping. Research and decision making are tasks that frequently result in endlessly flexible deadlines without a clear ‘good enough’ point. Research Research is one of the foremost areas that can benefit from time capping. At Charity Entrepreneurship we allocate a specific time frame for every research project. This has allowed our team to cover a lot of ground in a predictable way, and to cover the ground we need for making a specific decision within a clear time period (e.g. conducting research for a year and then recommending a list of top charities that could be started). Many research teams could think of situations where twice as much research, but with half the time put into each piece, would likely result in more good for the world. For a more concrete example: we had a very specific time budget for our animal reports. For each of the reports we could have gone much deeper (we ended up spending 1-5 hours per report and published a 1-page summary for 15 animals). But it would have been at the cost of breadth: for example, we could have spent 2-10 hours per report, but only covered 7 animals. Or, in theory, covered 30 animals at half the depth. The key questions to consider were what the purpose of these reports was and how big a role did they play in our endline goal (starting effective charities). What level of depth would give us enough information so that we could start to compare and consider which animals would be a priority? We decided that 1-5 hours would give us enough information for the soft prioritization of which animals to focus on. I think highly intellectual cultures (such as the EA movement) tend to undervalue this sort of time-capped research approach, and I often see comments on research, even very deep research, that more or less translate to “put more time into this research”. Of course, sometimes it is true that more time should be put into a specific branch of research, but I very rarely see it the other way around - comments that roughly translate to “you should have put less time into this research”. It's become a cliche in academic research to say “more research is needed,” but in some areas this is really not the case, and particularly so once counterfactuals are taken into account. Time capping, I think, is the one step that can be used to improve the situation. If someone wants to make the case that we should have covered 7 animals, but at double the depth, I am very interested to hear the considerations in favour of making this tradeoff, but if they say that more hours put into the research would make it better without a thought towards counterfactuals then it’s harder to engage with. Decision making Decisions are infinitely complex and, much like research, it would be easy for a person to spend anywhere between 1 minute and multiple years to consider complex decisions. Some decisions are sufficiently complex that the perfect answer can never be found; just better and worse guesses. Given the uncertainty and complexity of the world, but also the importance of making many decisions (often hundreds a day), time capping the more lengthy decisions seems like an optimal solution. This stops analysis paralysis and constant indecisiveness. It also gives important decisions a fixed deadline and timeline for when they need to be made. Using an example within CE: at the end of the year, we ultimately have to choose what are the best charities for us to recommend. This decision will almost by definition always be incomplete and subject to revision. But like with the research above, the important question is what are the counterfactuals? If CE, for example, did 5 years of research and decision making in the animal space, would it result in higher impact charities recommended at the end? Almost definitely. But we also have to consider the impact of a strong charity, or two, that could have been started 4 years earlier, as well as the cost of research. CE could cover and recommend charities of mental health, poverty, far future, and meta science. If 2 charities came from each of those areas during those 4 years that would be 8 charities not started for the end benefit of a better animal recommendation. Some decisions are so complex that it's easier to have impact in multiple fields (or double the impact in a single ‘best guess’ field). Our team ended up thinking that it would be quicker and higher impact to run a year of CE on both animals and poverty issues than it would be to research and decide which one is of higher impact. Using this system will not always result in the correct decision, but it saves in time what it loses in precision. Sometimes the best decision is the one that is good enough, given the limited time and knowledge. Time capping a decision puts into perspective how important this choice is in comparison to all the other choices, research, and tasks. It also allows you to look back on your decisions and feel as though you made the best choice you could in the time that you gave for the decision.  The first thing to consider is whether you need a job to prepare yourself for charity entrepreneurship (CE)? A number of people have been surprised at the impact they can have relatively early in their career. In fact, we generally think that having the right goals and personality are far more important for CE than specific background experience or degrees. Often, the number of diverse new skills you will have to learn will make any single background only minorly important relative to your speed of being able to learn new things and meta habits, such as task management. With individuals who apply to our incubation camp, we will try to inform those who could have been accepted if they had had more experience. And we aim to teach the individuals who get into our program the skills they would otherwise learn through many years of work experience. We will do it in a condensed and focused manner, so that more ground could be covered in a few months as opposed to many years of more passive learning on the job. Another option that we recommend getting a short term job or internship, should you want to gain skills during the year before applying for the CE incubation program. Taking on an internship between February and April can teach many skills and pass on many of the habits of an organization, yet still allow for a relatively quick founding of a charity at a minimal amount of time lost to skill-building.  For the people who are positive that CE is not a fit for them now, but think it might be in the future (e.g. in 2020 or later), the best kind of work experience we recommend is the following:
Small nonprofits will give you a better feel of working in CE directly (as your charity will start out very small), both work-wise and culturally. It will build a wide range of experiences as you will often be needed to wear a lot of different hats (a key skill for CE). Many small charities will end up giving you more responsibility within a shorter time frame. They also tend not to have the more established seniority-based systems that larger nonprofits often do, but which make it hard to grow. Culturally, they tend to be less rigid and have less established systems with the trade off of less professionality and with more job ambiguity. Overall, smaller nonprofits will stand much closer to simulating the first few years of founding a charity than the larger ones. Impact-focused charities will teach many of the skills that are hardest to learn through other work and volunteering experiences. Few charities are as single-mindedly focused on impact as the most cost effective ones. An organization’s focus will not only affect the skills you will learn (e.g. how to get website traffic vs measuring and evaluating your impact critically) but also the deeper attitudes you will end up building (e.g. it is easy to found a charity based around measuring the wrong metric). Well-run charities will teach you habits that will benefit your startup in the future, since even if you do not want to you will often end up replicating both the good and bad parts of the organizations you have worked for. This is part of the reason why work experience is less important than people think, since the habits you might pick up at a poorly run or non-impact focused can lead your charity down worse paths than coming in with a fresher slate for an incubation or founding setting. Well-run charities will allow you to pick up more cross-applicable meta habits, such as management, organizational structure, and task management.  Just like working for a small charity, getting a more diverse role will teach a wider range of skills than getting a very specialized role. Managing a diverse team can also create many of the same benefits. One exception to this is internships, even specific ones, that can teach a lot of specific skills in a short time span. Generally, we emphasise that size and focus are more important than the specific cause, but it is a bonus if the charity is also working within the broader cause area (e.g. animal issues, global health) that you would like to one day found a charity in. Some organizations that we think meet many of the above criteria include (those with active job or internship openings are linked below): Givewell-recommended or incubated charities
ACE-recommended charities Overall, we caution people against putting off their plans of founding a charity in order to build experience, but instead suggest they try to build experience in more rapid ways, such as through internships, incubation programs, and by talking to founders directly. That is, unless they have tried to found a charity and run into a block based specifically on needing more experience. Many other factors, such as value drift, changing life circumstances, and the possibility of reduced funding and mentorship support in the future make now a particularly good time to start a charity - even with imperfect experience. Ethical pest control This ask report is focused on considering more humane pest killing and controlling mechanisms. There are possibly billions of rats and pest birds, as well as many other species of mammals and insects which are counted as pests. These animals are often killed non-humanely, and yet the animal advocacy movement has been relatively inactive within this problem. Few organisations have attempted to reduce the suffering of pests, and those that have did not scale up. Overall, a charity built around ethical pesticides seems moderately promising. This report considers various possible interventions and the crucial considerations involved.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our newsletter.
Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.  Authors of the research: Joey Savoie, Karolina Sarek, David Moss When recommending different charities to found in the field of animal advocacy, a unique question to consider is what animals should be prioritized. For some interventions, this question is not necessary. For example, when “stunning before slaughter laws” were passed in the EU it affected a great variety of animals. On the other hand, though, recent cage-free campaigns targeted battery cage chickens’ welfare concerns, instead of cows’, pigs’ or fish welfare. This leaves us with the question of which animals should be our top priority for new charities. A perfect general prioritization does not seem possible, as some interventions will work better for certain (for example, cute) animals than others. Broadly speaking, however, it does still seem like some animals will end up being a higher priority across many interventions. There are a few different factors we considered when prioritizing between animals, including:
 There are many other factors that could be considered but these factors end up covering a lot of ground. They can be combined to create a promisingness ranking for a given animal. This promisingness ranking could direct future resources and efforts (for example, the next target of a corporate campaign). Overall, when considering all of these factors, we end up thinking the above list roughly represents the order of priority within animals. Based off of this system, we think fish (both wild and factory farmed), turkeys, wild bugs, broiler chickens, and wild rats are the top priority animals for new charities to focus on. If you want to receive information about our latest reports and be the first to know when we will start accepting applications to our incubation program, subscribe to our newsletter.
Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.  Authors of the research: Karolina Sarek, Joey Savoie, David Moss After spending considerable time on creating the best system we could for evaluating animal welfare, we applied this system to 15 different animals/breeds. This included 6 types of wild animal and 7 types of farm animal environments, as well as 2 human conditions for baseline comparisons. This was far from a complete list, but it gave us enough information to get a sense of the different conditions. Each report was limited to 2-5 hours with pre-set evaluation criteria (as seen in this post), a 1-page summary, and a section of rough notes (generally in the 5-10 page range). Each summary report was read by 8 raters (3 from the internal CE research team, 5 external to the CE team). The average weightings and ranges in the spreadsheet below are generated by averaging the assessments of these raters.  The goal of Charity Entrepreneurship is to compare the different charitable interventions and actions so that new strong charities can be founded. One of the necessary steps in such a process is having a way to compare different animals in different conditions. We have previously written both about our criteria for evaluating animals and about our process for coming to that criteria. This post explains our process and how the results for this system are being applied to different animal conditions. One of the goals of our system was to be applicable across different animals and different situations. We ended up comparing 9 animals (Humans, Hens, Turkeys, Fish, Cows, Chimpanzees, Birds, Rats, Bugs). These animals are not based on consistent biological taxonomy due to limited information being available on certain types (e.g. there was enough information on rats specifically to do a report on them, but for wild birds we had to look at a variety of birds to get sufficient data). We are not concerned about this limitation, as most of the interventions we are considering would hit a wide range of animals (e.g. a humane insecticide would most likely not be target-specific, so the most relevant data here is an index for bugs as a whole as opposed to an index on a specific species.) The reports are formatted so that it is easy to quickly grasp the main information connected with the specific rating. Each report is a summary page with the key information and a short description as to why the given rating, and thus, should be polished and readable to all. Each report was time capped at 1-5 hours, so they are limited in both scope and depth. We are keen to get more information on any of these areas (particularly information that is numerically quantified or related to wild animals, as this information was the hardest to find). Sample report:  After each of the reports were drawn up, each summary report was read and evaluated by 8 raters. We tried to get a diverse set of raters but all with a broadly utilitarian and EA framework. Three raters were from our internal CE research team (the staff who created or contributed to the reports) and five raters were external to the CE team, but involved in the animal rights’ research space (e.g. working or interning for EA animal organizations). The CE research team talked over ratings and disagreements openly, but the external raters did not see or disclose any CE ratings until after they had put in theirs. Ethically, people were best described as classical utilitarians, but with some slight variation (e.g. some more prioritarian, some negative leaning utilitarians). We liked the concept of multiple independent raters as there are many soft judgment calls and increasing the numbers of people doing ratings seems to mitigate specific biases and fallacies. This system has also been used before, and to good effect, by GiveWell. Ultimately, we ended up with a wide range of ratings going from 81 (strongly net positive) to -57 (strongly net negative). Some of the reports were pretty surprising and ended up changing our intuitions (for example, many wild animals were worse off than in our initial views). Others were not that surprising (for example, the rankings of factory farmed hens).  Our full spreadsheet, with all the ratings as well as links to the 1-page reports, gives specific descriptions as to why certain animals and situations received certain ratings. We feel as though there is lots of room to improve these numbers, particularly with deeper investigation into the lives of wild animal. But we limited our time on these reports due to finding that, historically, within our cost-effectiveness analysis, factors like these did not end up carrying the most weight or being the source of highest variability. For example, the cost of an intervention can vary by several orders of magnitude, and more logistical factors were more often the deciding factor when deciding between the most promising looking interventions. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
High welfare meat This ask report is focused on meat certified in programs that can make meaningful differences in animals’ lives. Having meat consumption switch to higher welfare meat could be more tractable than having people switch directly to veganism and, depending on your ethics, more important. This intervention can make animals go from net negative lives to lives worth living but it also brings large number of crucial ethical and logistical considerations. We cover some of them in this summary report.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
Food fortification This ask report is focused on the food fortification of factory farmed animals’ feed. Micronutrient fortification is one of the most well established and cost effective interventions in global health, and all beings, including both humans and factory farmed animals, can benefit greatly from the right levels of micronutrients. Food fortification is an unusually direct and cost-effective way of addressing major sources of suffering (e.g. bone breaks in egg laying hens) and, overall, looks moderately promising. This report considers multiple micronutrients and supplements that could be added to an animal’s feed to increase its welfare.  Ask reports Our priority ask reports are focused on what are the particular improvements or changes that can be “asked” for from corporations, governments, or individuals. Going cage free, making dietary changes, regulating slaughter practices, and many other asks all serve as examples here. They are compared based on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. All of these factors together could begin to suggest which asks might be the most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. However, these ask reports are short summaries of longer unpublished reports and, therefore, even if an ask looks promising this does not necessarily suggest that it will end up being a promising charity once paired with other elements and cross-compared to the other strongest possible charities. It just suggests that it is worth further and deeper investigation from our team. You can see our full planned research process here. If you want to receive information about our latest reports, subscribe to our newsletter. Once a month we will send you a summary of our progress.
 Animal advocacy is a huge area and there are thousands of possible ideas to investigate, which could all be the basis for forming charities. Our research process goes through multiple steps to compare and consider areas and ideas to help found the most effective charities. The research process involves multiple steps of differing breadth and depth. It would be impossible to go in depth with thousands of ideas; and while it would be possible to cover a huge number of ideas very shallowly, this would most likely not provide enough detailed information on whether a new charity in the area would be effective. Many research processes, including ours, thus involve varying levels of depth.  Broad Understanding Our first stage is what we call “broad understanding”. We have written a full post on it here. This is comprised of broad, often cross-cutting, reading, research, and projects that will help with gaining an understanding of the area and inform later decision-making. A few of the many things we did in our broad understanding stage were conducting interviews with 30 experts in AR, take an online course on animal husbandry, and read a variety of books by many different sources. This research was aimed at both inspiring new ideas outside of our more standard animal activism, and to get as wide an understanding of the issues as possible. After this, we felt pretty confident with listing a very wide range of possible charity ideas and being relatively sure we didn't omit opportunities simply because they fell outside the established AR perspectives. Priority Reports The second stage of our research is prioritization within domain. In an ideal world, we would have time to look at each possible idea in some depth, but as a result of the broad research stage, we have a list of several hundred possible ideas. In practice, it would not be possible to evaluate each of these ideas to a high level of scrutiny, given the time we have. However, subcomponents of an idea can be more easily cross-compared (such as which animal is most important). These subcomponents could then be combined in a short list of fully developed, specific charity ideas (e.g. Government lobbying for water quality aeration improvements for catfish in Thailand.). We broke up a charity idea into four subcomponents, each of which will have an individual priority report, a comparison spreadsheet, and a list of priorities within that component. The four subcomponents are animals, countries, asks, and approaches. The animal priority research would include both factory farmed animals (cows, pigs, fish, birds, etc) as well as wild animals (bugs, rodents, larger mammals, etc). Animals would be prioritized based on the number of animals, the amount of suffering per animal, the number of causes of the suffering within the animal, neglectedness, and the animals’ probability of sentience. These factors will suggest which animals are promising to work on and will eventually be combined with other elements into a strong charity idea. Countries would include locations across all 5 continents, with 5 factors being considered. The number of animals produced within the country, the number of priority animals produced, neglectedness as measured by the ratio of funding to animals produced (funding/number of animals), tractability, and if it has any limiting factors that would affect scale. We expect these factors to lead us to countries that might be currently overlooked by the animal movement or which are disproportionately important due to the size of the animal population that can be addressed by a charity. Asks tell us what the particular improvement that an activity would be aimed at would be like. This could be cage free, dietary changes, slaughter practices, or any other ask that could be made to a corporation, government, or individual. They would be compared on the strength of the idea (including the evidence base and estimated cost-effectiveness), limiting factors, execution difficulty, and externalities. These factors could begin to suggest which asks might be most effective when combined with a priority animal, country, and approach. Approaches encompass the different ways in which you aim to get an ask applied. They would include government lobbying, corporate campaigns, and individual outreach. The same ask could, in theory, go through any or multiple of these channels, but, overall, it seems that some channels have been historically more successful than others. We have not yet determined the main factors we will consider when comparing these approaches. Charity Idea Creation The third stage of our research will involve combining the top priorities researched above into coherent possible charities. Not all combinations of a top animal, ask, approach, and country will be applicable or coherent. For example, even if China is a top country and government lobbying is a top approach, they might not be a good combination. After we have combined the ideas that seem internally valid to our organization, we will then speak to experts in the animal community, government officials, non-farming corporations (such as retailers), and the broader farming world as a whole to get a sense of the ideas’ viability and to vet them externally. Finally, the specific ideas that continue to look promising after the external vetting will be put into a spreadsheet for the final phase of research. Priority Charity Reports The final and most important set of reports will be our priority charity reports. This will involve diving deeply into a small number (~20) of the most promising specific charity ideas. The criteria will be similar to our ask report criteria but in much further depth. For these charity reports we plan on looking at four broad areas with 16 sub-areas. Ordered below, in rough order of importance, these are:
Each targeted report will follow a system and set of questions very similar to our broad intervention research, aiming at systematic, deliberate research for each area. Unlike our other reports where we plan on publishing short summaries, the most promising of these reports will be between 10-50 pages and we intend to publish the full reports (as well as a 1 page executive summary) so that people looking to found these charities can learn as much about them as possible. They will lay out all the pros and cons of a specific charity idea alongside a cofounder profile for showing who might be a good fit to run them. They will also include implementation details, such as first year plans and theoretical budgets. The goal is to be specific enough so that a founder could pick up the idea and found an effective charity with minimal further research. Other Research We expect some cross-cutting research to come up throughout the process, and thus expect to publish a post covering our methodology or research findings about once a week throughout the year (for example, our animal reports), although we expect the bulk of our research hours to go into the process outlined in the previous section. If we end up hiring more research staff, it is possible we will be able to cover more ground or go into more depth in certain promising areas. Considerable hours are also spent on non-research activities, such as outreach, logistics, and the CE incubation training camp. In Summary We expect to go through 4 phases of research that will progressively narrow down a very large option space in order to arrive at 2-5 recommended charities to found in the animal advocacy movement. Timeline updated and example links added January 2019.
Estimated hours: ~2000 focused hours or about 54 FT staff weeks.  The small animal replacement problem is the concern that certain diet changes aimed at causing less harm to the world might, in fact, cause more harm - specifically, changes that result from eating smaller animals instead of larger ones. For example, when many people see the problems with factory farming, the first meat to go is often red meat, specifically cows. Sadly, if this person increases their chicken or fish consumption even moderately, this might be a bad move ethically. There are two main factors that drive this: welfare condition and meat generated per animal. Welfare Condition Welfare condition is pretty simple. Some factory farmed animals are treated worse than others. More specifically, there is a pretty clear consensus, both among animal activists and animal husbandry experts, that cows are generally given a much better life than chickens. You can see below a picture of cows in a feedlot (one of the worst stages of their life) vs the chickens (the default for almost all of their life). The conditions in the chicken situation are much worse (indoors, higher density, higher bird on bird aggression) basically across the board. You can imagine that if you had to choose to be a factory farmed chicken or a factory farmed cow you would definitely pick cow.
Size of the Animal The second factor that plays a huge role is meat generated per animal or the size of the animal. Simply, cows are much, much larger than chickens. If you eat meat for a year you affect far more chickens than cows (even if you eat a perfectly equal weight in both). Chickens generate about 5 pounds of meat per animal, where cows generate around 750 pounds of meat. This results in the average person eating a lot more chickens than cows per year.  The results are that considerably more chickens are eaten by each person and consumed in the world as a whole. The below chart shows the very strong impact that chicken has relative to other land based animals. Broadly, the smaller the animal, the more eaten for the same number of calories, thus many more fish and chickens are eaten over cows or pigs.  What it Means
The ethical implication of all this data is that if you are reducing the amount of meat you eat, the best thing to do would be to give up chicken, fish, and eggs instead of the more traditional path of giving up red meat first, or becoming a pescetarian. It also means that animal activists should be careful about encouraging changes, such as reducing red meat, as these sorts of changes might result in more chicken and fish being consumed and more animals being harmed.Instead they should consider focusing on interventions such as corporate campaigns on behalf of smaller animals such as birds or fish. TLDR: We looked at a lot of different systems to compare welfare and ended up combining a few common ones into a weighted animal welfare index (or welfare points for short). We think this system captures a broad range of ethical considerations and should be applicable across a wide range of both farm and wild animals in a way that allows us to compare interventions.
Full post here.  As part of researching the most effective charity options, Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has previously conducted research on Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs (see here). Since then a few things have changed that we feel are important enough to merit an update (available here).
In brief, this new evidence base points towards a large effect of CCTs on increasing clinic visits and institutional deliveries, and also suggests a larger effect of CCT programs targeted at healthcare workers, rather than healthcare patients, for certain outcomes such as antenatal care visits, clinic visits, and institutional deliveries. Why it was worth updating the evidence base More Evidence There are a large number of studies (70+) that were not included in the previous write-up and which provide a much larger sample for estimating average treatment effects. Crowdedness An initial reason for CE’s interest in CCTs was that the field is relatively uncrowded. The largest non-profit we know of that implements CCTs is New Incentives, which currently operates a program that offers CCTs to incentivize infant vaccination in Nigeria, after moving away from encouraging the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV by incentivizing birth in clinics, antiretroviral adherence, and HIV screenings for newborns. After this additional round of research we did not find any new large non-profits working on CCTs that we were not already aware of, although, we have been able to gather much more evidence from the more than a dozen government-run programs. Wider Array of Conditions Given the identification of these additional studies and the changes in some organisations’ (e.g. New Incentives) target outcomes, we believed there was likely to be evidence on a larger set of conditions than we considered before. Goal We are looking for more specific options in the field of conditional cash transfers. Our initial report did not make a strong specific recommendation, instead listing a few possible options. Improving the evidence base is a necessary step in the process. We plan on publishing a fully updated CCT report with specific details on updated options by the summer of 2019. What process was used to find the studies
How to read the spreadsheet The evidence is grouped into “Directly applicable evidence”, “Related studies”, and “Organizations currently doing C/UCT”, in addition to some rough Average Effect estimates. Author, Year, Study Effect: Includes the percentage point increase or decrease in the target outcome mentioned in the study. Where possible confidence intervals or p-values were included. Sample size (Control + Experiment): The number of individuals with the targeted outcome (including both those in treatment and control groups). In some instances individual-level numbers were unavailable and rougher units such as number of households are provided. Target Outcome: These include Antenatal Care (ANC), Immunizations, Institutional delivery, etc. Location & Region: The country where the program being studied was conducted. The region (Asia, Africa, Latin America) was also included for comparative analysis. Experiment Type: Lists whether the study was an RCT, observational data study, longitudinal or cross-sectional or quasi-experimental RDD or DinD. Intervention: Whether the program was a CCT for Education, Healthcare Utilization, or Healthcare Worker Performance (which could be targeted at education or healthcare utilization target outcomes). Size of Cash Transfer (USD): Many of the studies provide the dollar per month equivalent of the cash transferred to recipients. Where the program distributed cash at some other time interval the monthly size has been calculated. Where no US dollar amount was listed the USD equivalent was used when it was easy to do so. Link & Alternative Link: A URL to the original source in online pdf or through a journal access website. Notes: Any other points of interest.  Some of the books I read to try to get a sense of animals lives from different angles
I have been a vegan for 8 years and have been semi-actively involved in animal rights for the past 5 years. Despite this, I have realized that my understanding of many aspects of animals' lives is surprisingly narrow, and I think this is fairly common for activists in animal advocacy (or any movement, really). As the project I am now working on is recommending charities that should be founded in the animal advocacy movement and providing an incubation camp for them, I feel the need to broaden my understanding of these issues. Why a broad understanding matters There are a few reasons as to why getting a broad understanding can increase long term impact. The first is to get a truer and less biased sense of the world. Animal advocacy activists have an incentive to show the worst of the worst that goes on in factory farms. Likewise, the industry has an incentive to show only the best living conditions. But ideally, you want to have a good sense of the true state and variability of the conditions. For example, some of the most graphic scenes in a video are focused on pigs and cows, but the day to day life is far worse for a chicken, even if it does not yield as emotionally salient a clip. This is often easy to see if you visit a farm but less clear in much of the anti-factory farming content. The second major benefit is that broad research provides distinct information on different, and often more focused, domains (e.g. animal behaviour under stress). For example, a few books I read were on how animals grieve, which changed some of my views about how to mitigate psychological distress in a farm setting. This sort of information is hard to get from more standardized anti-factory farming sources. The third major benefit is due to the synergistic benefits of cross-domain knowledge. For example, an activist book might tell me that corporate outreach has been effective in the past, while another book, written by someone in husbandry, lets me find out about the detailed conditions of how chickens live on a farm and what behaviours they exhibit when given a choice between two toys. Together, these books might give me an interesting idea for what might be a good future lobbying technique. How to get a broad understanding 1) Reading diverse sources For example, one might break down the content produced in animal rights into three distinctive groups.
Reading each of these sources can provide a broader understanding. And I am not talking about self-identity or goals. In terms of that, I clearly fall more into group 1 than into any of the others. But in terms of useful knowledge, I think it's beneficial to have a broader reach. 2) Seeing the full supply chain - directly Another way to get a broad understanding of the matter is to witness firsthand or familiarise oneself with each step of the process. When I worked in poverty, I was one of the few people who talked to every employee at every level of an organization. This often yielded different results: for example, we worked with a company where I talked to the CEO, manager, field manager, head surveyor, and standard surveyor, and as I got closer to where the work was being done I got more and more accurate (and often negative) information. In the context of animal rights, a way to get a more wholesome picture can be from visiting a farm, or preferably a few farms at least. Ideally, by witnessing each step of the work done in multiple farms you can start to get more of a sense of what really happens there, contrary to the comparatively selected images that are published in the content arguing for or against animal welfare. For example, on the highest standard farms (e.g. AWA or GAP level 5+), how do they compare to farm sanctuary? Is it just the fact that animals are slaughtered or are there noticeable day to day differences in quality of life as well? Visiting multiple farms is something that relatively few people do as it comes with a fairly high time cost, but I also think it provides a different angle on what is currently neglected in the animal movement. For example, it gives a much stronger intuitive sense of rates and severity of different issues, something that can be very hard to find in academic research. Overall we feel getting a broader understanding is worth the time it takes to increase the accuracy of our world models and turn up new ideas that might be currently neglected in the animal movement. The ways listed above are just a few of many ways to get a broader understanding. Other ways include speaking to a wide range of people both within (like our animal experts survey) and outside of the animal advocacy movement, or working directly in any related field. One of the hardest things about charity entrepreneurship is getting a sense of whether it's a good fit for you. Historically, we have created a blog post aimed at some of the key characteristics, but we also now have a short quiz you can take to start to get a sense of whether you are a good fit. A short quiz will never have perfect predictive abilities and we expect our full interview process (which the people, who apply for the CE program will go through) will be far more predictive overall. That being said, we feel this quiz, if taken self-reflectively, does likely correlate with the people who will be the most effective charity entrepreneurs, and it can be taken right now, contrary to applying for our program, which is still several months away from opening (March 2019).
Take the quiz now  There are a variety of ways to prepare for founding your own charity. There is, of course, the legal and bureaucratic work, but much more important is getting ready, skill and knowledge-wise. Many charities are founded on a whim or impulse, but the best charities are founded after considerable careful and deliberate thought. Read, read and read some more Most of the best books on founding things are for-profit books that have cross-applicable lessons. Here is some of the most helpful reading for founding a new charity, regardless of area:  As to area-specific reading, for example, if you’re interested in global poverty, you might want to read: As well as review these websites: For animal rights you might read: Websites that could be of help: But, of course, reading can only get you so far if you want to start a truly great charity. Get some hands on experience Work, volunteer, or intern at charities! Getting some experience, particularly at a smaller nonprofit in your area of choice, will give you a deeper understanding of the details of how charities work. Generally, you will learn more by getting a wide variety of experiences, e.g. interning at 4 organizations rather than working at a single one for several years. We offer internships explicitly aimed at teaching charitable skills, but do consider organizations working directly in your field of interest, even if they do not mention the intent to train. Don’t get married to a single idea There are hundreds of charities that the world needs, so the real question is, which ones are of the highest priority to found. Thankfully, research has been done by Charity Entrepreneurship, GiveWell, and Animal Charity Evaluators in order to pin down what the most effective interventions might be in any given area, and, more specifically, what the overall best charities to found might be. Speak to others who have founded a charity Many people are willing to speak extensively about their field. If you contact the heads of the biggest charities, they will, most likely, not be able to speak to you, but the leaders of smaller organizations in fields related to the ones you are considering will often be interested in talking about their work if you have done your homework beforehand. If you cannot contact them directly, you can listen to them talk at lectures, conferences, or TED talks. I am happy to speak to people who are considering charity entrepreneurship as a career path and help them think over whether it might be a good fit for them. I have also introduced people to other founders across different charities, and many others will likely do the same if you ask them.  Apply for the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation camp Programming bootcamps can teach in months what schools often take years to teach. Likewise, the Charity Entrepreneurship camp is focused on teaching as much as possible in 2 months to get someone from 0 to founding a great charity. The camp focuses on both the hard and soft skills of building a charity: anything from making your first fundraising proposal to how to hire staff with the expertise you do not personally have. It’s built to apply to a range of people, from students fresh out of school to individuals who have worked in the charity sector for many years. All costs are covered for accepted applicants, including room and board. Applicants who go to the camp and decide to found an effective charity are also given a grant to cover their first ~6 months of charitable operating expenses. Sign up to our mailing list, to be the first to know when the application process for the camp begins. Summary The most helpful things you can do to get ready for founding a successful and high impact charities are:
 “I’m convinced that half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” - Steve Jobs If you are convinced that charity entrepreneurship might be a high impact and satisfying career, the next question you might ask yourself is whether charity entrepreneurship is a good personal fit for you. Starting a charity involves a lot more risk, stress, open-ended tasks, and heavier responsibility than most other jobs. We’ve listed out the key personality traits and skills we think are necessary for a successful charity entrepreneur. The good news is, your personality is dynamic; you can cultivate certain traits if you want to so if you do not have one of these its not set in stone. Successful charity entrepreneurs are:
You're resilientIt goes by many names - grit, determination, resolve, resilience. The strength to keep trying no matter what obstacles crop up (and, believe me, there will be obstacles) is absolutely critical if you are to succeed. Rome wasn’t built overnight, and founding a top charity won’t happen after a week of part-time work. If you want to start a charity, you have to want it even after your plans A through P have all failed. You have to keep trying even after you’ve had a scathing review online, because once you’re doing something big enough that strangers start to comment, there will always be somebody who doesn’t like what you’re doing. Being resilient means being dedicated at the highest level. It does not mean getting stuck on a specific plan or idea. It means aiming for the same goal over a long period of time. For example, if someone with grit were pursuing journalism, they wouldn’t apply for the same position dozens of times and no others. They would apply for hundreds of jobs in journalism and if that didn’t work, they might take an online course and build up their skills, or start reporting on events in a public forum that gets them a following. You're ambitiously altruisticYou want to help so many people over your lifetime that they wouldn’t all be able to fit in a football stadium. You want to wake up knowing you are pushing the limits of what is possible. Most people want to make the world a better place, but the majority only go so far as to be nicer to those around them or put a little extra thought into a present. Those gestures are laudable, but to do what it takes to run a great organization needs more vision, otherwise you’ll be too tempted by easier ways to change the world. You're results-oriented You worry that a lot of charities, while well-intentioned, are misguided. They often accomplish nothing and sometimes even make the situation worse. You think that the response to knowing that things can go wrong is not to say that making a positive difference is impossible, but that you have to learn as much as you can about the situation before making a decision. You want the analytical, critical, rigorous and empirical thinking which is found in the scientific sector to become the norm in the nonprofit sector too. The stakes are too high for decision-makers to value emotional appeals over evidence and results. You're open-mindedGood charity entrepreneurs always remain open to the possibility that any and all of their assumptions may be incorrect. If you are not open-minded enough to consider new evidence and update your beliefs and actions accordingly, you are almost certain to fail. As a small condolence, you probably won’t realize that you’ve failed because, as Kathryn Schulz explained, how you feel when you are wrong is identical to how you feel when you are correct. On the flip side, if you are open-minded, even if you don’t have the highest IQ, you will eventually outpace many of your peers because you will be able to steadily improve your model of the world. So, even if you initially think that something is incorrect, approach it with an open-mind. Have a ‘scout mindset,’ trying to understand situations and concepts as honestly and accurately as possible even when they are not convenient. Remember, changing your mind is the ultimate victory, because in those moments you are improving your model of the world. And how can we ever hope to fix a problem without understanding it? You're not afraid to admit mistakes Humans are world class self-deceivers, commonly making excuses for bad decisions, rationalising away negative outcomes, and constructing fantasies to replace unpalatable truths. Charity entrepreneurs need to be able to work hours on end for years and then admit that they made a mistake or that the project isn’t effective enough to continue pursuing. This requires a rare level of self-honesty. Many people end up burying their heads in the sand and rationalizing away negative information. Their fragile pride is more valuable to them than achieving the most positive impact possible. You're self-motivatedAs an entrepreneur you have to convince many people that your idea is a great one, but the first person you have to convince is yourself. You have to be able to get yourself up in the morning with no boss threatening to fire you. You have to motivate yourself to do unpleasant but necessary tasks. It's difficult and some people just can’t get the work done without a push. A good way to proxy this style of work is to take an online course. There are thousands online that you can take for free at your own pace. With such a powerful resource publicly available, it is amazing people pay such huge sums of money for a university degree, but it comes down to motivation. Most people cannot complete an online course by themselves without a teacher guiding them to the finish line. As an entrepreneur, you can set up a board or peer group to help you with this, but when it comes down to it, you will also have to be able to motivate yourself. You’re creative  Of course coming up with the initial concept takes creativity, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Almost every day entrepreneurs need to devise and compare multiple solutions to any given problem. Great entrepreneurs aren’t afraid to think outside the box, do things differently, and bend or break social norms. Difficult problems require creative solutions. That being said, it is possible to have a strong team that can collaborate creatively to build a strong organization. Not all original thinking has to come from the top. We find that encouraging board and staff members to contribute and collaborate freely is a great way to produce brilliant ideas. You’re doing it for the right reasons There are many reasons to start a charity and not all of them are altruistic. Some people do it to impress others, have adventures, or feel good about themselves. If you let these kinds of motivations interfere with the ultimate goal of helping, people will be harmed. For example, if your primary motivation is the warm glow of assisting others and you find out that instead of ministering to the ill, it’s better to prevent the disease in the first place, you may choose to stick to ministering because prevention is not as emotionally rewarding as treatment. Many people will die because of your misguided motivations. Likewise with prestige. A desire to impress others may cloud your judgement. Sometimes the best thing for the charity is to give the credit to somebody else.
We created the list of our recommended poverty charities to found in 2016. Our original list included 5 promising interventions:
In the last few years, a couple of things have changed, so updating the list is in order. Excitingly, two of the following charities were, in fact, founded.
Although there is room for the founding of more than one effective charity in the given area (for example, one could easily work on SMS vaccinations in Africa), the founding of these two charities does change the scope of neglectedness in those areas. Thus, both of these ideas were removed from the Top Charities to Found list. Secondly, over the last few years, we have been able to get a deeper understanding of the poverty research space. This occurred as a result of considering and speaking to multiple poverty research organizations, as well as through working more deeply with IDinsight. Given the relative strength and growth of these organizations-particularly IDinsight, which we feel is working on covering much of the ground we see as of highest impact-, we no longer see the founding of a poverty research charity as substantially neglected. Because of this, poverty research has also been removed from our list. Thirdly, we are looking for more specific options in the field of conditional cash transfers. Our initial report did not make a specific recommendation, instead listing a few possible options. By the end of the year, we plan on recommending a specific best condition, or two, to improve the shovel readiness of the area. Our views on tobacco taxation have not changed substantially. We continue to feel that this is a promising area and a very effective charity can be founded here. However, we have updated slightly positively towards it as time has passed, given our increased optimism about the promisingness of working with governments in order to achieve cost-effective metrics. In summary, here is our updated list:
In the past, Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has been focused on poverty charities, founding one ourselves and supporting the creation of another, both of which were GiveWell incubated. So why the shift in our research focus? Ultimately it comes down to what we think is the highest impact area to focus on. Some of the factors that most influenced us were.
The impact of the cause area of animal rights has been well described by EAs in the past, covering aspects including scale of the problem, tractability and neglectedness. I will address these briefly but will mostly cover fundamental assumptions, as these seem the most likely area for disagreement. The CE team generally believes animals are conscious and morally relevant agents. Given the numbers of animals involved in animal agriculture and other animal-use endeavors, this makes it a high scale and high importance issue. From a neglectedness perspective, animal rights are clearly more neglected than global poverty and many other cause areas, attracting both less money and fewer talented entrepreneurs. In the past, our team has always been most concerned about tractability of issues in this area and about the relatively weak evidence surrounding animal focused interventions. This remains our biggest concern with working in the area. Our team expertise is mostly focused in poverty, but we have developed a secondary knowledge base regarding animal rights. Our co-founders have both been vegan for many years and when Charity Science was founded it was founded with a dual focus on animal rights and poverty, working with THL and AMF in applying for grants. Although our focus moved to poverty, we have stayed relatively informed about the animal rights space throughout the 5 years of Charity Science’s existence. More recently, most senior staff have been vegan and kept up to date with the animal rights movement, with one of them working for ACE after he left Charity Science. In addition our recent hires have been made with animal rights expertise as a key requirement, with our new senior hire coming from Open Cages (a ACE standout charity). A fundamental premise of Charity Entrepreneurship is that many of the skills used to found charities in one area can be cross-applied to other areas. Our team has in the past founded both meta and direct poverty organizations. We found the skill sets between the two had very strong generalizability. Following discussion with individuals in the animal rights community and given our experience with early stage animal focused charities we believe many of these skills will transfer, particularly with regards to consulting and advising. On our announcement post we discussed the benefits of cause rotation, which we see as three fold. First, in the time necessary to feel very confident in prioritizing one cause area over another, we would be able to incubate a good charity in each top cause area. Second, there is a limited pool of people interested in starting organizations in each area, so focusing on putting out marginal recommendations in one field will lead to less output than switching between them periodically. Third, given the extremely uncertain nature of doing good, rotating between cause areas will make the impact more robust in the event that one of our assumptions or beliefs is very wrong. This perspective also aligns well with the recent writing on epistemic humility which we found persuasive. The final major factor that lead us to thinking animal rights would be the most effective area in which to run the next round of CE is the current distribution of funding and talent gaps between the animal and poverty movements. Right now there is a large funding gap in poverty charities and a relatively smaller funding gap in animal rights (despite AR’s historically very large funding gap). This makes founding new charities in animal related fields more promising than founding more GiveWell incubated charities. Overall, we think research on animal focused charities seems like the clear next area for our team to focus on. In future years, we plan on considering other areas, such as mental health and far future. Our current incubation program will accept applicants interested in founding charities from areas we have previously researched. For example our 2019 cycle will consider poverty (research conducted in 2016) or animal rights focused applicants (research conducted in 2018); from 2020 onwards, we will accept animal rights and poverty focused applications as well as applications focused on any additional areas we have researched at that point. About Charity Entrepreneurship:
Charity Entrepreneurship is a research and training program aimed at creating multiple counterfactual EA charities annually but with a different focus area each year. Our first year was focused on poverty research. We ended up recommending 5 charities 2 of which have been founded via the charity science team (Charity Science Health and Fortify Health). We plan on expanding out program by recommending several new charities in animal rights as well as offering wider support for individuals looking to found animal or poverty focused charities. We will have room to support 10-20 charity founders compared to the original 4 we were able to support in our first round. Role Description: The outreach interns will be to find and connect with people who might be a good fit for the CE incubation program. This could included attending college career fairs, polishing content, speaking to EA chapters, attending conferences, and getting the information out to relevant email lists and job boards. A time commitment of 5-40 hours a week is required for this position, and the intern should be comfortable talking to a wide range of people. Requirements:
Bonuses:
Benefits to you:
Details
To apply, please send the following to joey@charityscience.com
About Charity Entrepreneurship:
Charity Entrepreneurship is a research and training program aimed at creating multiple counterfactual EA charities annually but with a different focus area each year. Our first year was focused on poverty research. We ended up recommending 5 charities 2 of which have been founded via the charity science team. There is room for updating and improving the three other options with a particular focus on tobacco taxation. The focus of the research will be systematic, spreadsheet based and directly applicable to recommend charities being founded. It will be very similar to previous research that led to the founding of Charity Science Health and Fortify Health. Role Description: The interns will be tasked with researching key areas of interest in relating to top poverty interventions, for example, what country would be the best to focus on if lobbying the government to increase tobacco taxation. They will work together with a manager and other members of the team to slowly flesh out the best steps forward for people who found charities in these areas. They will be expected to complete their work to a high standard given the limited time that will be spent on each report. A time commitment of 5-40 hours a week is required for this position, and the intern should be familiar with research in other contexts. Requirements:
Bonuses:
Benefits to you:
Details
To apply, please send the following to joey@charityscience.com
Introducing Charity Entrepreneurship: an Incubation and Research Program for New Charities6/14/2018 How do we get more EA charities started? There’s a good case that charity entrepreneurship is high impact for EAs, but it seems not many are starting them. Part of the reason is that it’s intimidatingly hard. Not only do you have to have multiple rare and difficult skills, but you also have to choose a good idea to begin with. And if people are put off by the uncertainty of career selection, that’s nothing compared to the sheer ambiguity of all the potential interventions one could run. That is why we are starting a new program called Charity Entrepreneurship. We will make yearly charity startup recommendations, much like what GiveWell does for donations and 80,000 Hours does for careers. This research will be accompanied by an incubation program, similar to Y Combinator, that will teach people the prerequisite skills to start a nonprofit. In this post I’ll explain more about the rationale, details, history, and plans moving forward.
History The first project undertaken by Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) was 6 months of research in 2016 by 4 full time staff (~24 staff months). This resulted in Charity Science Health being founded, which has since received two GiveWell incubation grants and assisted over 200,000 families in India. This was the primary goal of this project and we feel CE succeeded. However, in a another way, CE was much more successful than we anticipated. Another project, Fortify Health, was founded, helped by our intervention recommendation, mentorship, and seed grants. Not only that, but several other EAs and non-EA charity founders showed a large interest in founding high impact ideas, such as the ones we had researched, although we did not have the ability to support more than two groups at the time. How it will work The organization’s time will be broken down into three sections. The first section will be systematic empirical research into an intervention area focused on finding the highest impact gaps to found a charity in. This will result in a list of “top charities to found in X area”, much like our published list from our last round. The second part will be a two month summer incubation program equivalent to about a summer term university course load, focused on building the practical skills need to found a charity. The third section will be a seed grant and weekly mentoring sessions for the organizations that are founded out of the program, similar to the support we were able to give Fortify Health. We believe this program has potential to found 1-3 GiveWell incubation/ACE recommended equivalent charities a year. Each year a different area will be chosen to focus on, with research being aimed at prioritizing specific possible charities within that area, as opposed to actively comparing across them. This is for multiple reasons. Firstly, in the time it would take to feel very confident in prioritizing one cause area over another, we could have incubated a good charity in each of the top cause areas. Secondly, there is a limited pool of people interested in starting organizations in each area, so focusing on putting out marginal recommendations in one field will lead to less output than switching between them periodically. Thirdly, given the extremely uncertain nature of doing good, rotating between cause areas makes the impact more robust in case one of our assumptions or beliefs are very wrong. This perspective also aligns well with the recent writing on epistemic humility which we found persuasive. The area we are running the first year on is animal rights, and for the next year we are considering far future and mental health, among others. We already have recommendations listed for global poverty and count CSH and Fortify Health as a somewhat informal first year of running this project. Case for impact The case for why charity entrepreneurship is effective has already been made here, here, hereand here. I’ll make the case for how Charity Entrepreneurship as an organization has impact in this section. CE’s impact hinges on two factors - the counterfactuals of the staff running the organization and the counterfactuals of the participants. My personal counterfactuals would be starting another direct nonprofit myself. The benefits of CE compared to this is that, while I think I could start another good charity, it takes about 3-8 years to take a charity from starting to being able to run without the founders. On the other hand, with CE we would be able to launch an expected 2-3 charities through our program every year. While I may be an above average charity founder, I do not predict that I am 6 to 24 times better than the incubatees. Which brings us to their counterfactuals. Some people would undoubtedly start charities without our aid, but many wouldn’t. Fortify Health for instance, has said that they think they wouldn’t have started their organization without my mentorship and initial funding. Making the leap from structured jobs to the uncertainty of entrepreneurship without a guide and some initial money is intimidating enough to turn off a lot of people. Providing a structure, education, guidance, and seed funding can help a lot of people gain the confidence to make the switch. Additionally, the support makes it more likely that they’ll run a higher quality organization, making better decisions and having a broader skill set than simply jumping in. The assistance will also help them stick with it at the beginning when things are particularly challenging. It’s easier to keep going when there’s a setback if you have a coach encouraging you to keep going. Part of the inspiration for this is to be what we wish we had when we had started. Aside from the direct effects of causing more people to join, there’s the benefit of choosing a better idea. Most startups are started based on jumping on the first opportunity the founder sees rather than systematically comparing their options. This can sometimes lead to good ideas but is dominated by comparing between alternatives, which I go into more deeply here. Furthermore, far more time and expertise will be put into prioritizing the interventions. Even if the founder might have put some effort into comparing their best options, it’s hard for an individual to put in the multiple person-years that will go into our research. Lastly, the intervention prioritization will be done by people who have specialized in and have a track record in choosing good ones. All of this combined will lead to higher impact charities getting started than otherwise would have. How you can get involvedIf you want to help this project you can:
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