The comments are the best part.
And by best, I mean worst.
Thank you for trying!
We also made sure to enjoy our trip and tried some Turkish coffee and petted some of the stray cats." (Awwww),
Well, cats like fish too so this is relevant.
One thing I reflected on after learning about your experiences is the challenge of getting in touch with other, non-EA established organizations
Who knew that acting in a weird, insular manner would hinder the very thing that was attempting to be accomplished?
The continuation of the stray cats thing:
One of these cats gave me fleas so I will no longer engage in petting stray cats
lol
i can’t believe I read this whole article. They somewhat buried the lede with the paragraphs about emailing farmers twice and that was it. Apparently shoe leather and knocking on doors was not an option. They did also go to a conference and have coffee and pet cats though!
Im just amazed they went to fish farmers with ‘farmer friendly’ outreach, yeah people are really waiting for more outreach on that. Wonder how many people who didn’t initially delete/ignore the emails looked at the site : https://www.piscivita.org/ and went ‘nah’ in greek and closed the site. (try switching to a different language and click around on the site (oops forgot to translate the site except for the main page)).
“Speaking to farmers during the conference proved difficult due to the language barrier and difficulty finding interpreters” no shit.
It bothers me a bit as after all these years you would expect EA to be reasonably good at setting up these kinds of EA franchises, but I guess they don’t do ‘how to’ guides and only have after action reports and that is it.
How delightfully ineffective
(Seriously, what has Effective Altruism ever accomplished beyond buying castles?)
The “malaria nets” side of it has done legitimate good, because they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel from scratch, stuck to actual science and existing, well performing charitable organisations.
global poverty still gets a good portion of the EA funding, but is slowly falling out of the movement because it’s boring to discuss and you can’t make any dubiously effective startups out of it.
TL;DR:
Overall, despite the fact that the project “failed”, we see the overall experience as a positive one. Most new charities fail - that is part of the game. The important thing is to figure out as quickly as possible whether your idea is a good one, and we believe that we succeeded in doing so.
the whole thing reads like a nonspecific job application to the EA-industrial-complex, actual “charity” irrelevant here
Honestly, if they had taken just one evening to chill and put themselves in the shoes of the tired, overly spammed, unmotivated farmers; they would have instantly recognised that sending them a non solicited email with a nondescript, probably overly verbose request, would be the absolute worst way to go about reaching them. Save maybe for carving their message on a brick and throwing it at their main window.
It looks to me as a typical case of “not my money, so let’s take things easy”. I would gladly make a study on how many failed charities would have been successful, would the funding depend on some basic metric. I would even do that as a charity. For, say, 30k. 🙃
Considering they only bothered to translate the landing page of their site, they prob would have emailed these farmers in english, and got promptly ignored due to that alone. I mean if you cannot even be bothered to translate into the companies (prob) primary language.
