Is Effective Volunteering Possible?

post by David Bravo (davidbravocomas) · 2023-05-19T12:41:36.577Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  Intuitions about Effective Volunteering
  An open door for further research
None
2 comments

Crosspost from the EA Forum [EA · GW]

Epistemic status: based mostly on intuitions and personal and anecdotal experiences, with a bit of help from the principles of economics. Uncertain and motivated to explore whether an overexploited activity is underexploited regarding doing the most good. About channeling the extended will to volunteer into solving problems effectively.

Last year I did volunteering for three weeks in Arusha, Tanzania. That was before I learned about Money as the Unit of Caring [LW · GW], Purchasing Fussies and Utilons Separately [LW · GW], Efficient Charity [LW · GW], and the rationalist and Effective Altruism aspirations and movements.

A friend of mine had gone there the previous year and had recommended the experience. He did warn me that some volunteers had left disappointed at how they had got more leisure than impact out of it. Even so, travelling to Africa and Tanzania, alone, getting immersed in the local culture, and learning first-hand about their struggles, was something I wanted to try at least once. The personal experience turned out to be amazing—probably the best I have ever had. When it comes to summer trips, it was, for me, unmatched. It was a very warm and very bright—and quite expensive—fuzzy.

In the mornings, my role there was to teach at a local school. I was usually an assistant to the main, local professor at a class of 30 five or six-year-olds, and sometimes I was the sole teacher of eight 12-year-olds. We had the afternoons free, which we frequently spent by going to an orphanage to play and cheer up the 20 solitary kids that were taken care of by a single nun.

Leaving cynicism aside, playing with the children and providing them with their brightest moments of the day was heart-opening enough that I think almost anyone, effective altruists included, would find the experience inherently valuable. If you add that you can meet great people, discover the realities of an entirely different country in an authentic[1] way, and leave with great peace of mind, it gets you wondering: isn’t there something of great practical importance we can extract from volunteering that can really move the needle on doing the most good, without having to feel a pang of guilt about it?

This is the core hypothesis of Effective Volunteering: volunteering can be as much about you as about helping eradicate tragedies and problems of the world you wish didn’t exist. This contrasts with what has been known as voluntourism, which, in blunt terms, is when: like tourism, you value the experience in itself so much that you are almost grateful that such a place called poverty exists so can have fun visiting it.

A project around Effective Volunteering should aim to investigate this claim and implement the most beneficial policies for doing good through the inevitable power and allure of volunteering, if there are any.

These last four words are the cornerstones that sustain the legitimacy of this investigation: once you choose that there are ways in which volunteering can be good, no evidence you find will change the bottom line [LW · GW]. So instead, one must leave from a state of suspicion and uncertainty, where the direction in which each new piece of data will pull you is unpredictable. Be curious and put little resistance into updating in light of new clues.

The validity of the project depends on the algorithm that produces the bottom line of the research. If the world is such that no kind of international volunteering can ever be beneficial, the algorithm will be effective if it outputs that no kind of international volunteering can be beneficial. If the world is such that only a few selected and rigorous volunteering programmes can be beneficial, the algorithm will be effective if it outputs that only these can be beneficial, and contributes towards implementing these and not others.

Intuitions about Effective Volunteering

Nonetheless, I have an intuition (which is the reason behind why I am willing to explore the possibility of Effective Volunteering) that, despite the huge popularity of international volunteering, it is underexploited when it comes to doing the most good. Most volunteer organisations are ineffective, do little or even negative impact, are mostly about voluntourism, and their real aim often is to turn volunteers into donors. Most effective charities, by contrast, are by definition effective regarding the value created from the money donated, but less frequently offer the possibility of volunteering abroad.

This might indeed be because a charity will never be effective through volunteering; that volunteering is inherently ineffective. But if we take humans’ nature for granted, and assume that for many people the experience of volunteering can be invaluable for motives such as building career capital, relationships, personal well-being, and self-care, then I think it is possible that some paths have a greater impact than others; and that some have a net-negative and others have a net-positive impact on the developing country. And, given this, that we can maximise the impact made through volunteering.

Within the Effective Altruism community, I believe it is not as needed that I point out the most common drawbacks of volunteering, although I will still underline some of the main ones below.

1. The power of specilisation

2. The fungibility of money

3. The cost of managing volunteers

4. Artificial jobs, weakening of local markets, and obstacles to resilience and independence

I don't think so. In such a case, the Kenyans, for a change, would be forced to initiate trade relations with Uganda or Tanzania, and buy their food there. This type of trade is vital for Africa. It would force us to improve our own infrastructure, while making national borders—drawn by the Europeans by the way—more permeable. It would also force us to establish laws favoring market economy.

5. Be wary of second-order effects; be wary of wolves in sheep’s clothing

These appear to be exceedingly adverse arguments against volunteering to even contemplate countering them with volunteering itself. But, to the above-mentioned benefits for the individual volunteer, it can be hypothesised that, although aid can sometimes be deceptive, helping is possible.

I do believe that leaving a market to its own devices, even in developing countries, is often preferable to most other options. By having to optimise for what the consumer wants, the market makes it easy to spot and remove bad and inefficient policies, become a bit less wrong about what works and what doesn’t, and make substantial progress. But, going meta, I do not find convincing the idea that capitalism and libertarianism are the all-purpose solutions that can cure all diseases.

It seems much more plausible and intuitive that, for all its apparent elegance and simplicity, full libertarianism isn’t the piece that fits in all puzzles. In fact, there might be no such once-and-for-all piece, and the best we may have is our capacity to reason about the best strategy for each particular situation.

As aspiring rationslists, we ought to ask: “so you’re telling me you can’t imagine a single situation in which libertarianism would be the wrong approach; not a single problem which libertarianism would fail to solve and another strategy wouldn’t?”. Scott Alexander addressed this when discussing the machinery of freedom (and The Machinery Of Freedom, the book), playing libertarianism against a centralised institution:

Given that the universe is allowed to throw whatever problems it wants at us, and that it has so far gleefully taken advantage of that right to come up with a whole host of very diverse and interesting ones, why is it that none of these problems are best addressed by a centralized entity with a monopoly on force? That seems like a pretty basic structure from a game-theoretic perspective, and you’re telling me it just never works in the real world? Shouldn’t there be at least one or two things where a government, or any form of coercive structure at all, is just the right answer? And can’t we just have a small government that does that?

Imagine you have two regions. One is rich, resourceful, and with plenty of accumulated and constructed knowledge; the other is poor, needy, and with feeble social, political and industrial structures. Information can leak from one to the other, but the imbalance is still huge.

Refraiming the previous question: “so you’re telling me that leaving the developing country on its own is better than sending people from high-income countries to help? That there’s really nothing that an enthusiastic visitor could do to make the lives of the struggling locals a little bit better? That the developing country has to figure all out by itself?”.

During my time at the school in Arusha, I felt there was a 5-year-old, by the name of Johnson, that was quite bright compared to the rest. It disheartens me to predict the lack of opportunities he might have as he grows up; how reality might crush his potential. He will probably never have a tutor or have the chances to exhibit himself and gain self-esteem.

It’s also a source of great frustration to imagine how I could help him, how I could tutor him, if there weren’t so many people that needed help and the world wasn’t such a broken place. This hunch that I could help Johnson, and many others, partly drives my suspicion that there is room for high-value interventions from volunteers.

An open door for further research

It’s not my claim that volunteering is the most effective strategy to do good; far from it. Nevertheless, as long as it provides net-positive value for the host country and it is done effectively, it can be a worthwhile activity given that it is a two-way street that can confer huge positives to the volunteer while directly tackling important problems.

Kirsten defined [EA · GW] effective volunteering (although, as I understand it, referring to volunteering within one’s country rather than regarding the substitution of international voluntourism) as “using pre-allocated volunteering time to do as much good as possible, using evidence and reason”.

It can be that, for effective volunteering to work, the selection process for volunteers would need to be much more restrictive. Okay, an MIT professor teaching in Tanzania could make huge differences, but it might be hard to find something that a local couldn’t do which a group of teenage friends inscribed by their wealthy parents could meaningfully offer. Or maybe their enthusiasm could be directed for good, without producing side effects such as a sense of abandonment in kids. This would necessitate careful investigation.

Additionally, the range of locations and of tasks carried out could have to change significantly, as would be expected. The emphasis could shift to non-easily-replaceable jobs in low-income locations where governance was weak, in remote or rural areas, with high rates of mental health issues, or where there was a need for creative solutions and novel perspectives.

All in all, my aim is not necessarily to encourage international volunteering for effective altruists—perhaps it is to discourage ineffective, harmful voluntourism. Rather, to take a scout mindset in investigating the viability of effective volunteering. The falsifiable hypothesis is that we can help, even if we wish that such volunteering wasn’t needed in the first place. Remember: if poverty exists, we want to eradicate it. If mental disorders are prevalent, we aim to replace them with happiness and well-being.

While it is natural to expect humans to pursue the warm fuzziness of volunteering, organisations and communities could exist that took a higher-level view and channelled this enthusiasm into utilons through the most effective interventions. Implementing these interventions and creating such spaces for volunteerism would depend on the outputs of effective research.

2 comments

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comment by Viliam · 2023-05-21T23:28:29.284Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You suggest that hiring a local teacher would be more effective. I was never there, so I don't know whether there is or isn't a shortage of sufficiently qualified local teachers. If a country has a problem educating their kids, it probably won't have many good teachers, because the teachers of today are the kids of yesterday... who had a problem to get decent education... so how many of them could have become good teachers?

That said, there still may be interventions way more effective than traveling there. Such as teaching by video. Or if the objection is that video education does not have the same (e.g. emotional) impact as a real teacher, then what about a remote collaboration with a local teacher? You two design the lesson together, or maybe you design the lesson alone, the local teacher actually teaches it. Kinda like using the video, except you use a local person instead of the screen. Or you could alternate the video lessons with lessons with the local teacher. Or you could explain the new topic, and the local teacher would do the exercises with the kids. Or you could teach the local teachers using the video. Or write a textbook for them.

Just trying to say that it's not "either-or", and some unusual approach may be the most efficient way. Maybe you should pay someone local to translate Khan Academy to their native language.

(I agree that the belief that the best way to help other people is doing nothing is suspiciously convenient.)

Replies from: davidbravocomas
comment by David Bravo (davidbravocomas) · 2023-05-22T06:25:47.462Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Certainly; it wasn't my intention to make it seem like an 'either-or'. I believe there's a lot of room for imported quality teaching, and a fairly well-educated volunteer might be better at teaching than the average local teacher. I didn't find how they taught there too effective: a lot of repeating the teacher's words, no intuition built for maths or physics…I think volunteers could certainly help with that. Also by teaching the subjects they are more proficient at than the local teachers (e.g. English). I agree there is the potential to use volunteers in a variety of ways to raise the level of education, and also to try to make the changes permanent once the volunteers leave.