Open Thread 6

Thanks for putting this together! It's interesting enough that I hope it doesn't get buried in the open thread.

You could add Charity Science to the Meta section as the organisation focused on fundraising for GiveWell-recommended charities. Though it wouldn't affect the figures much, as we could support the three of us if we got less than 0.02%.

I also understand that FHI's budget is quite large, so it would change the figures somewhat. It might be worth emailing sean . oheigeartaigh at philosophy.ox.ac.uk to find out the budget for it and CSER.

I would be interested in more detailed numbers on these, including the numbers for spending in $s as well as the %.

My very vague guess would be that GCRI, CSER and FLI have $200k/yr, CFAR $400k/yr and FHI $600k/yr.

It would also be interesting to think about how much of a demand these organisations place on EA donors as opposed to academic grants.

See also here for more figures.

Yes, please do do a proper post on this with cites etc, I think this is really valuable!

Thanks for making this!

FYI, almost all of GiveDirectly's income comes from Good Ventures or non-EAs. Its funding sources break down as follows:

Total: 17.4 million Good Ventures: 7 million Other Givewell: ~3.4 million Other non-EA: 7 million (presumably)

I think this sort of comparison is very valuable overall!

Post it. It's great to have more relevant content. Take note of whether people vote up your content so you know whether to post more like it.

Looks fun to me!

Hey Giles! The current page is, admittedly, not very informative. We're currently using Unbounce to test a number of hypotheses that will inform the building of the completed effectivealtruism.org.

A more informative page will be coming soon.

I think the page in question is under construction, but the link should be fixed.

ridiculously ineffective altruism for x-risk.

Why "for x-risk" in particular?

I think of earning to give as a strategy, rather than a place you're at. Pursuing earning to give will nudge you in the direction of:

• giving a larger % of income to charity
• giving some conscious thought to your career, taking earning potential into consideration
• keeping up to date with which charities seem the most cost effective

But you don't have to do all those things, or do them especially well, or do them a certain amount to say you're pursuing an earning to give strategy.

I often wonder about this with my own career. It's not particularly high earning but I do donate a high percentage (50%). I don't think it really makes sense to use this as an example of earning to give, since it's more simply described as "giving a high percentage."

My internal definition is "take a job (or build a business) so that you donate more than you otherwise would have" [1]. It's too minimalist a definition to work in every case (it'd be unreasonable to call someone on a $1mn salary who donates $1000 "earning to give", even if they wouldn't donate anything on $500k), but if you're the sort of person who considers "how much will I donate to charity" as an input into their choice of job, then I think the definition will work most of the time.

There probably needs to be a threshold amount donated for "earning to give" to be applied in an EA context, but I don't see the need for a progressive percentage scale for higher-income earners. If you're giving 10% of $1mn, then you're doing a lot more than me and my higher percentage of a lot less.

[1] That needs a bit of pedantic re-writing for it to perfectly match what I mean. e.g., I consider myself earning to give because if it wasn't for my pesky conscience, I'd negotiate a reduced salary for a four-day work week. It'd still be basically the same job, just a different contract... anyway I don't think this sort of pedantry is important here.

Interesting. I haven't read much analysis of this. One question you can ask is: assuming ordinary shares have a greater return, if you donate that dividend to AMF, will the world be better off.

We think AMF can save a life for $3k (or $10-15k if it's affected by inflation). And our guess it that after investing $100k in normal shares for 30 years, you're $50k ahead. That's 17 lives (or 3-5).

On the other hand, you're giving up the opportunity to give more responsible companies $100k of investment for 30 years. So the question would be - how good are these companies, and is funding them better than saving a few lives?

Also, intuitively, it seems like there should be some price elasticity situation here, where whichever shares you buy, some other people will sell them off, partially offsetting your direct impact. I'm not sure how that works with shares though.

Anyway, if you see any more useful info about it all, do report back!

The envelope icon next to "Messages" in the top-right (just below the banner) becomes an open envelope when you have a reply. (I think it turns a brighter shade of blue as well? I can't remember.) The icon returns to being a closed envelope after you click on it and presumably see what messages/replies you have.

If fossil fuels will be more valuable in the future, we would expect companies that own reserves to delay exploiting them so they can instead sell them in the future. We would also expect the forward curve for oil to be upwards-sloping. The latter is true, but only because the spot price has fallen so much over the past 4 months; 6 months ago the spot price of oil was well above the price of oil in 2020.

Now, you might object that private actors would only save the oil if they expected to make returns greater than current interest rates; otherwise they would be better off producing now and saving they money. As such, if oil is more valuable in the future, but only a little bit, private firms would inefficiently produce now. But this is not a special feature of oil - this is a fully general complaint against positive interest rates.

So essentially either:

• You are better at predicting future demand than the highly liquid oil futures market
• Interest rates are too high
• The market is currently efficient; there are no gains from such a plan.

Here is a related post by David Friedman on Sustainability

Was it this one? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/your-money/if-giving-feels-so-good-why-dont-we-do-it.html

We could make one.

If everyone on the ladder is EA-aligned then each person benefits from teaching almost as much as learning. It makes me think of Skillshare.im, though the structure is a little different.