To play devil's advocate (these don't actually represent my beliefs):

I can’t remember any EA orgs failing to reach a fundraising target.

This doesn't necessarily mean much, because fundraising targets have a lot to do with how much money EA orgs believe they can raise.

Open Phil has recently posted about an org they wish existed but doesn’t and funder-initiated startups.

It's pretty hard to get funding for a new organization, e.g. Spencer and I put a lot of effort into it without much success. The general problem I see is a lack of "angel investing" or its equivalent–the idea of putting money into small, experimental organizations and funding them further as they grow. (As a counter-counterpoint, EA Ventures seems well poised to function as an angel investor in the nonprofit world.)

Also, to address the general point that EA is talent-constrained, the problem might be that there are very few people with the skills needed, and more funding can be used to train people, like MIRI is doing with the summer fellows program. In that case earning to give is still a good solution to the talent constraint.

Note that GiveWell / Good Ventures (unsurprisingly) like to research a charity or cause area themselves before they direct funding to it, and this is tightly constrained by the pace of GiveWell research staff growth, so in practice many high-leverage opportunities are still (in my opinion) available to marginal EtGers — at-least, if those EtGers are willing to be at least 1/5th as proactive about finding good opportunities as, say, Matt Wage is. Maybe that won't be true after 10 years of additional research conducted by GiveWell (incl. OpenPhil), but I think it'll be true for the foreseeable future.

There are probably additional reasons GiveWell / Good Ventures won't fund particular things, besides the fact that they haven't been researched in sufficient depth by GiveWell. E.g. GiveWell might think it's a good thing for there to be multiple meta-charities in the EA space that maintain independence, and so even if funding CEA projects is a clear win, they still might think it's a bad idea for GW/GV to direct any support to CEA projects.

And finally, it's also possible that individual EtGers might have different values or world-models than the public faces of GW/GV have, and for that r... (read more)

This is what I was trying to get at with http://acesounderglass.com/2015/05/11/map-of-open-spaces-in-effective-altruism/ . I don't think the number of unsolved problems is at all well publicized.

A note on what we mean when we talk about "marginal EtGers".

In some sense all EtGers look marginal, in that they could shift the margins by moving onto direct work. But there's a coordination issue. Really the people who have the highest comparative advantage at EtG should be pursuing that, and whether we have the right balance determines where the cut-off should be between people choosing EtG or direct work. "Marginal EtGers" are people who only just decided on EtG. They could be people already in EtG careers, but they will more often ... (read more)

Has there been much thought or discussion put into the idea of making existing charities more effective? Sure there are lots of organizations out there that focus on making marketing more effective or getting more donors; but there seems to be a big whole in the market for people or organizations that work to turn current charities into ones we would consider effective. I've thought about this myself quite frequently and would be stoked to see something like this. Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

Thanks for posting this Ben, I've noticed some of the same things you mention.

I personally would be more motivated against earning to give if I heard an argument about why the "more money equals more stuff done" equation which seems to hold in the rest of our economy fails for charities.

I think EAs irrationally avoid giving to "second-best" charities (like GiveWell's standouts) , but that's a relatively weak impression. It might be helpful to talk more about top giving opportunities in a given moment/year, rather than talking about top charities, which can become less top as donations are made, until donating doesn't feel so shiny anymore (also saying this as a random EA, not soon-to-be GW staffer).

Of course, it might be better to ask people to give later in general, but there's no reason as far as I know to believe the best o... (read more)

I don't have any new considerations to add but I agree with a) there's probably a relative oversupply of 'EA money' on the margin and b) there are various psychological reasons that would pull towards E2G over direct work.

I think there are plausibly contrary explanations for some of these observations. for senior staff moving to Open Phil, it could be because Open Phil is younger, and its tasks are less structured. For top charities running out of room for more funding, this is only the top couple of GiveWell charities, and this needn't apply to intergenerationally-altruistic charities. GiveWell has mentioned a couple of organisations that they would like to see, but it's not as though finding such opportunities has yet become their main activity.

I think the general point i... (read more)

Sounds reasonable - and if successful will come back to a funding constraint.

You want to put your most expensive resource at the bottle-neck as an efficiency heuristic.

Do people think the bottle neck is ideas, execution, or funding - or the infrastructure needed to facilitate one or more of those?

It seems a shame that such intelligent and amazing people in the EA movement are, on the whole, putting their most productive and creative years (25-35?) into EtG rather than building and delivering practical solutions to improve the world in the best way possibl... (read more)

I broadly agree with this (and have some relevant posts in draft).

At a broad level, I expect the ratio of (value of marginal earning-to-give):(value of marginal direct work) can't get too distorted, because of mechanisms like:

• Donors discuss publicly whether they feel the pool of giving opportunities is deep;
• Charities talk publicly about whether they are more funding- or talent-constrained;
• Charities raise or lower salaries, making direct work more or less appealing to people using that as a heuristic in choosing a career.

However this isn't in conflict with your suggestion that at the margin now there may be slightly too much EtG. I'm not sure about that.