Organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project or the Fish Welfare Initiative have high utilitarian returns, but are difficult to sell to people outside of EA, so it makes sense for dollars coming directly from the core of the community to go to these niche but highly effective cause areas. 

We've just resolved some launch issues with the voting portal. The portal was limited to 30 candidates, so a randomised group of organisations was missing for each voter. 
If you've already voted, consider re-voting with a full list of candidates. 
 

Kind of a funny selection effect going on here here where if you pick sufficiently promising / legible / successful orgs (like Against Malaria Foundation), isn't that just funging against OpenPhil funding?  This leads me to want to upweight new and not-yet-proven orgs (like the several new AIM-incubated charities), plus things like PauseAI and Wild Animal Initiative that OpenPhil feels they can't fund for political reasons.  (Same argument would apply for invertebrate welfare, but I personally don't really believe in invertebrate welfare.  Sorry!)

I'm also somewhat saddened by the inevitable popularity-contest nature of the vote; I feel like people are picking orgs they've heard of and picking orgs that match their personal cause-prioritization "team" (global health vs x-risk vs animals).  I like the idea that EA should be experimental and exploratory, so (although I am a longtermist myself), I tried to further upweight some really interesting new cause areas that I just learned about while reading these various posts:
- Accion Transformadora's crime-reduction stuff seems like a promising new space to explore for potential effective interventions in medium-income ... (read more)

Given that OP is not funding WAW and invertebrate welfare, I’ve selected Wild Animal Initiative and the Arthropoda Foundation as my top votes. SWP was also a high vote but slightly less because I'm more bullish on the VOI of Wild Animal initiative and Arthropoda foundation  

That said, I'm guilty of "not enough time to research the orgs". There’s a reasonably high chance (~75%) that I would change these top votes with more reading, probably by prioritising less well-known orgs.

I'd like to see far more of EA's budget be going towards animal welfare, in particular to the most numerous and neglected beings, invertebrates. This puts Arthropoda above SWP at the top since the former is more neglected and urgent. After that, the EA AWF has good insight to the EAA movement's needs and Rethink Priorities functions as a public good for the EA community and I think have shown themselves to be worthy of having more discretion in their budget given their incredibly impressive track record. 

Apart from that, I find the case for FWI and WAI and LIC to be convincing. I'm a bit unsure of LIC's impact and thus it ranks behind FWI and WAI.

I voted for promising early-stage orgs, as they seem often more funding-constrained and more cost-effective on the margin than established organizations (who have a much easier time fundraising). More speculative, but seemed worth the risk. I like this format, thanks for organizing this! 

I'm voting for charities that have the biggest room for funding considering the impact the want to make. I am also prioritising meta charities, because they are less likely to receive votes due to most people supporting direct work, while meta charities are important for us to grow as a community. 

I made a shortlist of around 15 from a quick scan and then read more in detail for those (and discussing my biggest concerns for any that seemed interesting with Claude). I want to say that the process of reading many funding requests next to each other was interesting and, dare I say, almost fun!

Pause AI has been neglected in funding from eg Open Philanthropy

I think work on animals is comparatively neglected, due to the high numbers of individuals of bad conditions. More specifically, the smaller the animals, the more numerous and neglected they tend to be, which leads to underfunding.

AMF is very cost-effective.

I voted for mainly animal welfare/rights charities first, particularly ones which focused on highly neglected, large-scale populations like insects, shrimps, and fishes. I also voted highly for PauseAI because I believe in creating greater public pressure to slow AI progress and shifting the Overton Window, even if I am agnostic about pausing AI progress itself. After these, I voted for some of the meta/mixed organizations which I thought were especially promising, including Rethink Priorities and the Unjournal. Then I voted for mental health/resilience in... (read more)

I'm not going to say who I voted for because I think a secret ballot is important. I will say I strongly agree with the idea of using more democracy in EA for making decisions so I applaud the forum and the organizers for having this event week and letting us vote.

I ranked the more neglected charities higher as they will benefit from funding more than others

I voted for the animal welfare projects that seem to have more funding constraints, show more EV, and/or are more CE-aligned. Animal welfare is disproportionately underfunded within EA, so I did not vote for other groups in other  cause areas.

I don't have a lot of confidence in this vote, and it's quite possible my ranking will change in important ways. Because only the top three organizations place in the money, we will all have the ability to narrow down which placements are likely to be outcome-relevant as the running counts start displaying. I'm quite sure I have not given all 36 organizations a fair shake in the 5-10 minutes I devoted to actually voted.

I ultimately decided to vote for the animal welfare groups, because I believe that animal welfare, in both it's farmed and wild variants is probably one of the most robust and large problems in the world, and with the exception of groups that are the logistical/epistemic backbone of the movements (they are valuable for gathering data and making sure that the animal welfare groups can do their actions), I've become more skeptical that other causes were robustly net-positive, especially reducing existential risks.

Like @Toby Tremlett🔹 I did a quick initial vote and will come back and edit my vote once I've read more marginal funding posts + see who's in the lead. 

(Another plug here for the Spotify playlist we created with the marginal funding posts in case you (like me) prefer listening to posts)

Largely but not entirely informed by https://manifold.markets/AaronBergman18/what-donationaccepting-entity-eg-ch#sU2ldPLZ0Edd 

Cause prioritisation (global health and poverty first, then catastrophic risk and meta, then animal welfare (farmed above wild/marine, environmental included above welfare) and then AI last. Within causes, personal interest (eg antibiotics) and having heard of them before.

Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn't be where I am now!

I've put together a quick initial vote, but I'll vote again at least once before the deadline. I'll go more in depth and closely read the marginal funding posts of the top 5 or so candidates when there are clear front-runners. 

I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.

I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.

I'm kind of confused why I don't think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don't...

I believe that making better decisions is the first order of priority, followed by catastrophic risks. I tried to incorporate issue neglectedness in my vote.

Going through the list of eligible organizations by cause area, I tried to identify less prominent organizations (that weren't the top-ranked and thus most famous organizations among EA previously recommenden by Effective Giving / Giving what you can in the past years) and looked for a) a possibly neglected but promising approach (according to my gut feeling) and b) that made their funding goals concrete, sizeable and transparent through concrete measures. The organizations I chose claimed to be in the intermediate phase of growth with operations already r... (read more)

I voted for more mental health funding: Vida Plena and Kaya. They increase WELLBYs with a very high ROI

I went for the organizations with those plans which will actually work. Their aims and goals aren't just on paper or hypothetical, they might actually make a difference. Moreover, it was also based on personal preferences. The country I live in, is an agricultural country and also suffers with countless cases of domestic violence and animal abuse. So those problems naturally got my attention. Nothing would make me happier than to alleviate such crimes in any part of the world.

I used the comment field in the form to note that a field in the form was marked as optional when it was actually mandatory. That comment got automatically published here, and out of context it made no sense whatsoever. I think it would've been clearer to not automatically transfer this form feedback here (some people might've even assumed that it's private feedback).

PauseAI seem funding constraint - probably needs more runway for returns to be seen on their work

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I would really love to see the Good Food Institute (GFI) included on the list as well!

Animals are suffering and they deserve as much or more help than we give to other humans. They demonostrate no malice, hatred, jealousy, they only wish to survive. How we care for them reflects how we care for other humans. 

1. AI Safety seems to be the most urgent and is pretty neglected, while being tractable
2. In case humanity faces a GCR, there will be no focus on other topics, so putting focus on GCR prevention and mitigation seems legit to me
3. Animal welfare is pretty neglected, while IMHO being not so urgent
4. I don't know most of the organisations, so just picked all/some to represent the points above.

Sticking with choices I know a lot about and I'm confident have a big impact

Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn't be where I am now!

I strongly believe animal welfare should be prioritized above all other cause areas, due to effectiveness per dollar donated.

To give more people basic agency over their own lives.

There are millions of cries and bleeding in every single minute across the world from the farmed animal. The collective efforts to rescue and help the suffering souls has been made through EA animal welfare funds as the EA hands of support reaches all corners of the world to support those who dedicates their life to advocates and support in ending the sufferings of animals. So they deserve this support as the impact they are bringing in globally is huge. 

Aligning powerful AI is hard

My previous experience assessing the projects of the listed organizations (I did not vote for those I'm unfamiliar with), how neglected the work they're doing is, and the marginal impact I expect from funding them.

Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.

Having a human-centric core in EA seems robustly good to me, so we're sure to make the world a better place even if our other ideas don't pan out.

X-Risk is most important.
Helping animals might do more direct good than helping people, but it doesn't seem like people care much about animals, so helping people is second most important.