A place to explain your preferences, discuss them, and maybe change your mind.
Some comments on this thread are cross-posted from a text box which appears when you reach the end of the voting process, but everyone is welcome to post here whenever.
You can read about all the candidates here.
I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
I ranked the Shrimp Welfare Project 1st because I think their Humane Slaughter Initiative is the most cost-effective intervention around.
I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).
With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropoda's project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWP's operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropoda's projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since they're more existential. But all of this is held loosely and I'm very open to counterarguments.
To what extent are people voting in a manner that is consistent / not consistent with their past or intended future personal donations? I notice that my current ranking doesn't really align with the last time I handed out donations of my own money (end of 2023, for tax reasons). Some of that may reflect changed priorities and development over the past year, but I doubt all of it does.
To the extent that some of us have different impulses when handing out my own money versus (largely) other people's money, how might we disentangle the extent to which each set of impulses is correct? (For a third data point, my votes in the Equal Hands pilot have been somewhere between these two.)
I think the difference may largely come down to psychological factors, such as:
Some of the difference in votes vs. personal donations comes from the tax deductible status of donations. Donations to (for example) Arthropoda are only tax-deductible in the USA, meaning that many potential donors living in other countries might donate elsewhere. In a donor lottery this is no longer a concern.
Other factors like currency conversion fees when donating to charities that only take donations in dollars may have similar effects.
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 ...
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.
(Edited at 19:35 UTC-5 as I misunderstood how the voting system works)
My top 10 right now look something like:
1. The Midas Project
2. EA Animal Welfare Fund
3. Rethink Priorities
4. MATS Research
5. Shrimp Welfare Project
6. Apart Research
7. Legal Impact for Chickens
8. PauseAI
9. Wild Animal Initiative
10. High Impact Professionals
I ranked my organization, The Midas Project, first on my ballot. I don't think we have a stronger track record than many of the organizations in this election (and I expect the winners will be a few familiar top contenders like Rethink Priorities, who certainly deserve to be there), but I do think the election will undervalue our project due to general information asymmetries and most of our value being speculative/heavy-tailed. This seems in line with the tactical voting suggestion, but it does feel a bit icky/full of hubris.
Also, in making this list, I realized that I favored large orgs whose work I'm familiar with, and most skipped over small orgs who I know little about (including ones that made posts for marginal funding week that I just haven't read). This was a funny feeling because (as mentioned) I run a small org that I expect many people don't kno...
Personally I found it really helpful to listen through the Spotify playlist of Marginal Funding Week posts during a recent flight. (Note that unfortunately many of the candidates aren't in that playlist, apologies!)
In particular, I found @Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸's PauseAI post surprisingly convincing, given that I am generally a bit skeptical of pausing AI as a strategy for reducing risk. I'm also sympathetic to the argument that the EA Forum should allocate our money to charities that are harder to fundraise for elsewhere, and PauseAI scores well there. So I've made PauseAI my top choice, which I didn't spend too much time debating since my one vote isn't currently the winning one. I may revisit my vote if that changes.
In general I recommend listening to the Spotify playlist (or even reading through all the Marginal Funding Week posts/comments if you're extra virtuous!) — I found the experience both inspiring (hearing about all the work people are doing to improve the world) and sad (realizing how much more money we need to do all these things).
The current leaders, going into the final stretch... are the EA Animal Welfare Fund, The Shrimp Welfare Project, and Rethink Priorities.
The Against Malaria Foundation, Pause AI US, Wild Animal Initiative and MATS are runners up, with AMF being particularly close to getting into the top three.
You can expand the leaderboard at any time to see the runners up.
Now is the time to make the case for the runners up you think should be more highly ranked...
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.
Here's my longtermist, AI focused list. I really haven't done my research, e.g. I read zero marginal funding posts. MATS is probably the most popular of these, so this is basically a vote for MATS.
I would have ranked The Midas Project around 5 but it wasn't an option.
~All of the EV from the donation election probably comes from nudging OpenPhil toward the realization that they're pretty dramatically out of line with "consensus EA" in continuing to give most marginal dollars to global health. If this was explicitly thought through, brilliant.
(See this comment for sourcing and context on the table, which was my attempt to categorize all OP grants not too long ago)
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...
I voted for The Humane League UK (meat/broiler chicken welfare), Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation for cost-effective programs for animal welfare with low risk of backfire. I'm specifically concerned with backfire due to wild animal effects (also here), or increasing keel bone fractures for cage-free hens, so I avoid reducing animal product consumption/production and cage-free work.
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.
Largely but not entirely informed by https://manifold.markets/AaronBergman18/what-donationaccepting-entity-eg-ch#sU2ldPLZ0Edd
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)
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...
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...
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.
Hey @Toby Tremlett🔹 , when people leave their rationales with their votes and they end up as comments here, they often don't say what they voted for, and it doesn't show in this thread. So, I don't know what orgs they're talking about. Is that intended?
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).
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.
A lot of these orgs are IMO -EV:
-I'm opposed to (most) animal rights
-some of the choices regarding AI look like potential backfires via feeding capabilities (PauseAI is the only one where this is completely implausible)
If someone has information suggesting that the Nucleic Acid Observatory and/or Midas Project might be -EV, please tell me (as biorisk and AI risk are the ones most susceptible to this).
Some of the difference in votes vs. personal donations comes from the tax deductible status of donations. Donations to (for example) Arthropoda are only tax-deductible in the USA, meaning that many potential donors living in other countries might donate elsewhere. In a donor lottery this is no longer a concern.
Other factors like currency conversion fees when donating to charities that only take donations in dollars may have similar effects.