Quick takes

Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree. Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally.   

I was going through Animal Charity Evaluators' reasoning behind which countries to prioritize (https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/the-humane-league/#prioritizing-countries) and I notice they judge countries with a higher GNI per capita as more tractable. This goes against my intuition, because my guess is your money goes further in countries that are poorer. And also because I've heard animal rights work in Latin America and Asia is more cost-effective nowadays. Does anyone have any hypotheses/arguments? This quick take isn't meant as criticism, I'm just informing myself as I'm trying to choose an animal welfare org to fundraise for this week (small, low stakes). When I have more time I'd be happy to do more research and contact ACE myself with these questions, but right now I'm just looking for some quick thoughts.

David Rubinstein recently interviewed Philippe Laffont, the founder of Coatue (probably worth $5-10b). When asked about his philanthropic activities, Laffont basically said he’s been too busy to think about it, but wanted to do something someday. I admit I was shocked. Laffont is a savant technology investor and entrepreneur (including in AI companies) and it sounded like he literally hadn’t put much thought into what to do with his fortune. Are there concerted efforts in the EA community to get these people on board? Like, is there a google doc with a six degrees of separation plan to get dinner with Laffont? The guy went to MIT and invests in AI companies. In just wouldn’t be hard to get in touch. It seems like increasing the probability he aims some of his fortune at effective charities would justify a significant effort here. And I imagine there are dozens or hundreds of people like this. Am I missing some obvious reason this isn’t worth pursuing or likely to fail? Have people tried? I’m a bit of an outsider here so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on what I’m sure seems like a pretty naive take! https://youtu.be/_nuSOMooReY?si=6582NoLPtSYRwdMe

I'm concerned about the new terms of service for Giving What We Can, which will go into effect after August 31, 2024: This is a significant departure from the Effective Ventures' TOS (GWWC is spinning out of EV), which has users grant EV an unlimited but non-exclusive license to use feedback or suggestions they send, while retaining the right to do anything with it themselves. I've previously talked to GWWC staff about my ideas to help people give effectively, like a donation decision worksheet that I made. If this provision goes into effect, it would deter me from sharing my suggestions with GWWC in the future because I would risk losing the right to disseminate or continue developing those ideas or materials myself.

I'm starting to put together plans for this year's Giving Season events (roughly, start of November to end of December). If you remember the events last year, it'd be cool to know: 1- What was memorable to you from that period? 2- Was anything in particular valuable for you or for your donation decisions? 3- Is there anything you would expect to see this year? 4- What would you hope to see this year? Thanks!

For a different kind of FarmKind post:  FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I've seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).   I'm personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But -- although I haven't dug under the hood too much -- FarmKind's calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.  Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering). In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind's for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much "credit" to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I've put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind's work than my personal musings about offsets.     1. ^ In more detail: * Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that's fine! But in an offset situation, I don't think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that

Marcus Daniell appreciation note @Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

Thinking of trying to re-host innovationsinfundraising.org, which I stopped hosting maybe a year ago. Not sure I have the bandwidth to keep it updated as a ~living literature review, but the content might be helpful to people. You can see some of the key content on the wayback machine, e.g., the table of evidence/consideration of potential tools .  Any thoughts/interest in using this or collaborating on a revival (focused on the effective giving part)? This, along with the barriers to effective giving might (or might not) also be a candidate for Open Phil's living literature project. (The latter is still hosted, some overlaps with @Lucius Caviola  and @Stefan_Schubert's book).