Quick takes

As earn to giver, I found contributing to funding diversification challenging Jeff Kaufmann posted a different version of the same argument earlier than me. Some have argued that earning to give can contribute to funding diversification. Having a few dozen mid-sized donors, rather than one or two very large donors, would make the financial position of an organization more secure. It allows them to plan for the future and not worry about fundraising all the time. As earn to giver, I can be one of those mid-sized donors. I have tried. However, it is challenging. First of all, I don't have expertise, and don't have much time to build the expertise. I spend most of my time on my day job, which has nothing to do with any cause I care about. Any research must be done in my free time. This is fine, but it has some cost. This is time I could have spent on career development, talking to others about effective giving, or living more frugally. Motivation is not the issue, at least for me. I've found the research extremely rewarding and intellectually stimulating to do. Yet, fun doesn't necessarily translate to effectiveness. I've seen peer earn to givers just defer to GiveWell or other charity evaluators without putting much thought into it. This is great, but isn't there more? Others said that they talked to an individual organization, thought "sounds reasonable", and transferred the money. I fell for that trap too! There is a lot at stake. It's about hard-earned money that has the potential to help large numbers of people and animals in dire need. Unfortunately, I don't trust my own non-expert judgment to do this. So I find myself donating to funds, and then the funding is centralized again. If others do the same, charities will have to rely on one grantmaker again, rather than a diverse pool of donors. Ideas What would help to address this issue? Here are a few ideas, some of them are already happening. * funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know r

EA in the wild: I'm having trouble adding a screenshot but I recently made an online purchase and at the bottom of the checkout page was a "give 1% of your purchase to a high-impact cause" - and it was featuring Giving What We Can's funds!  Always fun to see EA in unexpected places. :) 

I’d love to dig a bit more into some real data and implications for this (hence, just a quick take for now), but I suspect that (EA) donors may not take the current funding allocation within and across cause areas into account when making donation decisions - and that taking it sufficiently into account may mean that small donors shouldn’t diversify? For example, the recent Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week posed the statement “It would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health.” Now, one way to think through this question is “How would the ideal funding split between Animal Welfare vs. Global Health look like” and test whether an additional $100m on Animal Welfare would bring us closer to the ideal funding split (in this case, it appears that spending the $100m on Animal Welfare increases the share of AW from 0.41% to 0.55% - meaning that if your ideal funding split would allocate more than 0.55% to AW, you should be in favor of directing $100m there). I am not sure if this perspective is the right or even the best to take, but I think it may often be missing. I think it’s important to think through it, because it takes into account “how much money should be spent on X vs. Y” as opposed to “how much money I should spend on X vs. Y” (or maybe even “How much money should EA spend on X vs. Y”?) - which I think closer to what we should care about. I think this is interesting, because: * If you primarily, but not strictly and solely favor a comparably well-funded area (say, GHD or Climate Change), you may want to donate all your money towards a cause area that don’t even value particularly highly. * Ironically, this type of thinking only applies if you value diversification in your donations in the first place. So, if you are wondering how much % of your money should go to X vs. Y, I suspect that looking at the current global funding allocation will likely (for most people, necessarily?) lead to pouring all your money into

I’m working on a project to estimate the cost-effectiveness of AIS orgs, something like Animal Charity Evaluators does. This involves gathering data on metrics such as: * People impacted (e.g., scholars trained). * Research output (papers, citations). * Funding received and allocated. Some organizations (e.g., MATS, AISC) share impact analyses, there’s no broad comparison. AI safety orgs operate on diverse theories of change, making standardized evaluation tricky—but I think rough estimates could help with prioritization. I’m looking for: 1. Previous work 2. Collaborators 3. Feedback on the idea If you have ideas for useful metrics or feedback on the approach, let me know!

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.   

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 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.

Last night, I quickly thumbed through the websites (and Ambitious Impact listings) of some smaller charities as I started thinking about my end of year giving plans.  I'd encourage smaller orgs to refer to something on their website dated within the past few months -- an event, a dated blog post, etc. -- that the median website visitor will ~quickly see. This is particularly true if the website refers to more distant events, has older-dated blog posts, etc. Without some indicator of freshness, the visitor may be left uncertain whether the org is still meaningfully active and potentially worth funding. After all, the closure rate for small, new orgs is not low. [Caveats: the thumbing was on mobile, while taking a bath, and at the end of a difficult day, so there could easily have been misses on my part]