Quick takes

Does anyone remember which EA org lets people specify in their wills that they are leaving money to effective charities?

One of the benefits of the EA community is as a social technology where altruistic actions are high status: earning-to-give, pledging and not eating animals are all venerated to varying degrees among the community.  Pledgers have coordinated to add the orange square emoji to their EA forum profile names (and sometimes in their twitter bio). I like this, as it both helps create an environment where one is might sometimes be forced to think "wow, lots of pledgers here, should I be doing that too?" as well as singling out those deserving of our respect.  Part of me wonders if 'we' should go further in leveraging this; bestow small status markers on those who make a particularly altruistic sacrifice.  Unfortunately, there is no kidney emoji, so perhaps those who donate their kidney will need to settle for the kidney bean emoji (🫘). This might seem ridiculous (I am half joking with the kidney beans), but creating neat little ways for those who behave altruistically to reap the status reward might ever so slightly encourage others to collect on the bounty (i.e donate their kidney or save a drowning child) as well as rewarding those who have done the good thing. 

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

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

How to support fundamental health research? Now that one of the most important organizations for fundamental health research globally, the NIH, is being gutted, what are some ways/organizations we can support continued research in this area?

I made two small donations via Every.org and regret it. By default, your profile and donations are public, and it's not immediately obvious (a privacy issue—especially if you make a potentially controversial donation as an individual), which I find unethical. Additionally, Every.org sends a lot of spam if you miss the opt-out button. These are known as UX dark patterns. Next time, I'll email the charity to ask if I can use conventional payment methods (if the donation is large enough) or simply refrain from donating. Being public about one's donations can be beneficial, but donors should have easy control over what they make public and what they don't. I encourage organizations to think twice before using Every.org. Thankfully, our local effective giving organization and the GWWC platform don't have these issues.

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!

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