There are 7 days left to sign up for the first month of this experiment!

As of right now, the marginal $25 influences the allocation of about $253 in expectation.

Nice - yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if that period is slower than the last ~5 years, as a lot of the capital that has gone into the space seems like it has been spent, and it doesn't seem like recent capital inflows have been as high. My 4-7x guess is based on a crude estimate done by Sagar Shah of how much production capacity can be bought with the capital that companies have available to do it, with a delay baked in for construction time.

What do you mean by "invest" here?

I meant more literally, put $100M in an investment account to save for good future animal opportunities vs spending on the best global health interventions today. I'm not certain it's actually a 50/50 item, but was trying to find a mid point.

 Maybe there are better global health interventions that can absorb $100M over time than GiveWell recommendations, though.)

I don't really know enough about global health work to say - but I'd guess there are some novel medical things seem plausibly able to:

• Appear over the next few decades
• Require a lot of cash to scale up
• Could be really cost-effective

Yes correct - just the Insects as Food and Feed industry. Though note these estimates were from 2020 - my best guess is that there are at least 4-7x as many insects farmed by the industry today (mainly because it's going through a lot of industrialization / scale up, and a bunch of new major factories have opened in the last few years).

Yep, I voted strongly agree from seeing that, though I wouldn't necessarily agree with the non-footnoted version, and without all these caveats.

In the abstract I think this would be good, but I'm skeptical that there are great opportunities in the animal space that can absorb this much funding right now! This is like, doubling the EA funds going to animal welfare stuff. I think I would strongly agree with claims like:

• Conditional on there being several years of capacity build up, animal welfare would use the funds more effectively.
• From a pure EA lens, some animal welfare spending is many times more cost-effective than the most effect global health interventions.
• The current most effective $100M spent on animal welfare is more cost-effective than the current most effective $100M spend on global health.

I think something that would be closer to 50/50 for me (or I haven't thought about it actually, but on its face seem closer to a midpoint):

• It would be better to invest an extra $100M to spend on animal welfare in the future than spending it on global health now.

I'd strongly disagree with a claim like:

• It would be better to spend an extra $100M in the next two years on animal welfare than on global health

So I listed myself as strongly agreeing, but with all these caveats.

Thanks! This is a great point. I'll work on getting some German-deductible options on the list for all categories for future months, but also can confirm that the pool has up to $1,500 (and potentially more) in donation swappable dollars to help navigate this right now.

Thanks! That's a great question and something I should figure out how to handle. I'll think about the ideal implementation of this and include something for November, but I think if it comes up for October participants:

• Pledge in USD, stating the other currency amount planned to give in the alternate currency (spot converted on the day of the pledge) in the comments.
• Give them amounts to give in their preferred currency using that rate.
• Once donated and receipts are submitted, I'll spot convert at the time they donated, and if the dollar weakened relative to their original pledge substantially, backstop it.

Nice! This is great pushback! I think that most my would be responses are covered by other people, so will add one thing just on this:

Even absent these general considerations, you can see it just by looking at the major donors we have in EA: they are generally not lottery winners or football players, they tend to be people who succeeded in entrepreneurship or investment, two fields which require accurate views about the world.

My experience isn't this. I think that I have probably engaged with something like ~15 >$1M donors in EA or adjacent fields. Doing a brief exercise in my head of thinking through everyone I could, I got to something like:

• ~33% inherited wealth / family business
• ~40% seems like they mostly "earned it" in the sense that it seems like they started a business or did a job well, climbed the ranks in a company due to their skills, etc. To be generous, I'm also including people here who were early investors in crypto, say, where they made a good but highly speculative bet at the right time.
• ~20% seems like the did a lot of very difficult work, but also seem to have gotten really really lucky - e.g. grew a pre-existing major family business a lot, were roommates with Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
  • Obviously we don't have the counterfactuals on these people's lucky breaks, so it's hard for me to guess what the world looks like where they didn't have this lucky break, but I'd guess it's at least at a much lower giving potential.
• 7% I'm not really sure.
   

So I'd guess that even trying to do this approach, only like 50% of major donors would pass this filter. Though it seems possible luck also played a major role for many of those 50% too and I just don't know about it. I'm surprised you find the overall claim bizarre though, because to me it often feels somewhat self-evident from interacting with people from different wealth levels within EA, where it seems like the best calibrated people are often like, mid-level non-executives at organizations, who neither have information distortions from having power but also have deep networks / expertise and a sense of the entire space. I don't think ultra-wealthy people have worse views, to be clear — just that wealth and having well-calibrated, thoughtful views about the world seem unrelated (or to the extent they are correlated, those differences stop being meaningful below the wealth of the average EA donor), and certainly a default of "cause prioritization is directly downstream of the views of the wealthiest people" is worse than many alternatives. 

I strongly agree about the clunkiness of this approach though, and many of the downsides you highlight. I think in my ideal EA, there would be lots and lots of various things like this tried, and good ones would survive and iterate, and just generally EAs experiment with different models for distributing funding, so this is my humble submission to that project.

I agree! I think that these donors are probably the least incentivized to do this, but also where a the most value would come from. Though I'll note that as of me writing this comment the average is well above 10x the minimum donation.