https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nb6tQ5MRRpXydJQFq/ea-survey-2020-series-donation-data#Donation_and_income_for_recent_years, and personal conversations which make me suspect the assumption of non-respondents donating as much as respondents is excessively generous.

Not donating any of their money is definitely an exaggeration, but it's not more than the median rich person https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on-u-s-generosity/

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo!

Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views

No, but in expectation it wasn't very far from the stock market valuation. I think it's very possible that it was positive EV even if it didn't work out

I think the only thing Imma might be "median" in is weekly work hours, which I don't think is what the poster meant. Most people couldn't do these things

I agree with some of this comment and disagree with other parts:

"people who initially set up Givewell, did the research and conivnced Dustin to donate his money did a truly amazing jop"

AFAIK Dustin would have donated a roughly similar amount anyway, at least after Gates levels of cost-effectiveness, so I don't think EA gets any credit for that (unless you include Dustin in EA, which you don't seem to do)

"The EA leadership has fucked up a bunch of stuff. Many 'elite EAs' were not part of the parts of EA that went well." I agree, but I think we're probably thinking of different parts of EA

"'Think for yourself about how to make the world better and then do it (assuming its not insane)' is probably both going to be better for you and better for the world" I agree with this, but I would be careful about where your thoughts are coming from

I agree with the examples, but for the record I think it's very misleading to claim Imma is a "mediocre EA".

If I understand correctly, she moved to a different country so she could donate more, which enables her to donate a lot with her "normal" tech job (much more than the median EA). Before that, she helped kickstart the now booming Dutch EA community, and helped with "Doing Good Better" (she's in the credits)

My understanding is that she's not giving millions every year or founding charities, but she still did much more than a "median EA" would be able to

Like with Wytham Abbey, I'm really surprised by people in this thread confusing investments with donations.

If SBF had invested some billions in Twitter, the money wouldn't be burned, see e.g. what happened with Anthropic.

From his (and most people's) perspective, SBF was running FTX with ~1% the employees of comparable platforms, so it seemed plausible he could buy Twitter, cut 90% of the workforce like Musk did, and make money while at the same time steering it to be more scout-mindset and truth-seeking oriented.

r/philosophy response: https://old.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1bw3ok2/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism_wired_march_2024/

to what extent was the ongoing death of effective altruism, as this article puts it, caused by the various problems it inherited from utilitarianism? The inability to effectively quantify human wellbeing, for instance, or the ways in which Singer's drowning child analogy (a foundation of EA) seems to discount the possibility that some people (say, children that we have brought into the world) might have special moral claims on us that other people do not.

Don't think it's really because of its philosophical consequences. EA as an organization was super corrupt and suspicious. That's why it's falling apart. Like it quickly went from "buy the best mosquito net" to "make sure AI doesn't wipe out humanity". Oh and also let's buy a castle as EA headquarters. Its motivations quickly shifted from charity work to prostelyzation.

Most of its issues seem to fundamentally lie in the fact that it's an organization run by wealthy, privileged people that use "rationality" to justify their actions.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1brg5t3/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism/kx91f5k/ Scott Alexander response to the Leif Wenar article