All of Avi Norowitz's Comments + Replies

I like this initiative! Just a suggestion: On the Google Form, it would help if the questions "Describe briefly your technical background" and "Describe briefly your involvement in Effective Altruism" were "Paragraph" inputs instead of "Short answer."

He links to it from his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1613522399269650434

Kelsey's correction.

I missed this as well: "I also ask that if you claimed one of these free cards last year, you either let others participate this year or pass this offer along to someone else who hasn't received one yet."

I've received the gift card but have not redeemed it. If anyone misses out on receiving a gift card this time around and hasn't received one last year either, send me a message and I'll give you mine.

I actually had to resubmit the donation:

Just following up here. It seems there was an error and the donation failed to process. If you would like to retry the donation to Centre for Effective Altruism USA, the match should automatically be applied.

While resubmitting the donation with a credit card, it did indicate that I would get $100 matched. I'm not sure if this will be the case for other donors with PayPal issues, or if it's necessary for each donor to contact every.org for help.

I actually had to resubmit the donation:

Just following up here. It seems there was an error and the donation failed to process. If you would like to retry the donation to Centre for Effective Altruism USA, the match should automatically be applied.

While resubmitting the donation with a credit card, it did indicate that I would get $100 matched. I'm not sure if this will be the case for other donors with PayPal issues, or if it's necessary for each donor to contact every.org for help.

I think the following should probably be considered EA-aligned nonprofits (at least marginally) as well, which would imply somewhat higher impact:

• Our World in Data: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/our-world-in-data
• Crate Free Illinois: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/crate-free-illinois-campaigning-against-gestation-crates
• Living Goods: https://www.givewell.org/charities/living-goods-November-2014-version
• International Refugee Assistance Project: IRAP: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/immigration-po

Wow, very impressive! I badly underestimated how much matching funds would be directed to EA-aligned nonprofits. And since the matching funds has been increased to $350k, this number is likely to go up significantly.

I count $210k in donations towards nonprofits that are at least marginally EA-aligned, out of $252k currently (83%):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/134p73NxhVvB8ggP4uu0kNwttbvb0KNk7PSh6ZLwzKZY/edit#gid=1518752980

But that may be an underestimate, because the page only lists the top 100 nonprofits. So there could be more EA-aligned nonprof... (read more)

I posted this on another thread, but for visibility, I reported my PayPal issue to Every.org and received this reply:

Hi Avi,

Thank you so much for your generosity and participating in the #FallGivingChallenge! 

Due to the sudden high volume, PayPal seems to be holding our transactions and your donations are currently stuck in "pending" for us. We are investigating the issue and will let you know when we have an update.

The match will be applied after the PayPal donation is cleared and you will receive a receipt then. We will make sure you receive both th

I reported the issue to Every.org and received this reply:

Hi Avi,

Thank you so much for your generosity and participating in the #FallGivingChallenge! 

Due to the sudden high volume, PayPal seems to be holding our transactions and your donations are currently stuck in "pending" for us. We are investigating the issue and will let you know when we have an update.

The match will be applied after the PayPal donation is cleared and you will receive a receipt then. We will make sure you receive both the $100 and $10 match for sharing for your first donation to

As far as I can tell, not at all.

I tried to submit a donation to CEA via PayPal and it didn't work right. I'm not sure how representative my experience is but it may be preferable for others to use credit card.

For my PayPal donation to CEA:

• I can't remember whether I got a confirmation dialog.
• I did not receive an email receipt from  every.org.
• I don't see the transaction in my PayPal activity.

But:

• My profile says I've supported CEA.
• When I try to donate again to CEA, I don't see the +$100 match.

So I'm not sure what happened. I submitted 4 more donations to other nonprofits via credit car... (read more)

Academic social science research is often a better fit for the EA research fund or Food Systems Fund because of their expertise + focus.

Did you mean the ACE Research Fund / Animal Advocacy Research Fund?

Peter Hurford made a related argument in To Inspire People to Give, Be Public About Your Giving, though it's more focused on maximizing impact vs helping your friends find fulfillment.

I strongly suspect the kidney donations in question are mostly to other Jews, and maybe mostly to other Orthodox Jews. The organization mentioned in the video is Renewal, which "helps facilitate kidney matches within the Jewish community."

And with regard to Matnat Chaim: "In a report aired on Israel’s Channel 2 Sunday, the Health Ministry said the policy leads to possible discrimination, noting that at least half of Matnat Chaim’s donors request Jewish recipients."

In general, Orthodox Jews are very altruistic towards other Jews, and especially other Orthod... (read more)

It looks like GiveWell may have advertised on more than 35 podcasts! They talk about their podcast advertising here and here.

80,000 Hours is not a US registered nonprofit. CEA accepted donations for them for EA Giving Tuesday with arrangements we made in advance. Around half of the nonprofits on our list required similar arrangements.

FHI is not a US registered nonprofit either and was not eligible for receiving EA Giving Tuesday donations.

As far as I know Effective Altruism Foundation and Founder's Pledge are totally different nonprofits.

Effective Altruism Foundation runs a few programs, including Center on Long-term Risk: https://ea-foundation.org/projects/

Hi Jacob. If you complete our sign-up form or our pledge form, then you'll be added to our mailing list and should receive reminders in future years.

• Sign-up form: https://eagiv.org/signup
• Pledge form: https://eagiv.org/pledge

You may also want to add a filter to direct emails from contact@eagivingtuesday.org into your primary inbox.

https://pandemic.metaculus.com/ works for me. The link you have is for https://www.pandemic.metaculus.com/ though, which does not work. Maybe that's the problem?

Because Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is part of Johns Hopkins University rather than its own US registered nonprofit, it may not be feasible to create a Facebook fundraiser for them.

I think the main potential benefits of GiveDirectly's COVID-19 response are (a) good PR for cash transfers, (b) an experiment to learn from, (c) bringing in more donors, and (d) persuading people to stay home rather than work. In terms of benefits for recipients though, it seems much less cost-effective than cash transfers to the extreme poor.

I think Open Philanthropy probably would not reduce it's grantmaking because of a recession. It seems Open Philanthropy is recommending around $200 million in grants per year. Forbes estimates that Dustin Moskovitz has a net worth of around $10 billion. So they're only spending down a mere 2% of Moskovitz's net worth each year. If Moskovitz's net worth declined to $5 billion that would still only be 4% of Moskovitz's net worth. In addition, better funding opportunities for Open Philanthropy may arise during a recession as other large funders pull back.

This seems to be based on one study of 21 pigs.

I'd expect some effect from that, but probably orders of magnitude smaller than the effect of increasing prices via taxation.

Hi Brian. Thanks for the feedback and letting us know about your experience.

So, in our testing from the US this year, we've seen that donations made at :00 on the dot typically generate receipts with :02. It seems plausible that being in Manila is causing longer than expected delays. Though if you've only tried one $5 donation, perhaps you could try a few more of them?

It's also normal for Facebook to take much longer to return a "Thank you for your purchase ... " than it shows up in your receipt. I'll make a note to clarify th... (read more)

Hi Mike. Do you think we should be more clear in our language? We're recommending donating within the first second because (a) we want to emphasize the importance of speed and (b) it is plausible the match will actually end in 1 second, even though a few seconds is probably more likely. But we also don't want people to misunderstand the difficulty of this and feel hopeless.

A $9,999 donation can be finalized in 1 click, so with some preparation and practice, it can be done in 1 second. It's also possible to finalize 2 x $9,999 donations in 1 second, though it requires skill and more practice.

A 1 second match end time is plausible, but it's not the most likely outcome. So probably 2 x $9,999 successful donations in 2 seconds would get matched. The max match amount per donor is $20,000 and this is just $2 short of that.

This all sounds correct to me. Just to add: the organization had a revenue of $31 million in 2017, so they're not going to sell their domain for cheap.

https://www.guidestar.org/profile/94-2751173

They can now be found as "GiveWell" in San Francisco, CA. I think they changed their legal name at some point.

You can share one login and password among multiple people if you trust your team members enough.

You can do this for free with Rebrandly, though only the admin account can create links.

(I'm not arguing any particular position here. Just mentioning some considerations.)

I think tweeting to Jeff Bezos seems fine, though I'd hope that someone's first response would be "I should make sure Effective Giving saw this" rather than "I should tweet my favorite EA charity at him".

Maybe? Although I think there were some advantages to tweeting him directly:

• He was asking for tweets, not for organizations to reach out to him via some other way.
• I imagine it's going to be very, very difficult for organizations to ge

Thanks for sharing your views on this. I'm now updating towards the view of "don't tweet wealthy people about EA unless they explicitly ask for donation suggestions."

Here are some past examples of EAs tweeting wealthy people with donation advice:

• Jeff Bezos: In this case he's asking for advice, so tweets that are consistent with what he's asking for seem appropriate. For instance, I think I suggested GiveDirectly to him. Do you share this view?
• Ricky Gervais: This seems like the kind of tweet that EAs should not reply to in your

It's Dustin and Cari's money, so it's their decision what to do with it.

The movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) caused me to reflect on how people -- including myself -- might rationalize their contributions to harm, or their lack of responsibility for preventing it.

I think it's bad for Beyond Meat's brand to sell low quality products though as they've done in the past.

Their approach seems like the right move to me:

I CAN’T FIND BEYOND CHICKEN STRIPS IN MY GROCERY STORE. ARE THEY DISCONTINUED?

At Beyond Meat, we’re constantly innovating and renovating our products based on consumer feedback. Unfortunately, our Chicken Strips weren’t delivering the same plant-based meat experience as some of our more popular products, like the Beyond Burger and Beyond Sausage. But, there’s good news. We have a team of chefs and scientists who are working on getting an even better, tastier version of Beyond Chicken Strips back on retail shel

I believe sausages typically contain pork, so Beyond Sausages might make the numbers look a little better.

Beyond Meat also had a disappointing chicken product, but it looks like they've discontinued sales, and are working on a better chicken product.

The Charity Entrepreneurship report doesn't seem to mention that beef cattle spend around half their lives on pasture. They are also including some dairy cattle considerations that don't apply to beef cattle, e.g. tie stalls. I think this might be skewing their report to a more negative estimate than appropriate.

I think creating distinctions between directly causing harm vs allowing harm to be caused is likely to reduce a person's effectiveness at doing good in the world. I think causing harm in an abstract way that doesn't violate social norms is basically OK if it leads to something more good. For instance, if I advocate to a funder to cut funding to a less effective program and use that funding for a more effective program, I am causing harm to the recipients of the program that got cut. I think that's fine and a good thing to do.

A knowledgable EA friend of mine has suggested using DAFs for the limited purpose of donating appreciated stock to organizations that do not routinely handle such requests. He said at Vanguard, you can open a DAF, donate your appreciated stock to the DAF, instruct the DAF to donate the appreciated stock to the organization(s), and then close the DAF.

You can find some more reliable information here, though not from an EA perspective.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Donor_advised_fund

Thanks for following up on this and posting a correction. I'd suggest updating your original post to include your updated fish consumption estimates. Or if that's too much work, a correction on that post with a link to this new one would be helpful. As it stands now, it still says: "I also excluded fish because there is no significant correlation between income and fish consumption in African countries." I think people are likely to find your original post when researching the meat eater problem, especially since the corresponding EA Concepts page cites it.

Since there are less than 1 million elephants alive today, even if each elephant has modestly more moral value than each human, elephant welfare is still very unlikely to meet the importance criteria.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I agree that many of the considerations for fishmeal and fish oil are similar. I originally wrote this post a long time ago which is why I did not reference your report in it, but I've now included it under "Some useful sources."

A few comments on your report:

• Your report says: "These days, any of the fish that are farmed more intensively around the world are carnivorous ... " This was confusing on a first read, but I assume that was a typo and you meant many? As far as I know, the vast majority of farm

I'm surprised that "After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation" did not win, given that:

• It started an important conversation, likely valuable for people seeking EA jobs, people providing EA career advice, and people hiring for EA jobs.
• It generated 259 upvotes and 177 comments, which is more than I remember ever seeing.
• It must have been unusually difficult for the author to write.