calebp
Bio
I currently lead EA funds.
Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer's.
You can give me positive and negative feedback here.
Posts 30
Comments389
Topic contributions6
Fwiw, I am a fan of open-source public goods. I think more nonprofits should try to build products rather than papers (or at least be in that mindset). I am a little worried that doing research is just more accepted than producing products that people might use and that creates unhelpful barriers. Relatedly, I quite like the move towards essay websites more care goes towards thinking about the UX and trying to actually interact with users.
I mostly agree with this. I wasn't really aiming to give a balanced take here on whether people should start for-profit instead of nonprofit - I just meant to list a few (imo) underrated by EAs features of for-profits.
I'm more confused about the poor personal fit point. I suspect that many EAs are also a bad fit (at least initially) for starting nonprofits, but the EA ecosystem makes it somewhat easier for nonprofits to survive (which imo is probably a good thing overall).
The version of your claim I most agree with is:
* An EAs comparative advantage is identifying the most overlooked and big deal moral considerations, and access to minimal viable nonprofit capital
* This selects for highly neglected things where you might be able to have an impact at a small scale, with not particularly high standards
* So even if EAs aren't sufficiently competent to build high-growth companies, they can still have an outsized impact via founding nonprofits
I don’t quite understand why you’re comparing donated money from people earning to give to money consumed by a charity.
I think a better comparison could be to just convert everything into impact adjusted dollars imagining that you’re able to sell off your impact equity. In this scheme it’s clearer that taking more money from value aligned funders is bad, whilst taking money from non-aligned funders is roughly neutral and donating a bunch of money is very good. The charity has to essentially “pay back” in impact the value aligned funder to get itself out of a hole, whereas the for profit doesn’t need to worry about that (on impact grounds).
To be clear, I think many nonprofits do a lot of good and are well worth funding - I spend most of my time trying to fund them - but it is harder to work out net positive if you’re consuming a bunch of fungible and value aligned resources.
Ok, I did also write:
* Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits
* Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything.
* Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions.
* It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you.
* For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Which I think are all differentially more useful in short timelines than in long timelines worlds as you don't have less time to mess around, and you instead need to very quickly work on a useful thing. If you disagree with this maybe we're talking past other and I misunderstand your perspective.
Fwiw I'm sympathetic to nonprofits being better on net than for profit in short-timelines for reasons that aren't discussed in this post e.g. greater freedom to focus narrowly on useful work, particularly in cases where there isn't a viable business model.
Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
There are strong reasons to believe that profitable companies are producing goods or services that people want (which is not to say they are morally worthwhile). In most cases, the end user will simply not pay if the service they provide is bad. This just isn't true in non-profits. I don't think being an EA changes the calculus very much on the for-profit side, but importantly for profits have a strong kill function.
Hi Markus,
For context I run EA Funds, which includes the EAIF (though the EAIF is chaired by Max Daniel not me). We are still paying out grants to our grantees — though we have been slower than usual (particularly for large grants). We are also still evaluating applications and giving decisions to applicants (though this is also slower than usual).
We have communicated this to the majority of our grantees, but if you or anyone else reading this urgently needs a funding decision (in the next two weeks), please email caleb [at] effectivealtruismfunds [dot] org with URGENT in the subject line, and I will see what I can do. Please also include:
You can also apply to one of Open Phil’s programs; in particular, Open Philanthropy’s program for grantees affected by the collapse of the FTX Future Fund may be particularly of note to people applying to EA Funds due to the FTX crash.