Huh, given the odd funding splurges (things like a $60k EA Grant for developing a new version of Less Wrong for people to have fun intellectual discussions on, and I believe a similarly luxuriant amount to EA Geneva) I'm surprised an organization which does as much as Rethink Charity isn't already fully funded by the movement building fund. Does anyone know how much money got donated to that and where it's gone?
Do you/Rethink Charity need funding? I presume the EA Community fund is throwing a healthy amount of money your work?
Lastly, it seems like it would be nice if you could get notifications when a new person is found near you and if people to opt-in to receive messages from other EAs.
This would be a handy feature.
I'm not a huge fan of cross-posting things here that have appeared on organisational blogs before. Amongst several other problems it makes the EA Forum feel deader, like those subreddits filled only with link promotion. On the other hand I know you're one "little guy" (or perhaps "little outfit") without your own major blog, so need to post somewhere, so this is hardly the worst offence.
I agree that GiveWell could be considered part of EA. Ultimately I see that as a merely semantic question. My and I think AGB's point is that the donors who follow GiveWell aren't self-identified members of the "EA movement", and aren't giving because of EA outreach specifically. It appears that organizations doing EA outreach specifically get much more than 5% of the money donated by members of the "EA movement" who were inspired to give by those organizations.
Sadly, I don't think there's a way to make it a good 'front facing' pick, because it would seem too 'hardcore' to newcomers.
Perhaps more relevant, even if they don't identify as EA, where the silent donors give is influenced by EA. So I think there's still a good case for including them in the money moved.
Can you explain why you're thinking that they're influenced by EA? It seems at least equally plausible that they're influenced by GiveWell, which is distinct from most EA meta-orgs, and operates using a different model. Are you thinking that there's another influence on them, like 80k or GWWC?
It's excellent to see you complete this! Good luck. Do you plan to write-up an evaluation of the project, and your thoughts on the best ways to ensure good EA work gets funded?
GiveWell staff members published where they plan to make their personal donations in 2015.
Many put their money where GW's mouth is and give to AMF, notably.
What general EA meta activities do you all think do most good, and how do they compare to each other? Which ones should we as a movement be encouraging and if appropriate funding people to undertake?
This discussion of climate change was interesting: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/973160419406982/
This looks promising potentially. Does REG have an itemised expansion budget it can share, either with potential donors or publicly? Is it possible to see accounts detailing expenditure over the last year or two?
Has their been an evaluation of the impact of EA Global yet? Do we have any indication of any wins it yielded?
I was also hesitant about CFAR ... Good point regarding GPP .... Not sure about 80K
Its meta in Hurford's sense, which is different from Todd's - it's indirect, and has a chain of causality to impact that has extra points of failure. That's what many of Hurford's arguments spoke to. GPP and 80K also count as meta by this definition.
Anyway, taking all this into consideration I get $3.2m meta, $62m non-meta for a ratio of 5%. (Plus $2.1 million in "grey area")
Are you counting donations from people who aren't EAs, or are only relatively loosel...
That queue looks like it has some nice features, and I look forwards to seeing them all, but it also looks like you (and the rest of the tech team) are a good way through sorting through them. That's the only reason I didn't upvote this - it doesn't seem like there's much more we'd want for the forum besides what you guys can already cover, but it's been a great community asset!
Thanks for the response. You're right, the relevant question isn't keeping GWWC going but is if there are promising new growth opportunities that the extra funding will pay for, which you say there are this year. There's also some neatness to GWWC being able to support/grow its staff with 10% of the total yearly donations of the people who pledge 10% via it. I haven't thought whether that's the appropriate model, but it provides a way to pace growth rather than keeping going until you've matched their total donations.
It's worth reassuring people that even if the full goal isn't met it isn't a disaster - there isn't a funding gap for keeping GWWC itself going, which could presumably be done quite cheaply. I know there's a perception that this fundraising round has been a struggle, and there's been a lot of scepticism about it (e.g. (here)[https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/882996591756699/]). But that isn't that damning: it was bound to happen at some point at which GWWC asked for more money to fund more paid employees, rather than keeping going until GWWC got as much money as the people who've signed it's pledge are giving.
Nick Cooney's book is fantastic, even better than Singer's. (Far from being animal focused, it doesn't mention animal rights much at all.)
I got into a conversation with 'Telofy' about his post about dissociation being a necessary or helpful approach for some Effective Altruists, and he suggested that it might be useful to use the survey find out how many people have the problem he described there or find his solution useful.
It may be useful to find out how many people have this problem or find this solution useful. Does anyone share or not share it?
Seems like another uncharitable implicit argument against the EAs known for favouring robustness (GiveWell, the Vancouverites, people skeptical about leafleting and metacharities and xrisk on those grounds). I've heard experts say the most important parts of asteroid detection are fully funded. If they weren't people would generally accept funding them as a priority.
Also, it would be worth trying to work out what about a career in the arts they think is required for their happiness and seeing whether you could find higher impact alternatives that provided this.
Depending on what you mean by the arts I suspect that would be very likely to be low impact. That would suggest trying to convince them to change course though I think that's not likely to be successful, meaning it would be best to focus on other people.
Have you considered doing something that could go viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge? The potential upside from that would make it worth a shot for the effective altruist community.
Could you say more about particular plans, like the "large sponsored fundraiser which will be run simultaneously by local EA groups around the world"?
I've been following the reports you and Xio and Joey have been writing on all the different fundraising methods you've explored, and will consider a substantial donation (since I'd want to keep you running and pay for a sizeable chunk of time experimenting). It would be a shame for effective altruism if you guys had to shut down abruptly given your demonstrated commitment to measure results and shut projects down if they don't raise money. I assume it would be a waste of knowledge and expertise and contacts you've built up too. It'd be helpful if you could...
I could see situations where it's not best for me to donate >=10% (like this year since I'm a student)
If you're a student you're not counted as having an income, and I believe you only have to give 1% of living costs (someone from GWWC can correct me if I'm wrong!). Besides that, having a pledge you have to fulfil every year seems like a valuable thing - it's good to be a stickler for honesty. If you're planning to donate or already donating but can't commit to 10% every year yet, you could always declare that rather than taking the pledge yet, and then decide whether to take it later.
I'm not sure these people are much more easily excluded by the current pledge. You could still get people who have very bizarre beliefs about the best way to help people in poverty.
Technically that's possible but in practice GWWC members don't currently tend to have those beliefs - the pledging community has a clear feel of being focused on evidence-based poverty charities. The new pledge that's being consulted about would certainly include more people, and AlasdairGives is right that there's nothing in it that'd exclude the large numbers of people who ...
I think that cause agnosticism is probably the most important novel ingredient of effective altruism, so seeing this kind of sentiment is disheartening. (I don't have strong views on the pledge itself.)
As I said to Jess Whittlestone, it's worth being clear that the attitude that AlasdairGives expresses isn't a narrow-minded rejection of people who favour other causes and more general EA types. If you read him charitably, he's saying that he joined because he sincerely thought that GWWC-recommended charities were the ones which he should support, and tha...
Saying you wouldn't want to take the pledge for this reason seems a bit like saying you don't want to be part of the EA community because it contains those people.
I see why you might say that, and understand your position, but I hope you can see how it could be a little uncharitable to those of us who feel crowded out of what was originally an organisation that made a compelling case about our obligation to help people in the developing world (with things like the calculator showing that many potential GWWC members were in the richest 1-5% of the world)...
I'm unsure, as I don't know how many people see late additions to the open threads. It's the sort of thing which'd go in LessWrong Discussion versus. LessWrong main so maybe its a data point for creating a discussion section.
To answer this question:
if you aren’t yet a member of Giving What We Can, would you join if this change was made?
I'm not a member, but I've been seriously considering joining for a while, and probably wouldn't join if this change was made, as a large part of the appeal of publicly joining GWWC is being part of a community focused on global poverty, rather than of singularitarians, rationalists and the like (who have their own communities).
I find myself really quite strongly against this. I'll try to find the time to compose a comment explaining why, but for now I'll simply state this as a data point.
Looking at the EA Community Fund as an especially tractable example (due to the limited field of charities it could fund):
Since its launch in early 2017 it appears to have collected $289,968, and not regranted any of it until a $83k grant to EA Sweden currently in progress. I am basing this on https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community - it may not be precisely right.
On the one hand, it's good that some money is being disbursed. On the other hand the only info we have is https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/ea-community/payouts/1EjFHdfk3G