Are ideas getting harder to find?

I'm sure if I thought about it for a bit I could figure out when these two mutually contradictory strategies look better or worse than each other. But mostly I don't take either of them very seriously most of the time anyway :)

I think these strategies can actually be combined:

A patient philanthropist sets up their endowment according to mission hedging principles.

For instance, someone wanting to hedge against AI risks could invest in (leveraged) AI FAANG+ ETF (https://c5f7b13c-075d-4d98-a100-59dd831bd417.filesusr.com/ugd/c95fca_c71a831d5c7643a7b28a7ba7367a3ab3.pdf), then when AI seems more capable and risky and the market is up, they sell and buy shorts, then donate the appreciated assets to fund advocacy to regulate AI.

I think this might work better for bigger donors.

Like this got me thinking: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/20/21523492/future-forward-super-pac-dustin-moskovitz-silicon-valley

“We can push the odds of victory up significantly—from 23% to 35-55%—by blitzing the airwaves in the final two weeks.”

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/6788/Which-party-will-win-the-US-Senate-election-in-Texas-in-2020

it's possible to make money this way

Agreed, but I don't think there's a big market inefficiency here with risk-adjusted above market rate returns. Of course, if you do research to create private information then there should be a return to that research.

Trading based on private information is sometimes illegal, but sometimes not, depending on what the information is and why you have it, and which jurisdiction you're in. [...[

True, but I've heard that in the US, normally, if I lobby in the U.S. for an outcome and I short the stock about which I am lobbying, I have not violated any law unless I am a fiduciary or agent of the company in question. Also see https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/04/24/its-perfectly-fine-for-herbalife-short-sellers-to-lobby-the-government/#95b274610256

I have my own counterargument

I really like this, but...

it can be made to look bad

This seems to be why people have a knee jerk reaction against it.

Interesting. 

Related: "Some programs have received strong hints that they will be killed off entirely. The Oxford Policy Fellowship, a technical advisory program that embeds lawyers with governments that require support for two years, will have to withdraw fellows from their postings, according to Kari Selander, who founded the program."

https://www.devex.com/news/inside-the-uk-aid-cut-97771

https://www.policyfellowship.org/

What do you think of the worst case WHO model that suggest that  COVID will disrupt malaria prevention and lead to additional ~350,000 deaths?

See:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/As-COVID-19-spreads-do-not-lose-track-of-malaria

https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/the-potential-impact-of-health-service-disruptions-on-the-burden-of-malaria

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01710-x

most of the impact is achieved by a few, very impactful people could also make the people who perceive themselves as having potential for high impact particularly vulnerable, since the gap between their intrinsic value or self-worth and their instrumental value would seem even wider.

Not sure if relevant to what you're saying, but there's this very interesting paper that shows:

Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have (almost) no control: country of residence and income distribution within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that more than one-half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in 1% income groups (by country) is accounted for by these two characteristics. The role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining the global distribution of income.

This has obvious implications how much people can realistically earn to give, but also suggests that other forms of impact, like social impact, might be mostly outside people's control. This is good reason to not be too hard on oneself for not achieving more, and not compare yourself to people like Bill Gates.

This blog post "Why not give 90%?" also seems relevant. 

Some people don't have facebook or don't like to give credit card information. You might consider setting up on both FB and GFM, where you try to get people to FB first, because it doesn't take any fees and then maybe either to PayPal, which also doesn't take fees, and only then perhaps to GFM, just make a website with your own aggregate donation count.

You might also want to check out Youtube's new crowdfunding capabilities.

Good luck! Suvita seems  like a great project.

Yes, correct, sorry we do not accept applications and only do independent research to find giving opportunities.

I downvoted this for comment for not addressing the central claim but only the tone.

Getting the tone right can sometimes be challenging especially for non-native speakers.