All of Henri Thunberg's Comments + Replies

Agree that this seems useful! Hope these seem like they're getting to interesting possible disagreements.

• Any company from AIM's Founding to Give's first batch get into YC before EOY 2027?
• Any company from AIM's Founding to Give's first batch lead to an exit with donations >$1M before EOY 2036?
• >10% of companies (>12 months old) from AIM's Founding to Give get into YC before EOY 2030?
   

On the other hand, by filling the gap for 2024 we think there is over a 90% chance that we will be able to reach a sustainability tipping point i.e. have a viable income stream for at least 1 FTE and therefore avoid similar threats in the future. 

Is your claim that for funding of 2025, you will have ≥1 FTE funding (120k >loty / 29k USD) ready at the end of 2024 – excluding Open Philanthropy, EA Infrastructure Fund, and Meta Charity Funders? Or does the statement permit grants from those sources? 

5. [...] Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

FWIW, I don't think this Meta Charity Funders' model. I think they let funders join rather than donate to a pool. As far as I understand, after joining you access communal resources to best decide on grants – but the decision itself of where to donate remains with yourself as original funder.

This looks great, thank you for doing work to increase excitement about effective giving further!

For those interested, I created a Manifold market for the Donation Election, where people can add their own charities and bets on how the funds will be distributed.

It seems obvious to me that numerous stakeholders-- including organization leaders, donors of all sizes, group leaders, and entrepreneurs-- would all benefit from having an accurate understanding of EA’s growth trajectory. And it seems just as obvious that it would be tremendously inefficient for each of those parties to conduct their own analysis. It would be in everyone’s interest to receive a regular (every 3-6 months?) update from a reliable analyst. This wouldn’t be expensive (it wouldn’t require anything close to a full-time job initially, though the

(I think the links in the summary are linking to a collaborative edit version of this doc, rather than the places you want it to)

Love this! Seems like a great push (importantly, in a constructive and thoughtful way) for many that might otherwise feel frustrated with their current situation. Will definitely share this from time to time :))

Thanks for sharing this Linch, I found it a useful complement to the marginal grant thresholds post, which I recommend for those who enjoyed this post.

Thanks Joel for your thoughtful comment, which I'd like to build on.

I was thinking about how we can get funders to make calculated bets on those that have been discarded elsewhere, and get rewarded when they proved others right. Isn't AI Safety Impact Markets trying to solve some of the issues with adverse selection through that kind of mechanism? Sorry for the lack of depth, but I think others can weigh in ... (read more)

What are your thoughts, for you personally, around...
I) Time spent 
II) Joy of use 
III) Value of information gained
of Manifold vs Metaculus?

Great listen, I enjoyed this a lot!

Kudos to Luisa who does a really good job of acting as a "Watson", asking the followup questions that listeners might have. Several times in this podcast I was happy with her summaries or clarifying questions, even if I suspect she already knew the answers many of those times.

I would be surprised if the effect from the lack of a pledge drive would run on into February and March 2023 though. Comparison YoY here is 12 months before, Jan 2023 to 2022 etc.

Emm sorry, what? Out of 8,000 GWWC pledgers, who have at least pledged to give 10%, very few earn $1M?

This is a great post!

I assume that you are, but better safe than sorry: Are you discussing this with Chris Lloyd at Good Impressions who's currently " investigating whether paid ads can be an effective fundraising tool"  for EA organizations?

Thank you Eda for posting this. This must be a horrible situation to be in and I am so sorry for the losses and suffering.

Could you please give more pointers on why these organizations were chosen? While you can't vouch for their effectiveness, I guess you are very comfortable with them doing relevant work and having a solid track record of similar activity? (To be extra clear, this is not criticism, just understanding the extent of efforts.)

At Ge Effektivt (Swedish effective donations platform) we wrote a blog post about it partly because we get ques... (read more)

Listened to it while doing other stuff so might not be 100 % accurate.

To my understanding Tegmark appears for 10 minutes, doing a normal AI-risk spiel. I think the angle relevant to the podcast is the risk of concentration of power in the hands of a few. So some accusations of big tech capturing AI conferences etc.

There's a small segue talking about covid where Tegmark states he felt it was such an infected discussion that he couldn't talk about it openly in some work environments for fear of repercussions.

As a Swede who is somewhat familiar with the publication Expo, I would maybe put the risk of forgery of that document at <5%. They are specifically known for their digging journalism, and I would be very surprised if they screwed up something basic like that.

Also, wouldn't it be extremely strange behavior from FLI if that document actually was a forgery? Would be the go-to defense rather than what they are doing now.

I  agree with this, there's both a communication and a memory-hogging issue for each new Slack workspace you bring in.
So many conversations you're in include a "Yeah, I think I'm in that Slack space, not sure" since a few of them look alike.

That aside, I applaud the creation and hope to contribute.

Thank you for being transparent and insightful about the lessons learned. I found this post useful!

Would you be comfortable sharing some more statistics? I'm thinking things like...

• Rate of enrollment at companies
• Average donation amount when you were up and running, I suspect it was lower than described in "It currently has £15,000 amount going through each month from 150 users."
• Dropoff rates from users' payroll giving
• ...

You've nudged me one step closer to writing a similar thing about learnings from a Swedish charity startup I worked with in 2017-2020.

This is something that has been on my mind, and my organization Ge Effektivt has sometimes received questions about it, so I am very happy that you are doing this. Looking forward to your work, and hope it can improve the work of the effective giving landscape in more than one way!

Cool! Looking forward to the post. Would you mind sharing briefly what you're (paying for) lobbying for?

Answering quickly and informally for Ge Effektivt (sorry, I hadn't seen this earlier).

When I used something like 1h to try to estimate the counterfactuality of our donations I ended up around 50%. This is removing users who say they found us through Effective Altruism Sweden, Giving What We Can pledgers (although some signed up because of us), people who found us through webpages of charities we donate to, people I know are in the EA Sweden network (some of who I think give more than they otherwise would), and then adding some on top of that. I'm open to s... (read more)

Quick comment: Since there has been a project called EA Funds, up until recently when they merged with Giving What We Can, you might want to consider the phrasing in the headline to avoid confusion. :) "... EA Money..."?

Is there any experience with the fundraising think-tank Rogare? Seemingly some interesting publications regarding fundraising as a profession, the ethics around it, and more.

(When searching for Rogare on the forum I am only met with first-person narrators, dragons, and cosmoses performing various kinds of 'roaring'.)

Some feeedback: This is a fun and interesting way to learn about things going on in the EA community so I appreciate you posting it to the forum.

To me the description lengths work well for this kind of post, as I trust I can find more information about most of the projects if/when I go look for it, and about specific decisions if you keep doing AMAs.

✅ Great initiative
✅ Thank you for a nice structure to your post, answering lots of questions I expect people would have.
✅ I think you're making sense launching and seeing what comes of the project. 

Posted in EA Sweden programmer Slack and suggested it directly to a few programmers. Hope you will all find it fruitful, best of luck!

Sorry, I was in a bit of a rush and should have looked at your link before giving too quick an answer – in that case I would have understood what you had already seen and considered. My bad!

Thanks for the good question, I hope they raise the topic at the event! 

It might not be completely satisfactory to what you're looking for, but from what I hear it seems like the work at givinggreen.earth seems to have exactly those people in mind by giving more recommendations than just policy.

I have anecdotal evidence from Swedish donors being happier with BURN Manufacturing as an evidence backed climate intervention with positive effects on the local community, than an option more effective on a co2e/$ basis.

One question we might still want to ask ... (read more)

Personal pet peeve of mine: calling time spent on public transport "time lost".

If I spend an hour or two extra (by taking a train vs taking a bus) I would most of the time spend that extra time doing the same thing I would at the office or at home. (Working, reading, catching up with friends through texts, watching a movie)

In some contexts this is a sensitive argument, because not all people can do their work from public transport, but a very high percentage of EAs are knowledge workers that can.

This of course depends on the comfortability of the mode of t... (read more)

Thank you to everyone participating for the thorough discussion and raising the issue. I'm Henri Thunberg, the sole FTE of geeffektivt.se, the Swedish site picking up Giving Green's research that was mentioned early on in Alex's post. I wanted to elaborate on our reasoning to include Giving Green research. Nearly all of the decisions below were taken by me, and do not reflect the opinions of colleagues, volunteers, or other supporters.

A major data point for us to include climate as a cause area on our site was the fact that climate constituted 32% of the m... (read more)

Personal reflection: Most opportunities to discuss this with people around me come up when they want to offset a flight or their yearly emissions. In line with your reasoning above the dollar amount for offsetting is surprisingly low to most people, which might be met by incredulity.

In those cases it doesn't seem like they have a fixed amount of money in mind, but rather an amount of CO2, meaning me recommending an effective charity for offsetting just means they get to keep more of their money for other spending (in most cases of people asking me fo... (read more)