I don't have any insider information, but my speculation would be that they just think that they counterfactually reach more people by having a very separate brand.

i.e. SMA closely related to the EA brand/flavor/way of communicating would counterfactually help X more people do more good than EA by itself, while SMA as a separate movement with its own ideas/style on how to do the most good would counterfactually help Y extra people, and Y > X.

I also think it's likely that SMA believes that for their target audience it would be more valuable to interact with AIM than with 80k or CEA, not necessarily for the 3 reasons you mention.

I used to think the same, but now I see that many GWWC pledgers and donors mention 80k as the reason why they're pledging or donating, often to neartermist causes.

I've also heard several stories like this one of people being able to do more good in a neartermist cause thanks to 80k.

I think we tend to overestimate how common it is to consider "consequentialist cosmopolitanism" when thinking about doing good in the world. The vast majority of people don't consider important things like counterfactuals, or that they can help many more people abroad.

See for example Part 2 and Part 3 of the 80k career guide: I think they can definitely be valuable for an introduction to neartermist EA.

You could maybe say that Probably Good's career guide is better, so it makes sense to omit 80k, but I don't know if they cover all the neartermist-valuable topics covered by 80k.

The 80k job board also has a lot of non-longtermist roles (but maybe it's a subset of the Probably Good job board, I'm not sure)

Thanks for all the work!

I found it a bit strange that this is the first thing you can filter on:
 

Was there a lot of user demand for this?

I also found some of the tags surprising: I think some orgs marked as "Part of the EA Community" might not consider themselves such, have you checked with them that they are ok with the categorization?

The EA Forum/LessWrong codebase is open source, you can see it just means that your karma change for 2024 was >= 500

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AForumMagnum%2FForumMagnum%20karma%20farmer&type=code

(And beloved means that the most common reaction was receiving hearts)

I liked the cute animation I got for karma farming https://res.cloudinary.com/cea/video/upload/v1734615259/wrapped-2024/Karma-farmer-green.mp4 

 

I agree that salaries in EA should be more in line with the rest of the non-profit sector^[1], that Open Philanthropy is the main funder of many projects, that funding diversification has tradeoffs, and that members of the EA community should donate (much) more.

But I think this post exaggerates the % of effectiveness-oriented funding that comes from OpenPhil, at least for projects outside of EA community building.

I think the main reason is that most effectiveness-minded donors (including billionaires and agencies like USAID) are not part of the EA community, but still fund "causes the EA community cares about".

Other/Individual EA donors 15mm (GWWC donors, etc. based on some rough math from (source). I’m very interested if someone has a better or more accurate figure.

Here are estimated appproximate amounts donated via the GWWC donation platform in the past year, by rough cause area. (Note, these have not been double-checked and should not be considered official numbers, and they don't include donations reported by pledgers made outside the GWWC platform)

For donors not using the GWWC platform, I think this hinges a lot on how you define "EA donors" (see below)

I’m not sure if Givewell and Open Phil is double counting here (since Open Phil gives to Givewell) but I’m going to ignore Givewell as EA funding since a lot of this comes from what many would consider outside of the EA community (many people and philanthropists who wouldn’t consider themselves to be EAs though I’m not sure this is completely fair).

I think most GWWC donors also don't consider themselves part of the EA community^[4], I don't think this matters much in terms of our willingness to fund the most impactful projects that help improve the lives of others.

Here are some other effectiveness-oriented sources of donations:

• The Life You Can Save recently announced $100M in donations since 2013.
• Via Effektiv Spenden "nearly 10,000 individuals in Germany and Switzerland donated 19 million euros to highly effective organizations in 2023."
• The Founders Pledge community also donates significant amounts to high-impact projects https://www.founderspledge.com/our-impact.
• All the partners of the new Lead Exposure Action Fund (and many other large philanthropists) donate very significant amounts to high-impact projects, but I think only Good Ventures ever claimed to be part of the EA community.

The problem, I think, is that most causes the EA community cares about don’t have a lot of outside support. Who outside of the EA community would fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare?

As you mention in a footnote, the Navigation Fund is funding the Shrimp Welfare Project, and many other high-impact projects in causes that the EA community cares about, even if (as far as I know) it's not explicitly part of the EA community, and you don't include it in the funding amounts in this post.

Crustacean Compassion was started in 2016 and only got funding from OpenPhil in 2021. I don't think that only people in the EA community donate significantly to crustacean welfare.

I think it's weird to mention "fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare" as causes in a post on how OpenPhil is the main funder of many EA projects, given that OpenPhil stopped funding those.

I think if you were to ask a well-calibrated Toby Ord/Will Macaskill back in 2009 the odds of the movement having billions of dollars committed to it in a few years, they would have put the odds incredibly low.

In his 2013 TED Talk, Peter Singer claims that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet were "the most effective altruists in history", and in 2023 MacAskill keeps defining EA not in terms of a specific movement/community but in terms of "using evidence and careful reasoning to try to do more good."
I think probably in their mind EA (as they define it) already had billions of dollars committed to it in 2009.

See also We need more nuance regarding funding gaps from 2022 with an estimate of the number of funding sources for different cause areas at different scales. I think for most cause areas the number of funding sources of more than ~$1M/year increased since 2022.

Besides the Shrimp Welfare Project mentioned above, other interesting examples of non-OpenPhil funding are that Lightcone stopped receiving funding from OpenPhil but managed to raise >$1.1M in a month and that EAIF isn’t *currently* funding constrained.

1. ^{^}

   I think currently EA salaries are higher for non-leadership roles and probably lower for leadership roles

2. ^{^}

   Mostly this $10M donation

3. ^{^}

   Note that this area might be over-represented in this table, as the main way to donate to GWWC and to Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund is via the GWWC platform, while donations to projects in other cause areas are usually made outside of it

4. ^{^}

   For what it's worth, I also don't consider myself part of the EA community.

5. ^{^}

   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:IanFoundersPledge#You_can't_write_about_Founders_Pledge 

Sorry for the very late reply, basically my understanding is that interest rates now are high, so this post implies that we should consider investing now and donating later.

Is that a correct interpretation? Are you following that strategy yourself?

How do you decide the timing of your donations?

I initially felt a strong sense of urgency to donate as soon as I can:

• There are likely compounding positive returns to donations (e.g. LLINs could slightly increase the rate of growth of the local economy)
• I thought that the best funding opportunities get covered with time
• I might lose all the money
• I might stop wanting to donate it (e.g. if a family member gets ill)

I'm considering leaning a bit on the "investing to give later" side for 2025:

• Interest rates seem much higher^[1]
• Inequality seems to be increasing (which means that by investing now I might be able to pay more people in the future to work on impactful projects)
• I see many people like you haven't lost interest in donating after 11 years

But I don't know how to balance all those considerations, and if I do decide to give later I wouldn't know how to decide when.

1. ^{^}

   I found this post arguing that we should donate more when interest rates are lower interesting, but I'm not a finance professional so I don't know if it holds any water.

I think it's normal, and even good that the EA community doesn't have a clear prioritization of where to donate. People have different values and different beliefs, and so prioritize donations to different projects.

It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones

What do you mean? I don't understand how animal welfare campaigns interact with x-risks, except for reducing the risk of future pandemics, but I don't think that's what you had in mind (and even then, I don't think those are the kinds of pandemics that x-risk minded people worry about)

I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are

It seems clear to me that there is no general consensus, and some of the most vocal groups are actively fighting against each other.

I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work on this topic. I guess the LTFF?

You can see Giving What We Can recommendations for global catrastrophic risk reduction on this page^[1] (i.e. there's also Longview's Emerging Challenges Fund). Many other orgs and foundations work on x-risk reduction, e.g. Open Philanthropy.

I am more confused/inattentive and this community is covering a larger set of possible choices so it's harder to track what consensus is

I think that if there were consensus that a single project was obviously the best, we would all have funded it already, unless it was able to productively use very very high amounts of money (e.g., cash transfers)

1. ^{^}

   Disclaimer: I work at GWWC

20% of the global cost of growing chickens is probably in the order of at least ~$20B, which is much more than the global economy is willing to spend on animal welfare.

As mentioned in the other comment, I think it's extremely unlikely that there is a way to stop "most" of the chicken suffering while increasing costs by only ~20%.

Some estimate the better chicken commitment already increases costs by 20% (although there is no consensus on that, and factory farmers estimate 37.5%), and my understanding is that it doesn't stop most of the suffering, but "just" reduces it a lot.

You can also right-click → inspect element on the time indicator: