All of Luke Freeman 🔸's Comments + Replies

Best. FAQ. Ever. 💸💸💸

Giving What We Can, Good Food Institute

Congratulations to Sjir! I'm thrilled for you, the GWWC team, and the EG community! I'm excited to see where you take the organisation and how it grows under your stewardship. Your incredible competence and deep commitment to effective giving were evident in the time we worked together and will serve you well in this role.

A big thanks to the boards and especially the CEO search committee for all their careful work in this selection process. I know how much time and attention went into making such an important decision. The thoroughness of your approach and the broad stakeholder engagement speaks volumes about your commitment to finding the right leader for GWWC's next chapter 🙌

Thank you for writing this comprehensive and candid post. As the ED/CEO of GWWC during this period, I deeply appreciate the transparency about both the challenges faced for us all during that period and reforms implemented. Some of the decisions, like the restrictive communications policy, were undoubtedly difficult and had real costs for the community, but I believe you and the team navigated an incredibly complex situation with integrity, putting in place important governance improvements while managing serious (and often unknown or unclear) legal risks.... (read more)

Big plus one here 🥰

Nice! I enjoyed how accessible and friendly this is!

Thanks! Found it (yep, was in spam unfortunately).

Thanks team! I can't keep track of which email address I've used from year to year on the surveys, do you plan to send an email to those who filled in the previous surveys with a link to fill it in again which pre-fills the email address? That'd be wonderful if so 🙌

That's fantastic!! Great to see, thanks for sharing!

Thanks both. They haven't shared this with us specifically so I can't speak for them. They have been very clear that it is a conditional match.

I'll try updating the wording for clarity.

Sadly I read it the same way 😅 But I’m glad this is happening!!

I can’t quite state enough how much I appreciate you writing this right now. You shared what I’m feeling and thinking way better than I feel I can. Thank you.

💕

While I can't share specific details about our previous benefactor for various reasons (e.g. privacy), I can assure you the reasons for this are not related to any issues with the Donor Lottery itself (e.g. support of the approach, estimation of its value or cost-effectiveness, any issues with the process etc).

Our previous benefactor has been instrumental in supporting the lottery in the past and we deeply appreciate this. We'd be excited to find more backstop funds to increase the size of the Donor Lottery again.

@Larks. Further to Jason’s above comment (noting it’s roughly equivalent to tax deductible donation calculations), you count Gift Aid if you count your pre-tax income. If you can’t claim Gift Aid then you count your post-tax income.

Thanks for sharing!

Yep. Plus:

1. the recommendations are as the donation is made (not after which is the case with a DAF and is why the donation gift card might be difficult as the allocation comes afterward)
2. the programs are restricted (whereas DAFs give unrestricted funding)

A DAF let’s you donate to a fund that you ~control so you can later make unrestricted donations from to charities registered in the same country that the DAF is registered in, whereas GWWC/LTYCS/GiveWell etc can receive donations to program restrictions (eg bednets) and then make restricted grants based... (read more)

Nice work!! Love it 🥰

This is something I’ve been thinking about for GWWC but haven’t yet figured out the legalities (especially trying to avoid being seen as a Donor Advised Fund).

Thanks!! Great to hear!

Our largest funder has been OP, and we received some (now returned) money from Future Fund. Other than that it hs mostly been individuals and small foundations (eg family foundations).

(Thank you!!)

We take funding from Open Philanthropy (currently our largest funder) but not from the evaluators and grantmakers whose recommendations we use (eg Founders Pledge, GiveWell etc) because we don't want it to undermine people's trust in our recommendations.

For various reasons both OP and us would like us to reduce the portion of funding that comes from them as time goes on.

Latest (48 hours in): OpenAI Board Stands by Decision to Force Sam Altman Out of C.E.O. Role
After 48 hours of furious negotiations, the A.I. company said Mr. Altman would not return to his job and that former Twitch C.E.O. Emmett Shear would be its interim boss. 

The board of directors at OpenAI, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up, stood by its decision to push out its former chief executive Sam Altman, according to an internal memo sent to the company’s staff on Sunday night.

OpenAI named Emmett Shear, a former executive at Twitch, as the

Not exactly, depending on what someone means by "sacrificed income". See my comment clarifying this. Essentially "salary sacrifice" (a form of payroll giving where you take home less pay for some kind of benefit including a donation to a charity; or equivalent arrangements) is different to "choosing a lower paying job for impact reasons". The key here is it's voluntary, revocable, has a specific monetary value, and the donation is very specifically one that would count towards a pledge.

Agreed!

Yep. It’s complicated and needs to be tailored to the organisation and it’s needs at the time. So far all our roles have been remote but we have seen an employees location as something that might have some cost/benefit to consider but not a requirement.

The distinction is important because (a) it’s good to encourage people to make high-impact career trade offs, but (a) GWWC isn’t/shouldn’t be about starting to track all of people’s impact decisions in one place and converting all volunteering and lower (or hypothetically lower based on glancing at Glassdor) paying jobs into $ so you can then donate less actual dollars. It’s about recognising if you’re in a relatively well off financial position and voluntarily using your available financial resources to help others as effectively as you can.

Allowing some ... (read more)

Further to my lunch example. If you said “I’m buying lunch!” or “Lunch is on me!” then you still owe then $20.

(Excuse the brevity, typing on my phone). The spirit/norm is:

1. Choosing a lower paying job for impact reasons (regardless of how high that impact may or may not be) ≠ pledged donation
2. Voluntary pre-tax donation (to an org that meets the pledge criteria) via payroll giving or other means = pledged donation
3. Voluntary pre-tax donation (to an org that meets the pledge criteria, where you also happen to work) via payroll giving or other means (e.g. writing to say please pay me $ less than is on my contract for Y period) = pledged donation
4. #3, but artificially i

Re: Last point. The hiring manager can/would/does take into account the cost/benefit of the location/specific candidate when deciding which offers to make. It’s an all things considered decision.

FWIW: The CoL adjustment is the thing with the widest spread of views within the pay survey that we did. I think that we’ve arrived at near the least bad option for our team at the moment. An employee location does factor into some roles more than others, for example if someone is likely to be donor facing it is much more valuable to the organisation (and worth paying more) for them to be located in places like SF, NYC, London, Sydney etc where we have a high number of (potentially larger) donors.

FWIW Regarding your “bright-line” rule: For ~all our current roles/hires (even the most junior ones) their earning potential in the private sector is higher than the output of the calculator. We’re not typically hiring people who could attract <average wages as the counterfactual because we have been hiring exceptional people for specialist roles. As we grow we might hire for different roles where this isn’t the case and may at that point reconsider. I certainly don’t expect our current calculator/settings to last more than 1 year (at the very least we’re updating for things like inflation and currency shifts, we will also use these comments in the review process too).

(Typing on my phone, excuse the brevity)

Regarding "How much runway someone should have".

I'd very much plug spending time actually crunching the numbers and using some financial planning resources (e.g. Yield & Spread). Huge amount of peace of mind when you actually calculate different scenarios.

Literally building a spreadsheet and writing out assumptions helps a lot. I remember going through this with my partner in our early 20s it involved hard calls but once you actually see the numbers it helps. It's going to be so personal though like how happy you are with rice and beans, if y... (read more)

"but I've never been older" - best quote of the day ;)

Oh yeah, a big one. 

It was a combination of reading about Toby and the further pledge at the same time as reading some behavioural economics and learning about the hedonic treadmill that led me to switch our finances to "pay ourselves a living allowance" at a time when we were on a very low combined income and as our incomes grew so did both our savings and donations. It was because of the lower spend rate more than the savings that I felt able to take the risk of pursuing startups, big pay cuts to work in nonprofit sector, and we both took time off b... (read more)

I think that captures it about as well as I could. One thing I'd add is that similar to marriage my preferred norm is to formally resign if you no longer intend to stick with it (and not just start ghosting if you're no longer vibing).

Less this:

More this:

...but then, I'd also like more marriages to end in a way that more peaceful and respectful than is common.

I like the analogies! I've used the former one before but I like the addition of "moving in together" analogy for the trial pledge.

Also regarding the name, it was "Try Giving Pledge" before and I think the "Trial Pledge" adjustment is a slight improvement, but really don't think it's been nailed. Would be super interested in alternative ideas and possible consequences of those names.

Thanks for sharing Lizka! I appreciate you sharing these considerations :)

Personally, I donated at roughly the 10% amount for several years before taking the pledge (and at some point in the process I actually thought I had but when I realised I in fact hadn't in 2016 I then did it on the spot lest I forget again). I've definitely leaned into the "lifetime" part of the wording at points and after taking the pledge I had years where I gave below 10% (e.g. when working on my startup and taking home below minimum wage) and others where I have far exceeded tha... (read more)

Note that I said we paused the giving season campaigns around the time of the crisis, we didn’t decide not to have a pledge campaign entirely (though the pause and the crisis itself did negatively impact pledges significantly).

Per my original comment, I agree that the EV decision (driven by legal considerations) obviously impacted GWWC strategy and day-to-day operations.

“Management” ultimately flows up to the board (and then EV recruited an Exec team to handle entity-wide decisions and processes for EV UK and EV US).

In a fiscal sponsorship scenario the fiscal sponsees actions can affect one another so it isn’t simply the case that an individual project can/should only think of their own risk appetite. During a crisis period I can understand the fiscal sponsor management not havi... (read more)

While I agree in terms of the ethos, I also understand the difficulty and a reasonable amount of the complexity of the situation and why this would have been difficult (and possibly bad, all things considered) to do at the time. I do not envy the position of those involved in this level of decision making/crisis response, and recognise the need to do a lot of satisficing at the time. 

The GWWC team are responsible for our strategy. This was a legal response decision (while it obviously affected our strategy and day-to-day operations).

Thanks 😀 Glad it was helpful!

Is that a fair characterization?

Yep!

have you seen any signs of this dynamic easing?

No strong signs yet. This upcoming giving season will be a true test of that though.

I’m curious whether you think these issues are still as impactful as they were right after they occurred.

My impression is that it's less, but far from back to normal. Also bearing in mind that "normal" is hard to define (especially with GWWC) as a lot has changed over the last decade!

Also, do you think the other issues would have had as much of an impact if FTX h

Who gave this instruction? The EV board? I think the decision was reasonable, I’m just trying to understand how it was made.

It was a board level decision.

my impression was that GWWC is essentially autonomous

While that is largely true for day to day operations, EV UK and EV US are still essentially responsible for the actions of their projects.

I lead the team at GWWC and thought it might help for me to share some quick context, clarifications, and thoughts (sorry for the delay, I was on leave). I've kept this short and in bullet points.

• Firstly, thank you for writing this. I think that broadly you are correct in the view that FTX has done much more damage than is commonly recognised within the EA community, however, I think that this effect is overstated in your post due to various reasons (some of which have been outlined by others already in the comments).
• Here is our Growth Dashboard (live

Thanks team for all your work on this! I'm excited for it!!

Excited to see this! Hope you all have a great time! Go London!!

While I'm generally sympathetic to GiveDirectly's position (I really like their work on so many fronts and think that cash outperforms so many interventions), it seems intuitive to me that it often won't outperform the very best interventions until we have a lot more funding supply (and I applaud their ambition for increasing that funding supply).

I often think of interventions like bednets as analogous to vaccines (something else that is often distributed for free when there's a widespread disease instead of sold for cash) for a few reasons:

1. Stopping the sp

Thanks Imma! We’re still very much looking for people to put their hands up for this. If anyone thinks they’d be a good fit please to let us know!

Hiring a fundraiser in the US, and perhaps in the Bay specifically, is something GWWC is especially interested in. Our main reason for not doing so is primarily our own funding situation. We're in the process of fundraising generally right now -- if any potential donor is interested, please send me a DM as I'm very open to chatting.

We’d be very excited to see applications for the Bay Area!! 🎉🎉🙏

Also worth noting that the 2020 podcast jump was significantly contributed to from the Sam Harris episode taking the GWWC Company Pledge (which was also a significant shift in his advocacy moving forward). This involved a lot of work behind the scenes from our side but would be attributed here as "finding EA (and GWWC)" from the podcast.

Also in ~2017 GWWC chapters were converted to EA groups so that also explains some of the difference (GWWC chapters used to be a way that people found out about EA in-person which was largely supplanted by EA groups so that now people find out about GWWC in-person via EA groups).