Despite my criticisms/thoughts below, how has no organization (RP, ACE, AWF, etc.) hired @Vasco Grilo yet? He's published extremely detailed good quality stuff just in his spare time and with a little bit of guidance/directional thought, I think he would be a great addition to many, many organizations out there.

Sorry, it's taken me so long to comment, I've been busy. (I'm also writing this quickly)

I am the "anonymous" funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.

I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn't being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn't ask for a full review, but I'm happy for a full review to be made of any charity.

I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I'm fairly happy with my decision.

I'm fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn't engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn't dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.

Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won't be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .

I agree that we should be thinking at the margin.

I suppose I'm saying that I think your beliefs suggest we should try to annihilate the world or try to extinguish all life. 

I think hidden in a lot of your analysis is one of the following

1. Negative utilitarianism. I think this is a fine belief to hold but I think it should be stated outright.
2. An assumption that the lives of many/most/all animals is net negative by default and we need evidence that they are positive for them not to be considered net negative.

I think 2 is more likely but I think a lot of the people that think along your lines (maybe someone like Bentham's Bulldog too), seem to assume that life is likely to be negative and I just don't see why this assumption should be expected. We don't really see any animals committing suicide, they clearly show desire/preference to live (they try to escape death at many costs), a lot of life for humans who we consider to usually be net positive is spent on things where we "struggle" to maintain existence and yet most people are fairly happy with their life.

I also agree that we should be highly uncertain about whether soil creatures live positive or negative lives but your analysis more or less assumes that the sign is negative and everything else follows from there.

On death, most of the life of a creature is usually not spent during it's death. I'm happy for interventions for farmed animals to reduce pain during death (and humans too!) but I think basing a lot of calculations on this doesn't capture most of the animal's life.

Last, I think your analysis ignores something I consider to be extremely important and in fact, the main reason I'm (and I think others should be) vegan. Namely, a ~daily reminder that animals matter and a reduction in cognitive dissonance and the effect it has on others. I think my (and any other) individual diet's direct harm is uncertain, has a lot of crucial considerations, etc. but, I think a lot of rationalists like to pretend they are above usual human thoughts/instincts on this matter. I discuss this more here.

Strongly upvoted. I think APRI is doing this at least in the sense of developing species that feel less pain. I think this is a promising direction

I'm supportive of doing this kind of thinking, but I think taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion suggests we should be looking to found charities that will end all life on earth; nuclear PROLIFERATION charities, perhaps charities that seek to make and release bioweapons that will kill of small animals, insects, etc. and maybe just charities that start wildfires. Have you given much thought to this?

Also, why does everyone assume that small organisms necessarily live net negative lives?

One of the problems with EA is that people are extremely nice and don't want to tell you that either 

1. They don't like your project and/or don't think it's very good
2. They don't think your project is as good as alternatives and they have limited resources.
3. They don't care much about this cause area.

There are more but it's very common to hear this kind of positive feedback but no commitment/further engagement. When people wish you well/luck, this is them being polite/nice  and saying they aren't interested but that sounds too mean. Furthermore, they really do wish you luck as they probably wish most people luck on their projects.

In your case, I expect it to be a mixture of the 3 perhaps, depending on the case. People are being nice to you and don't want to crush your hopes. Furthermore, if in the EA community, few people care, as a top priority, about climate change.

This also commonly happens in the for profit world. Investors/VCs rarely say they are a no. They will usually give some excuse like it not being the right time or they aren't in this space and such. This allows them to keep the door open to invest in the future if you defy their expectations or just not be seen as a dick/someone you don't want to interact with to preserve their reputation or if they change their mind because someone told them the investment is good. 

A good motto to go by when raising funds is "fuck yes or no" meaning if it isn't an enthusiastic yes with clear things they want further for funding or a promise of funding, it's a no.

Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasn't giving any money to AI safety back then. I don't have any criticism because I don't know better about what policies to support and didn't want to add noise.

I don't want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. I'm not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. It's caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations don't improve.

I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/against funding things like Manifund does. It really doesn't take long, so I don't buy the usual "time constraints" argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told "we don't think your work is good/meets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization." It'd waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isn't any way an abdication of their character or something.

That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what you've accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didn't do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. It's going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you aren't very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you aren't advertising the work you do, people won't know about it.

Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, "If we don't get $1.6M soon, we are shutting down". That's... a lot of money. It's hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, it'd be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the "Communications Team" do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/AIS community.