All of MarekDuda's Comments + Replies

There is a good chance there will be an AMA for the Global Health & Development Fund later in the year, especially if Elie Hassenfeld ends up also forming a team.

Any news about this is likely to come in the second half of 2019.

Hi Peter - yes, on the front page the time is listed in your local timezone, and if you navigate through to 'Lottery Details' you'll see it both in UTC and your local timezone.

Update: the Animal Welfare Fund team published their grant recommendations today.

Thank you for your comment. I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that the changes announced in this post are to a large degree inspired by feedback from donors and the community. We see this project as a collaborative effort and our plan is to continue to improve the platform, utilising such feedback in the process.

2
Larks
5y
Thanks!

Thanks Sam!

Yes, it is. We are currently focussing on operational robustness, but after that we see no reason not to expand the offering to cover most of the organisations EAs give to.

0
weeatquince
6y
YAY <3

By your first question do you mean whether there is a $ amount ceiling after which the fund managers expect the marginal effectiveness of further grants to drop off? I think if this was the case, the managers would have a good reason to wait to grant until more effective options appear again.

On your second point, we would want to have the platform a little more stable operationally before adding further jurisdictions, as this would increase the complexity non trivially. Nevertheless we do hope to be able to register elsewhere in due time and the Netherlands would likely be our first target.

0
MvdSteeg
6y
Regarding the first point: if there's much more incoming donations than they can effectively allocate, I can imagine they automatically lower their standards by some margin so less funds would remain unallocated. If there's no expectation of more effective options showing up in the future that wouldn't get covered by new incoming donations, then this could be seen as a good thing, money spent on a fairly effective charity is better than not spending it at all. However, in addition to the responsibility of allocating the resources they have as well as they can, I think the fund managers have a responsibility to also communicate when they feel like their fund is hitting diminishing returns. This is difficult to quantify, but e.g. last dollar vs first dollar impact ballpark might suffice. It is very much possible that the funds are -nowhere- near the point where this should cause any worry, and I'm not at all trying to say that any fund manager has neglected to give such a signal, because there may not have been any cause for it. However, I'm not sure if, as a (potential) donor, there's a way for me to tell this right now. Maybe I could deduce it from notes on past grants. I would expect a red light to be given if at any point a fund manager feels like their fund will not be able to allocate their resources to the standard they hold for themselves. It would be helpful if there was also an explicit green light when this is -not- the case. I'm not sure this can be derived from just the current fund balance, because it does not say anything about future opportunities coming up. We might see a fund is holding 1 million after a series of grants, conclude that this means it cannot use our donations right now, while in fact the next batch of grants could have easily handled another 500k or more. Glad to hear the Netherlands is high on your priority list in terms of expanding registrations! I don't suppose you're willing to risk any kind of ETA, right? ;)

Hi Jon, yes this is due to the numbers reported in March including the accounts payable - money not yet held in cash but expected to come in. We later realised that some of the transactions we were expecting to come in were not real donations, but rather several people making large 'testing' donations which then did not get paid. We have resolved these issues, and will be reporting Fund balances in cash terms going forward, however it did mean that the March numbers ended up being inflated.

We will be publishing a post in the coming weeks going into detail on the work we have been doing in the back end of Funds and releasing an update to the site which automatically pulls the Fund balances from our accounting system.

3
Jon_Behar
6y
Thanks for clarifying! Looking forward to seeing the upcoming post, it would be great if it could include a chart/table of donations (in cash terms) to each fund over time.

Hi Peter, should be in the next few days, we're just finalising the details on CEA side.

0
Peter Wildeford
6y
Perfect, thanks!

Yes, that is a little ambiguous. It is trying to say that no user is at the 3-point level (if you have 25,000 karma or more). Currently no user is above the 2-point level for regular up/downvote and 8-point for the strong up/downvote. We have no plans to adjust the karma in the switch.

Re link posts, that does seem like a good idea. We will be publishing a much more detailed 'Proposed Moderation Standards' post closer to launch.

[edited for clarity]

3
RandomEA
6y
That totally makes sense now. Thanks for the reply.

As Julia mentions below, over the last few months we have been been putting a lot of thought into how to improve the Forum ahead of its re-launch later this year. The ‘sub-forum model’ was what we also arrived at as a desirable potential vision.

Due to hoping to relaunch the Forum in a relatively short timeframe, and the availability of the LW2 codebase for us to work with, our initial goal is to release a direct clone of LW2 rebranded for use as the EA Forum 2.0. The LW2 format already addresses some of the issues and feedback we have had about the current... (read more)

Hello, speaking in my capacity as the person responsible for EA Funds at CEA:

Many of the things Henry points out seem valid, and we are working on addressing these and improving the Funds in a number ways. We are building a Funds ‘dashboard’ to show balances in near real time, looking into the best ways of not holding the balances in cash, and thinking about other ways to get more value out of the platform.

We expect to publish a post with more detail on our approach in the next couple of weeks. Feel free to reach out to me personally if you wish to discuss or provide input on the process.

1
Brendon_Wong
6y
If EA Funds wants an effortless "zero risk" option to hold the cash, putting all of the money in a high yield business saving account looks like the way to go. This would probably only take several hours to set up. According to various online reviews "Community Bank of Pleasant Hill Business Premier Money Management Account" seems the best, and "Goldwater Bank Savings Plus Personal & Business Account" looks good as well. Free withdrawals seem to be limited to twice a month but the withdrawal fee is pretty negligible relative to learning $20,000 in annual interest. To increase yield, using CDs is an easy next step. Otherwise, opening a brokerage account and putting the capital into a money market fund or a short term bond fund would be a relatively low risk and higher yielding option.
1
John_Maxwell
6y
A possible approach to this problem is to have a mixture of liquid and illiquid assets. Suppose an EA fund has $500K, with $100K in very liquid assets, $200K in moderately liquid assets, and $200K in fairly illiquid assets. Suppose the fund manager decides they want to give all $500K in the fund to a specific organization. In that case, they could give $100K to the organization immediately, which would hopefully tide them over until the $200K in moderately liquid assets became available, which would hopefully tide them over until the remaining $200K became available.
8
HenryStanley
6y
Awesome. Looking forward to seeing where EA Funds ends up!