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A friend in canada wants to give 10k to a UK global health charity but wants it to be tax neutral. does anyone giving to a big charity want to swap (so he gives to your charity in canada and gets the tax back) and you give to this global health one?

I would guess too that these two events have made it much easier to reference EA in passing. eg I think this article wouldn't have been written 18 months ago. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362

So I think there is a real jump of notoriety once the journalistic class knows who you are. And they now know who we are. "EA, the social movement involved in the FTX and OpenAI crises" is not a good epithet.

I generally choose on a month by month basis. I don't claim this is effective.

Things that I guess might be the most effective in the coming months? EA funds, Rethink and Animal Welfare stuff. 

(I find it uncomfy to talk about justifications for this but whatever. Feel free to correct errors here)

EA funds - I remember reading @Linch's case that money there was really marginal when he wrote it. I think they've had more money since but it still might be very effective.

Rethink - I know and trust Peter and often see reflections of work I think is interesting in Rethink (eg the surveys and animal weights). If their animal weights are even 1% likely then that implies a big shift in how we should spread impact. 

Animal Welfare stuff - seems underrated compared to humans.

Why not AI?

Well my P(doom) is 2-8% which is comparably lower than many people's. Also I am unsure that marginal money is spent well. I hear about and see non-trivial levels of grift. I have given to AI pause stuff before and might do that, but currently I feel like AI stuff is where I want it in terms of many of the axes I think I could donate to effect.

What else would excite me?

Sustainable immigration stuff. I think if that could happen there would be a lot of good outcomes pretty cheaply. Note I don't mean more immigration, I mean more sustainable stuff. How can we increase levels of immgration without increasing backlash (in the UK there has been a huge increase in concern about immigration mainly caused by the government)

The OpenAI stuff has hit me pretty hard. If that's you also, look after yourself. 

I don't really know what accurate thought looks like here.

Just to say that a non-EA friend brought this piece up in conversation. That almost never happens. I think it has really moved people.

I am still on the trial pledge and have been for a while now. I think promises really matter and so one shouldn't make one that one can't keep. I am sad that my pledge number is rising and that I don't get a bad, but I think this is better for me overall.

Thanks for writing this.

Board member of the other project

I originally thought this was a good reason for recusal but no longer do. I was told that outside EA it is pretty normal for grantmakers to get board seats. If you are going to give a load of money to a project it seems pretty reasonable to have some level of control, as shares would in a business. Likewise a project may want easy access to someone from the grantmaker so they can get future grants.

Not to say this is always good, but I don't think it requires recusal in many cases (it may be the literal reason for the seat), compared to many other examples.

Proportional voting with some number of votes. between 1 and 10.

If it were me, the thing I'd experiment on is being able to donate votes to someone else. That feels like something I'd like to see more of on a larger scale. I give a vote to Jenifer and Alan, she researches longterm stuff, he looks into animal welfare.

It has an emotional impact on me to note that FTX claims are now trading at 50%. This means that on expectation, people are gonna get about half of what their assets were worth, had they help them until this time.

I don't really understand whether it should change the way we understand the situation, but I think a lot of people's life savings were wrapped up here and half is a lot better than nothing.

src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/ftx-claims-rise-after-potential-bidders-for-shuttered-exchange-emerge 

I am not confident on the reasons why this is, but I think it's because Anthropic and the cryptocurrency Solana are now trading a lot higher. My last memory (bad do not trust) is that FTX has about 11bn in debt against 4bn in assets. I think Anthropic and the Sol they hold have both gone up by about a billion since then. 

I dunno folks, but I hope people get their money back - and I know that includes some of you.