Hi Aaron. We're currently curating our own funds across a range of cause areas (pulling together existing evaluators/recommendations), and we're certainly open to integrating with existing funds at some point!

Thanks! Great question. Yes, it's primarily designed to help people who aren't as familiar with effective giving make more meaningful donations. But even for people already engaged, it'll help organize your charities in one place, automate all of your donations, and track the impact of every dollar.

Hi Siebe - it's definitely worth distinguishing effective giving, career choice, x-risk, etc. There's likely a whole host of factors that differ between them. To your point (and Peter's question above), it's worth sorting out how we handle this differentiation.

Thanks for this. The SEGS consisted of seven items on a 7-point Likert agree/disagree scale: (1) I am interested in Effective Altruism, (2) I would like to learn more about Effective Altruism, (3) I support the Effective Altruism movement, (4), I would share information about Effective Altruism with people in my network, (5) I identify as an "effective altruist," (6) I would like to meet others who support Effective Altruism, and (7) I will donate my money based on Effective Altruism. We also measured a few more-behavioral outcomes e.g., a windfall donation task (in which participants allocated money between Deworm the World, Make a Wish, a local choir, and keeping it for themselves), and willingness to sign the GWWC pledge. For the SEGS x Empathy relationship, we controlled for past giving behavior to try to feather that out.

Ah yes, the links to the scales don't appear to work in the PDF, here are open-access versions:

EQ: http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2004_Lawrence_etal_MeasuringEmpathy.pdf

IRI: http://fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/stories/pdf/selfmeasures/EMPATHY-InterpersonalReactivityIndex.pdf

MFQ-20: http://www.moralfoundations.org/questionnaires

TIPI: https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/ten-item-personality-measure-tipi/

MS-S: http://journal.sjdm.org/16/16129b/jdm16129b.pdf

CRT: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/151029/jdm151029.pdf

Thanks both, great point. We focused the description in this study on the effective giving and career choice aspects of EA, and the results may well be different depending on the framing -- it'd be worth replicating with something like x-risk. Here's the full description (built from ea.org):

"What is Effective Altruism? Thinking carefully about how to do good. Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most? Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on.

Most of us want to make a difference. We see suffering, injustice and death, and are moved to do something about them. But working out what that ‘something’ is, let alone doing it, is a difficult problem. Which cause should you support if you really want to make a difference? What career choices will help you make a significant contribution? Which charities will use your donation effectively? If you don’t choose well, you risk wasting your time and money. But if you choose wisely, you have a tremendous chance to improve the world.

Effective altruism considers tradeoffs like the following: Suppose we want to fight blindness. For $40,000 we can provide guide dogs to blind people in the US. Or for $20 per patient, we can pay for surgery reversing the effects of trachoma in Africa (a disease which causes blindness). If people have equal moral value, then the second option is more than 2,000 times better than the first."

Greg, this is fantastic. Congratulations on everything involved in making this a reality. I'm sure many of us will head over for a visit to collaborate and build community (I especially appreciate the handy google calendar!).