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vmasarik

23 karmaJoined Nov 2022

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Could you expand on your last point? As I am not sure I understood it properly.

many EAs reason about funding stability as if every skilled person was happy to work at an organization that could run out of money in less than a year

I would agree that having charities with long term funding and stability is great. At the same time I feel that if a charity is provably effective then it will keep existing even if it has less than a year of funding because they shouldn't have issues with asking for more funding.

Therefore, if you keep the funding under a year, the charities that work will continue working, those who are not as promising will dissolve. What would be the solution then? If you provide 3 years of funding to the effective charities, I assume nothing would change because those charities wouldn't have issues with getting the funding. If you give 3 years of funding to an inefficient charity, do they have just 3 years to waste, or do they return the money?

Thank you for the detailed post!

Could you explain a bit further the case for "CENTRE FOR EXPLORATORY ALTRUISM RESEARCH (CEARCH)"? I believe I might have misunderstood something, or missed some details. 

The linked report talks about  Rethink Priorities, and Open Phil already doing research in this area, but at the same time it is explained that this area is currently "Very neglected". In this post you also write that the plan is to

(a) identify 1000 causes, (b) narrowed down on a cause that is at least 10x more cost-effective than top GiveWell charities

I am sincerely very happy that there are more people coming into this area, as I believe the requirements and dedication necessary for joining Open Phil is rather high, and having people who are not 95% perfect, yet still doing research in this area would be still valuable. 

However, isn't it a bit too confident that CEARCH would identify a 1000 causes that RP or OpenPhil couldn't find? To me it just seems so counter intuitive where OpenPhil / RP wouldn't hire people for this, but somehow making a new organization makes sense? Or at least where is this confidence coming from? Is it really beneficial to start a new organization, compared to just joining the already existing ones?

Truly my only wish is to fully understand so that I can focus my personal goal into areas that need support. Thank you again!
Vlad