Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday.

My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign.

If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly about my normal longtermist c3 recommendations.

Some friends and I have nonpublic recommendations less good than Bores but ~4x as good as the normal longtermist c3s above, according to me.

1. +1
2. Random take: people underrate optionality / information value. Even within EA, few opportunities are within 5x of the best opportunities (even on the margin), due to inefficiencies in the process by which people get informed about donation opportunities. Waiting to donate is great if it increases your chances of donating very well. Almost all of my friends regret their past donations; they wish they'd saved money until they were better-informed.
3. Random take: there are still some great c3 opportunities, but hopefully after the Anthropic people eventually get liquidity they'll fill all of the great c3 opportunities.
   1. Some public c3 donation opportunities I like are The Midas Project (small funding gap + no industry money), Forethought, and LTFF/ARM.
4. Random take: you should really invest your money to get a high return rate.

I'm not sure what we should be doing now! But I expect that people can make progress if they backchain from the von Neumann probes, whereas my impression is that most people entering the "digital sentience" space never think about the von Neumann probes.

Oh, clarification: it's very possible that there aren't great grant opportunities by my lights. It's not like I'm aware of great opportunities that the other Zach isn't funding. I should have focused more on expected grants than Zach's process.

Thanks. I'm somewhat glad to hear this.

One crux is that I'm worried that broad field-building mostly recruits people to work on stuff like "are AIs conscious" and "how can we improve short-term AI welfare" rather than "how can we do digital-minds stuff to improve what the von Neumann probes tile the universe with." So the field-building feels approximately zero-value to me — I doubt you'll be able to steer people toward the important stuff in the future.

A smaller crux is that I'm worried about lab-facing work similarly being poorly aimed.

I endorse Longview's Frontier AI Fund; I think it'll give to high-marginal-EV AI safety c3s.

I do not endorse Longview's Digital Sentience Fund. (This view is weakly held. I haven't really engaged.) I expect it'll fund misc empirical and philosophical "digital sentience" work plus unfocused field-building — not backchaining from averting AI takeover or making the long-term future go well conditional on no AI takeover. I feel only barely positive about that. (I feel excited about theoretical work like this.)

$500M+/year in GCR spending

Wait, how much is it? https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/page/4/?q&focus-area%5B0%5D=global-catastrophic-risks&yr%5B0%5D=2025&sort=high-to-low&view-list=true lists $240M in 2025 so far.

I'm confident the timing was a coincidence. I agree that (novel, thoughtful, careful) posting can make things happen.

I mostly agree with the core claim. Here's how I'd put related points:

• Impact is related to productivity, not doing-your-best.
• Praiseworthiness is related to doing-your-best, not productivity.
• But doing-your-best involves maximizing productivity.
• Increasing hours-worked doesn't necessarily increase long-run productivity. (But it's somewhat suspiciously convenient to claim that it doesn't, and for many people it would.)