âHowever, also relevant is that itâs reasonably small by the standards of the effective altruism community (and this is true if you draw the border not just at CEA but including all the EA meta-charities*). Our metrics are a bit crude, but to a first approximation I think CEA has been growing in proportion to the community as a whole.â
This does seem like the most relevant metric to me, and Iâm not sure I agree with you about âreasonably smallâ here. As Sebastian notes, the total CEA budget for 2016 is approx. $1.8m. That raises two questions for me:
How much of this do we expect to raise from within the EA community, broadly defined? I would expect the answer to be âa lotâ, maybe 85%, but interested if others have different impressions.
How much money will the EA community, similarly broadly defined, donate this year?
That would get you towards â(financial) resources going to CEA as a fraction of total EA resourcesâ, which is a number I care on quite a lot actually.
The EA community, broadly defined, donates a huge amount of money. GiveWell moved more than $20m (excluding GoodVentures) in 2015, source and credits effective altruism as motivating a substantial part of this. Giving What We Can moved more than $3m. FLI committed grants worth about $7m. Leverhulme Foundation granted $15m for existential risk research. This is far from exhaustive, but weâre looking at something on the order of magnitude of $50m fairly easily.
Relative to this, CEAâs $1.8m does not seem nearly as large. I think one of the sources of intuitive surprise is just that the EA movement as a whole seems to be roughly doubling or a bit more in size every year which means that the heuristics we have for thinking about size become out of date very quickly. Relative to EA as a whole, CEA may be shrinking slightly since we have been growing a little slower than doubling.
Most of the projects have significant non-EA funding, but this is something weâre trying to grow (for example by recruiting for a development manager who could expand our non-EA donor base). 80k got a lot of funding through YCombinator and associated leads. GWWC gets a substantial amount from people with a strong interest in development and giving but less in effective altruism itself. GPP gets significant funding from grant sources that wouldnât otherwise fund EA work. Even EAO got at least $50k from people who have not typically given to EA charities, which is surprising for an organisation focused so heavily on the EA community itself. Iâve gone over our numbers and think 80k may have gotten more than half its budget outside the EA community recently. GPP gets around 40%. This is pretty loose stuff though, because itâs so hard to define what counts as EA money and we donât have good access to the counterfactuals. Ben also makes a really important point about the donors who move from giving to us to supporting other EA projects.
Although note that youâve compared 2015 money moved with projected 2016 costs. I think itâs probably more appropriate to compare them in the same year, which if the growth is indeed a doubling every year means the CEA budget is about half the size proportionally.
Overall it looks like meta-charity is in the vicinity of 5% of money moved. My personal (extremely uncertain) guess is that 5-10% would be about right for a movement in equilibrium, but that during rapid growth itâs better to be higher.
I understand how youâre both getting to these numbers and a ratio of around 5%. Iâm trying to reconcile them with the fact that for example, Denise and I expect to give around 50% of our donations to meta-charities this year. For everyone like us, there need to be 9 comparably sized donors giving 0% to make the maths line up. But I donât actually offhand know of anyone planning to give less than 5% to meta except some small donors who donât want to split their donations. I understood EA donations to be relatively top-heavy, so those small donors shouldnât affect things that drastically. So that suggests my circles are skewed in some way, but Iâm not sure how.
All I can think of is that the really big donors give less than 5% (though not 0) to meta-charities and they skew the entire pool. But that doesnât quite seem right either, e.g. Good Ventures donated $15m to Givewell charities in 2014 and Givewell operations were $3m total in that year. Annoyingly I canât seem to find how much GV donated to GW for their operations that year, but I assume it was not significant less, and probably more, than 5% * $15m = $0.75m.
In any case, if it is the case that the low overall percentage is entirely due to a few large donors contributing low percentages to meta-charity, that still seems worth bearing in mind when you are actually in the process of fund-raising from relatively smaller donors (who are presumably the targets of this post). AFAIK they are already committing way more than 5% to meta-charity.
Thereâs a big pool of silent donors who give to GiveWell recommended charities. They donât participate actively in the community so you never hear from them.
So I agree that if you care about âactively participating EAsâ then the percentage who give to meta-charities is likely higher.
Itâs not clear which figure is most relevant. It makes sense that the people most involved in the community are in the best relative position to support the EA orgs because they know the most about them. It also makes sense that the more persuaded people will be more inclined to support meta-charities. Finally, large donors should give more to startups because they have more time to research (and can specialise in being meta-charity donors); small donors should stick to GiveWell recommended charities. Overall, the large active EA donors should give above the 5% baseline to pull the overall ratio up.
My understanding was that the majority of Givewell donors have essentially nothing to do with EA whatsoever (though this seems to be changing by the sounds of the board meeting Sebastian mentioned linked to above). Is the claim that thereâs an intermediate group who, say, have heard of and would identify with EA and donated to GW-recommended charities but donât actively engage? That doesnât sound crazy.
I agree with all of the latter points, but again my impression was that donations are already very top heavy. Some estimates that might help pin this disagreement more precisely:
What percentage of donations by dollars do you think come from people donating more than $30k annually?
What percentage do you think those people give to meta-charity?
If your answers are, say, 30% and 20%, that already gets you above 5%, and of course thatâs a lower bound at this point.
On the silent donors, Iâm not sure. If youâre giving a lot of money to a GiveWell recommended charity or youâre a member of GWWC, then functionally youâre an EA (in my definition). But I agree many of them might not explicitly identify as EAs. I do think thereâs a significant intermediate group, but Iâm not sure how many.
Perhaps more relevant, even if they donât identify as EA, where the silent donors give is influenced by EA. So I think thereâs still a good case for including them in the money moved.
If we can persuade a big group of people to give to AMF but not metacharities, then it makes sense to do that, and then for the people who are interested in giving to either give to meta charity.
Perhaps more relevant, even if they donât identify as EA, where the silent donors give is influenced by EA. So I think thereâs still a good case for including them in the money moved.
Can you explain why youâre thinking that theyâre influenced by EA? It seems at least equally plausible that theyâre influenced by GiveWell, which is distinct from most EA meta-orgs, and operates using a different model. Are you thinking that thereâs another influence on them, like 80k or GWWC?
Theyâre influenced by GiveWell, and GiveWell is part of EA.
Or even if you donât think GiveWell is part of EA, theyâre very similar to EA in their approach, and many of the staff are explicitly EAs or supporters of EA. I think GiveWell has also been influenced by other groups in EA, though itâs hard to tell.
I agree that GiveWell could be considered part of EA. Ultimately I see that as a merely semantic question. My and I think AGBâs point is that the donors who follow GiveWell arenât self-identified members of the âEA movementâ, and arenât giving because of EA outreach specifically. It appears that organizations doing EA outreach specifically get much more than 5% of the money donated by members of the âEA movementâ who were inspired to give by those organizations.
Ah, I was trying to look at the ratio of meta-charity work to money being moved at the same time. Since meta-charities fundraise often a year in advance, then as a flow of donations the proportion should be higher.
I do think that âYou should measure and give to the most effective measured charitiesâ is a much easier sell than âYou should try to understand which of the things we canât measure well could be even better than the ones we canâ, so my prior is that these numbers arenât surprising. I donât feel I have a good understanding of the community breakdown; I expect I interact way disproportionately with people who are on board with the second statement. This means my error bars on the kind of estimate that you ask Ben for are large, and they donât have too much effect on my all-things-considered belief.
From memory, 80k has raised about 40% of its total funding from outside the EA community. Weâve also brought more donors into the EA community, which Iâm not including in this figure.
âHowever, also relevant is that itâs reasonably small by the standards of the effective altruism community (and this is true if you draw the border not just at CEA but including all the EA meta-charities*). Our metrics are a bit crude, but to a first approximation I think CEA has been growing in proportion to the community as a whole.â
This does seem like the most relevant metric to me, and Iâm not sure I agree with you about âreasonably smallâ here. As Sebastian notes, the total CEA budget for 2016 is approx. $1.8m. That raises two questions for me:
How much of this do we expect to raise from within the EA community, broadly defined? I would expect the answer to be âa lotâ, maybe 85%, but interested if others have different impressions.
How much money will the EA community, similarly broadly defined, donate this year?
That would get you towards â(financial) resources going to CEA as a fraction of total EA resourcesâ, which is a number I care on quite a lot actually.
The EA community, broadly defined, donates a huge amount of money. GiveWell moved more than $20m (excluding GoodVentures) in 2015, source and credits effective altruism as motivating a substantial part of this. Giving What We Can moved more than $3m. FLI committed grants worth about $7m. Leverhulme Foundation granted $15m for existential risk research. This is far from exhaustive, but weâre looking at something on the order of magnitude of $50m fairly easily.
Relative to this, CEAâs $1.8m does not seem nearly as large. I think one of the sources of intuitive surprise is just that the EA movement as a whole seems to be roughly doubling or a bit more in size every year which means that the heuristics we have for thinking about size become out of date very quickly. Relative to EA as a whole, CEA may be shrinking slightly since we have been growing a little slower than doubling.
Most of the projects have significant non-EA funding, but this is something weâre trying to grow (for example by recruiting for a development manager who could expand our non-EA donor base). 80k got a lot of funding through YCombinator and associated leads. GWWC gets a substantial amount from people with a strong interest in development and giving but less in effective altruism itself. GPP gets significant funding from grant sources that wouldnât otherwise fund EA work. Even EAO got at least $50k from people who have not typically given to EA charities, which is surprising for an organisation focused so heavily on the EA community itself. Iâve gone over our numbers and think 80k may have gotten more than half its budget outside the EA community recently. GPP gets around 40%. This is pretty loose stuff though, because itâs so hard to define what counts as EA money and we donât have good access to the counterfactuals. Ben also makes a really important point about the donors who move from giving to us to supporting other EA projects.
Although note that youâve compared 2015 money moved with projected 2016 costs. I think itâs probably more appropriate to compare them in the same year, which if the growth is indeed a doubling every year means the CEA budget is about half the size proportionally.
Overall it looks like meta-charity is in the vicinity of 5% of money moved. My personal (extremely uncertain) guess is that 5-10% would be about right for a movement in equilibrium, but that during rapid growth itâs better to be higher.
I understand how youâre both getting to these numbers and a ratio of around 5%. Iâm trying to reconcile them with the fact that for example, Denise and I expect to give around 50% of our donations to meta-charities this year. For everyone like us, there need to be 9 comparably sized donors giving 0% to make the maths line up. But I donât actually offhand know of anyone planning to give less than 5% to meta except some small donors who donât want to split their donations. I understood EA donations to be relatively top-heavy, so those small donors shouldnât affect things that drastically. So that suggests my circles are skewed in some way, but Iâm not sure how.
All I can think of is that the really big donors give less than 5% (though not 0) to meta-charities and they skew the entire pool. But that doesnât quite seem right either, e.g. Good Ventures donated $15m to Givewell charities in 2014 and Givewell operations were $3m total in that year. Annoyingly I canât seem to find how much GV donated to GW for their operations that year, but I assume it was not significant less, and probably more, than 5% * $15m = $0.75m.
In any case, if it is the case that the low overall percentage is entirely due to a few large donors contributing low percentages to meta-charity, that still seems worth bearing in mind when you are actually in the process of fund-raising from relatively smaller donors (who are presumably the targets of this post). AFAIK they are already committing way more than 5% to meta-charity.
Thereâs a big pool of silent donors who give to GiveWell recommended charities. They donât participate actively in the community so you never hear from them.
So I agree that if you care about âactively participating EAsâ then the percentage who give to meta-charities is likely higher.
Itâs not clear which figure is most relevant. It makes sense that the people most involved in the community are in the best relative position to support the EA orgs because they know the most about them. It also makes sense that the more persuaded people will be more inclined to support meta-charities. Finally, large donors should give more to startups because they have more time to research (and can specialise in being meta-charity donors); small donors should stick to GiveWell recommended charities. Overall, the large active EA donors should give above the 5% baseline to pull the overall ratio up.
My understanding was that the majority of Givewell donors have essentially nothing to do with EA whatsoever (though this seems to be changing by the sounds of the board meeting Sebastian mentioned linked to above). Is the claim that thereâs an intermediate group who, say, have heard of and would identify with EA and donated to GW-recommended charities but donât actively engage? That doesnât sound crazy.
I agree with all of the latter points, but again my impression was that donations are already very top heavy. Some estimates that might help pin this disagreement more precisely:
What percentage of donations by dollars do you think come from people donating more than $30k annually?
What percentage do you think those people give to meta-charity?
If your answers are, say, 30% and 20%, that already gets you above 5%, and of course thatâs a lower bound at this point.
On the silent donors, Iâm not sure. If youâre giving a lot of money to a GiveWell recommended charity or youâre a member of GWWC, then functionally youâre an EA (in my definition). But I agree many of them might not explicitly identify as EAs. I do think thereâs a significant intermediate group, but Iâm not sure how many.
Perhaps more relevant, even if they donât identify as EA, where the silent donors give is influenced by EA. So I think thereâs still a good case for including them in the money moved. If we can persuade a big group of people to give to AMF but not metacharities, then it makes sense to do that, and then for the people who are interested in giving to either give to meta charity.
Can you explain why youâre thinking that theyâre influenced by EA? It seems at least equally plausible that theyâre influenced by GiveWell, which is distinct from most EA meta-orgs, and operates using a different model. Are you thinking that thereâs another influence on them, like 80k or GWWC?
Theyâre influenced by GiveWell, and GiveWell is part of EA.
Or even if you donât think GiveWell is part of EA, theyâre very similar to EA in their approach, and many of the staff are explicitly EAs or supporters of EA. I think GiveWell has also been influenced by other groups in EA, though itâs hard to tell.
I agree that GiveWell could be considered part of EA. Ultimately I see that as a merely semantic question. My and I think AGBâs point is that the donors who follow GiveWell arenât self-identified members of the âEA movementâ, and arenât giving because of EA outreach specifically. It appears that organizations doing EA outreach specifically get much more than 5% of the money donated by members of the âEA movementâ who were inspired to give by those organizations.
Ah, I was trying to look at the ratio of meta-charity work to money being moved at the same time. Since meta-charities fundraise often a year in advance, then as a flow of donations the proportion should be higher.
I do think that âYou should measure and give to the most effective measured charitiesâ is a much easier sell than âYou should try to understand which of the things we canât measure well could be even better than the ones we canâ, so my prior is that these numbers arenât surprising. I donât feel I have a good understanding of the community breakdown; I expect I interact way disproportionately with people who are on board with the second statement. This means my error bars on the kind of estimate that you ask Ben for are large, and they donât have too much effect on my all-things-considered belief.
From memory, 80k has raised about 40% of its total funding from outside the EA community. Weâve also brought more donors into the EA community, which Iâm not including in this figure.