Error

a sustained increase in money moved by the EA movement (say, by 2-5x or so? I haven’t dug into the data enough to make a proper forecast)

As of right now, the increase in the amount of money the EA movement has committed to effective giving is probably between 2 and 3 times as much as it was a year and a half ago. What has changed in the last year is FTX making it big, leading to Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) having a net worth billions of dollars greater than Dustin Moskowitz’s. There were also several other crypto investors in EA who became wealthy as well. That altogether brought the amount of money dedicated to EA-supported causes to almost triple from what it was in 2020.

What has changed in the last few months, though, is the collapse of the value of cryptocurrencies. SBF’s net worth has dropped by billions of dollars, as the net worth of all successful crypto investors in EA has plummeted. The amount of money dedicated to EA-supported causes almost tripled from 2020 to 2021 but now in 2022 about half of those gains have been lost. This has prompted the EA community to reflect more on the fact that most of the billions of dollars behind Good Ventures are caught up in Facebook stock, itself volatile.

This all applies to increases in money moved per year too. The volatility in the total amount of money available means that there may not be an increase in money moved per year that can be predictably sustained.

I’m less confident about WWOTF greatly increasing the amount of funding we have access to as we already have access to quite a significant amount of funding. That said, the current sources of EA funding are a bit too correlated, so anything that broadens the pool is great :-).

Maybe the biggest difference is that EA is transitioning from mostly staying out of the public spotlight to entering it (when EA first started there was more of an effort to get EA into the media, but this seems to have been de-emphasised when it was realised that it wasn’t really persuading people to join vs. appearances on niche podcasts). But as EA has become more influential, we naturally started drawing more attention and so there really wasn’t any option apart from engaging with the public more.