Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on “what’s going on here?”:
The simplest high-level explanation is that the surveys capture ‘thought leaders’, which is distinct from the set of people who control the money, and these groups disagree on allocation. I guess my prior expectation would not have been that these numbers match, but perhaps I’m in the minority there?
More specifically, as you mentioned, Coefficient Giving is responsible for ~2/3 of the grant dollars in this data set, so to a significant extent this reduces to comparing Dustin and Cari’s preferred allocation to that of the surveyed EA population.
It’s notable that Global Health is the only category to receive more funding than the survey mean (and more than double at that). Here it’s both true that CG consistently gives a larger fraction, and that GiveWell top charities are the only ‘EA orgs’ to achieve any significant ‘mainstream appeal’ to date; e.g. the amount that GiveWell directs from non-CG sources per year is 3-4x the entire Animal Advocacy budget in this data set (and likely very little of that is coming from EA survey respondents).
Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Tyler. I tend to think that 2 & 3 tends to account for funding discrepancies.
I do think at the same time there might be a discrepancy in ideal and actual allocation of talent, with so many EAs focused on working in AI safety/x-risk reduction. To be clear I think these are incredibly important and think every, but that maybe a few EAs who are on the fence should work in animal advocacy.
Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on “what’s going on here?”:
The simplest high-level explanation is that the surveys capture ‘thought leaders’, which is distinct from the set of people who control the money, and these groups disagree on allocation. I guess my prior expectation would not have been that these numbers match, but perhaps I’m in the minority there?
More specifically, as you mentioned, Coefficient Giving is responsible for ~2/3 of the grant dollars in this data set, so to a significant extent this reduces to comparing Dustin and Cari’s preferred allocation to that of the surveyed EA population.
It’s notable that Global Health is the only category to receive more funding than the survey mean (and more than double at that). Here it’s both true that CG consistently gives a larger fraction, and that GiveWell top charities are the only ‘EA orgs’ to achieve any significant ‘mainstream appeal’ to date; e.g. the amount that GiveWell directs from non-CG sources per year is 3-4x the entire Animal Advocacy budget in this data set (and likely very little of that is coming from EA survey respondents).
Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Tyler. I tend to think that 2 & 3 tends to account for funding discrepancies.
I do think at the same time there might be a discrepancy in ideal and actual allocation of talent, with so many EAs focused on working in AI safety/x-risk reduction. To be clear I think these are incredibly important and think every, but that maybe a few EAs who are on the fence should work in animal advocacy.