I’m helping prepare a spreadsheet listing organizations and their budgets, which at some point will be turned into a pretty visualization...
Anyway, according to this sheet, meta budgets total around $4.2m (that’s $2.1m GiveWell, $0.8m CEA and $0.8m CFAR, plus a bunch of little ones). That’s more than “a couple”, but direct charities’ budgets total $52m so we’re still shy of 10%.
(Main caveats to this data: It’s not all for exactly the same year, so anything which is taking off exponentially will skew it. Also I haven’t checked the data particularly carefully).
I’ve also been counting x-risk organizations as not meta. That one’s a bit ambiguous—on the one hand they do a lot of “priorities research and marketing”, but on the other hand there isn’t really an object-level tier of organizations beneath them that works in the same areas.
As to what self-identified effective altruists are up to: a quick look at the 2014 EA survey only yields number of donations to each organization, not amount of money… but if we go with that, 20% of the donations are to organizations I’ve counted as “meta”.
So my working conclusion would be that if you favour a 50% split across the community, you’re looking good for putting all your eggs in meta. If you favour a 10-20% split, you may need to look a bit more carefully.
A final note of caution: you can only push in one direction. If you favoured a 20% meta split, and (just suppose it turned out that) only 5% of donations in your reference class went to meta, it doesn’t automatically mean that you should donate to meta. There might be some other category, e.g. direct animal welfare charities, which were also under-represented according to your ideal pie. It’s then up to you to decide which needs increasing more urgently.
I can’t emphasize the exponential growth thing enough. A look at the next page on this forum shows CEA wanting to hire another 13 people. Meanwhile GiveWell were boasting of having grown to 18 full time staff back in March; now they have 30.
But the direct charities are growing like crazy too! It all makes it very easy to be off by a factor of 2 (and maybe I am in my above reasoning) simply by using out of date figures. Anyone business-minded know about the sort of reasoning and heuristics to use under growth conditions?
I can’t emphasize the exponential growth thing enough. A look at the next page on this forum shows CEA wanting to hire another 13 people. Meanwhile GiveWell were boasting of having grown to 18 full time staff back in March; now they have 30.
This. I haven’t talked to him personally, but that’s the sort of thing that has some of us who made his article one of the most upvoted ever worried about a meta trap, where organisations keep adding jobs for EAs they know without in advance setting out credible limits for when this should stop.
These increases seem to be in line with the total growth of the EA movement, so doesn’t look like a meta-trap.
without in advance setting out credible limits for when this should stop.
GiveWell/Open Phil have said their target is for their budget to be 10% of money moved per year.
CEA is more complex because it’s actually 4 independently run projects, but each project thinks carefully about what a marginal person would do and whether it will generate returns. Hiring is a difficult and costly business, so you generally don’t do it just for the fun of it.
My guess is actually that many meta-projects underhire, because their donors like to see them maintain a large positive leverage ratio, whereas in fact it would be optimal to invest more now to get more growth in 2-5 years.
Small aside: CEA are just advertising for 13 positions, but they’re very unlikely to hire for all of those positions. I expect CEA to hire more like 6-7 people, spread over 6-12 months (since hiring takes a long time, and we run rounds about once a year). Note that’s spread over 4 mainly independent projects.
I’m a bit unsure about whether CFAR should be classed as “EA meta”. You could see it as a whole other cause which is improving decision making. Only part of what it’s doing is trying to improve the EA movement.
Also note that we’re undercounting the amount of direct work being influenced if we just look at this year’s direct charity budget.
e.g. GPP (part of CEA) mainly advises policy makers rather than helping the direct charities.
e.g.2. 80k helps people choose careers which normally aren’t at direct charities.
e.g.3. Some of GiveWell’s research will likely be used by people outside of those working at direct charities.
e.g.4. GWWC is also raising money that will be donated in the future.
Did you also include all of Open Phil’s grants in your direct charity estimate? You should do that, or only include the proportion of GiveWell’s funding that’s spent on “traditional GiveWell”.
I think the EA survey likely has a strong selection bias in favor of those who prefer meta. There’s lots of random GiveWell and GWWC donors who’ll never fill that out.
I was also hesitant about CFAR, although for a slightly different reason—around half its revenue is from workshops, which looks more like people purchasing a service than altruism as such.
Good point regarding GPP: policy work is another of those grey areas between meta and non-meta.
Not sure about 80K: their list of career changes mostly looks like earning to give and working at EA orgs—I don’t see big additional classes of “direct work” being influenced. It’s possible people reading the website are changing their career plans in entirely different directions, but I have my doubts.
Not sure what you mean by e.g.3.
I totally get the point regarding GWWC and future earnings, but I’m not sure how to account for it. GWWC do a plausible-looking analysis that suggests expected future donations are worth 10x total donations to date. But I’m not sure that we can “borrow from the future” in this way when doing metaness estimates, and if we do I think we’d need a much sharper future discounting function to account for exponential growth of the movement.
Good point regarding OPP: My direct charity estimate only included the top recommended charities by GW,GWWC and ACE. The OPP grants come to an additional $7.8m in 2014 (“additional” because it’s not direct charities I’ve already considered and isn’t meta either).
Anyway, taking all this into consideration I get $3.2m meta, $62m non-meta for a ratio of 5%. (Plus $2.1 million in “grey area”). So we’re getting close to agreement!
I was also hesitant about CFAR … Good point regarding GPP …. Not sure about 80K
Its meta in Hurford’s sense, which is different from Todd’s—it’s indirect, and has a chain of causality to impact that has extra points of failure. That’s what many of Hurford’s arguments spoke to. GPP and 80K also count as meta by this definition.
Anyway, taking all this into consideration I get $3.2m meta, $62m non-meta for a ratio of 5%. (Plus $2.1 million in “grey area”)
Are you counting donations from people who aren’t EAs, or are only relatively loosely so? They can correct me if I’m wrong but Hurford didn’t seem concerned about those.
Regarding the survey, do you feel that it’s biased specifically towards those who prefer meta, or just those who identify as EA?
I don’t know about the Oxford line, but the general feeling where I am and among international EA’s I’ve talked to is that the survey tells us more about the people who are more engaged in the international community, identify more as EA’s and participate online, are more dedicated, etc. Most other sources confirm that these people _do_ particularly favour meta, that many came from the large old LessWrong community, that they’re heavily consequentialist, etc.
Naturally finding out about and establishing contact with as many other people as possible would also be valuable, including less engaged random GWWC and even GW donors. I don’t know about GWWC Central, but my local chapter plans to help get next survey to as many people as possible.
Some of the money going into the meta orgs comes from non-EAs too.
With e.g.3 I meant that GiveWell is also influencing the nonprofit sector beyond just the recommended charities. Arguably you could include that as part of the direct charity estimate.
With 80k, there’s also a bunch of career changes (~20-30% of the total) that are towards building career capital (which has a similar problem to accumulating pledged donations).
I’m helping prepare a spreadsheet listing organizations and their budgets, which at some point will be turned into a pretty visualization...
Anyway, according to this sheet, meta budgets total around $4.2m (that’s $2.1m GiveWell, $0.8m CEA and $0.8m CFAR, plus a bunch of little ones). That’s more than “a couple”, but direct charities’ budgets total $52m so we’re still shy of 10%.
(Main caveats to this data: It’s not all for exactly the same year, so anything which is taking off exponentially will skew it. Also I haven’t checked the data particularly carefully).
I’ve also been counting x-risk organizations as not meta. That one’s a bit ambiguous—on the one hand they do a lot of “priorities research and marketing”, but on the other hand there isn’t really an object-level tier of organizations beneath them that works in the same areas.
As to what self-identified effective altruists are up to: a quick look at the 2014 EA survey only yields number of donations to each organization, not amount of money… but if we go with that, 20% of the donations are to organizations I’ve counted as “meta”.
So my working conclusion would be that if you favour a 50% split across the community, you’re looking good for putting all your eggs in meta. If you favour a 10-20% split, you may need to look a bit more carefully.
A final note of caution: you can only push in one direction. If you favoured a 20% meta split, and (just suppose it turned out that) only 5% of donations in your reference class went to meta, it doesn’t automatically mean that you should donate to meta. There might be some other category, e.g. direct animal welfare charities, which were also under-represented according to your ideal pie. It’s then up to you to decide which needs increasing more urgently.
I can’t emphasize the exponential growth thing enough. A look at the next page on this forum shows CEA wanting to hire another 13 people. Meanwhile GiveWell were boasting of having grown to 18 full time staff back in March; now they have 30.
But the direct charities are growing like crazy too! It all makes it very easy to be off by a factor of 2 (and maybe I am in my above reasoning) simply by using out of date figures. Anyone business-minded know about the sort of reasoning and heuristics to use under growth conditions?
This. I haven’t talked to him personally, but that’s the sort of thing that has some of us who made his article one of the most upvoted ever worried about a meta trap, where organisations keep adding jobs for EAs they know without in advance setting out credible limits for when this should stop.
These increases seem to be in line with the total growth of the EA movement, so doesn’t look like a meta-trap.
GiveWell/Open Phil have said their target is for their budget to be 10% of money moved per year.
CEA is more complex because it’s actually 4 independently run projects, but each project thinks carefully about what a marginal person would do and whether it will generate returns. Hiring is a difficult and costly business, so you generally don’t do it just for the fun of it.
My guess is actually that many meta-projects underhire, because their donors like to see them maintain a large positive leverage ratio, whereas in fact it would be optimal to invest more now to get more growth in 2-5 years.
Small aside: CEA are just advertising for 13 positions, but they’re very unlikely to hire for all of those positions. I expect CEA to hire more like 6-7 people, spread over 6-12 months (since hiring takes a long time, and we run rounds about once a year). Note that’s spread over 4 mainly independent projects.
Just look at the split in 2014 and then again in 2015 and see if the ratio is changing fast.
Nice data.
I’m a bit unsure about whether CFAR should be classed as “EA meta”. You could see it as a whole other cause which is improving decision making. Only part of what it’s doing is trying to improve the EA movement.
Also note that we’re undercounting the amount of direct work being influenced if we just look at this year’s direct charity budget. e.g. GPP (part of CEA) mainly advises policy makers rather than helping the direct charities. e.g.2. 80k helps people choose careers which normally aren’t at direct charities. e.g.3. Some of GiveWell’s research will likely be used by people outside of those working at direct charities. e.g.4. GWWC is also raising money that will be donated in the future.
Did you also include all of Open Phil’s grants in your direct charity estimate? You should do that, or only include the proportion of GiveWell’s funding that’s spent on “traditional GiveWell”.
I think the EA survey likely has a strong selection bias in favor of those who prefer meta. There’s lots of random GiveWell and GWWC donors who’ll never fill that out.
I was also hesitant about CFAR, although for a slightly different reason—around half its revenue is from workshops, which looks more like people purchasing a service than altruism as such.
Good point regarding GPP: policy work is another of those grey areas between meta and non-meta.
Not sure about 80K: their list of career changes mostly looks like earning to give and working at EA orgs—I don’t see big additional classes of “direct work” being influenced. It’s possible people reading the website are changing their career plans in entirely different directions, but I have my doubts.
Not sure what you mean by e.g.3.
I totally get the point regarding GWWC and future earnings, but I’m not sure how to account for it. GWWC do a plausible-looking analysis that suggests expected future donations are worth 10x total donations to date. But I’m not sure that we can “borrow from the future” in this way when doing metaness estimates, and if we do I think we’d need a much sharper future discounting function to account for exponential growth of the movement.
Good point regarding OPP: My direct charity estimate only included the top recommended charities by GW,GWWC and ACE. The OPP grants come to an additional $7.8m in 2014 (“additional” because it’s not direct charities I’ve already considered and isn’t meta either).
Anyway, taking all this into consideration I get $3.2m meta, $62m non-meta for a ratio of 5%. (Plus $2.1 million in “grey area”). So we’re getting close to agreement!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PMw_q7vZ0oQgPbY3vrie3Xb0n_wifCidYzpxSDCTbPE/edit#gid=608881848
Some other caveats:
It doesn’t measure non-financial contributions, such as running local chapters or volunteering for EA orgs.
Some of the money going to direct charities comes from people with no connection whatsoever to the EA movement (i.e. not influenced by GiveWell etc.)
Regarding the survey, do you feel that it’s biased specifically towards those who prefer meta, or just those who identify as EA?
Its meta in Hurford’s sense, which is different from Todd’s—it’s indirect, and has a chain of causality to impact that has extra points of failure. That’s what many of Hurford’s arguments spoke to. GPP and 80K also count as meta by this definition.
Are you counting donations from people who aren’t EAs, or are only relatively loosely so? They can correct me if I’m wrong but Hurford didn’t seem concerned about those.
I don’t know about the Oxford line, but the general feeling where I am and among international EA’s I’ve talked to is that the survey tells us more about the people who are more engaged in the international community, identify more as EA’s and participate online, are more dedicated, etc. Most other sources confirm that these people _do_ particularly favour meta, that many came from the large old LessWrong community, that they’re heavily consequentialist, etc.
Naturally finding out about and establishing contact with as many other people as possible would also be valuable, including less engaged random GWWC and even GW donors. I don’t know about GWWC Central, but my local chapter plans to help get next survey to as many people as possible.
Yes. Looking at the survey data was an attempt to deal with this.
On the survey, those who prefer meta, I guess.
Some of the money going into the meta orgs comes from non-EAs too.
With e.g.3 I meant that GiveWell is also influencing the nonprofit sector beyond just the recommended charities. Arguably you could include that as part of the direct charity estimate.
With 80k, there’s also a bunch of career changes (~20-30% of the total) that are towards building career capital (which has a similar problem to accumulating pledged donations).