The EA Crisis Fund would respond to crisises around the world such as the current crisis of Ukranian refugees. This would help develop the capabilities of EA to respond to novel situations on short timelines, provide great publicity and build connections and credibility with government. This would increase the chance that EA would have a seat at the table in important discussions.
Potential Downside: It may be hard to respond to these crisises in a way that builds credibility without burning a lot of money.
I think if we are just jumping into the same highly-salient crises as everybody else (Ukraine today, Afghanistan yesterday, Black Lives Matter, Covid, etc), we burn a lot of money quickly at only middling effectiveness (even if we try to identify specific “most effective” interventions in each crisis, like providing oxygen tanks to Indian hospitals during their covid surge) and don’t even get a huge amount of publicity because everybody else is also playing that same game (see: Elon Musk giving starlinks to Ukraine, etc).
This idea maybe works better if we are trying to respond to other crises elsewhere in the world that everyone else isn’t already going bananas over—like doing famine/disaster relief in countries that aren’t getting headlines, or doing pandemic early-response stuff before the world realizes it’s a problem, or having some kind of “Pivotal Action Fund” on hair-trigger alert to attempt a response to the potential emergence of transformative AGI capabilities. I’m not sure what specific approaches such a fund would use to reliably improve response times above the current situation (which is presumably “OpenPhil has the ability to spend a lot of money fast if they all start really freaking out about an emerging crisis”), but I’d certainly be interested to hear someone explore this idea.
I think the experience of the FRAPPE donor circle, which formed in response to the first COVID wave in spring 2020, is relevant. We found that it didn’t take that much money or time for us to be able to 1) get access to high-quality, often non-public information about the crisis and how it was unfolding and 2) find strong giving opportunities that not enough other people were paying attention to. I like Chris’s idea because the combination of high salience + fast-moving environment is often a good one for finding high-leverage opportunities, but it’s easier to intervene effectively and take on a leadership role when you have gone to the trouble of setting up some infrastructure for it in advance.
EA Crisis Fund:
Effective Altruism/X-risk
The EA Crisis Fund would respond to crisises around the world such as the current crisis of Ukranian refugees. This would help develop the capabilities of EA to respond to novel situations on short timelines, provide great publicity and build connections and credibility with government. This would increase the chance that EA would have a seat at the table in important discussions.
Potential Downside: It may be hard to respond to these crisises in a way that builds credibility without burning a lot of money.
I think if we are just jumping into the same highly-salient crises as everybody else (Ukraine today, Afghanistan yesterday, Black Lives Matter, Covid, etc), we burn a lot of money quickly at only middling effectiveness (even if we try to identify specific “most effective” interventions in each crisis, like providing oxygen tanks to Indian hospitals during their covid surge) and don’t even get a huge amount of publicity because everybody else is also playing that same game (see: Elon Musk giving starlinks to Ukraine, etc).
This idea maybe works better if we are trying to respond to other crises elsewhere in the world that everyone else isn’t already going bananas over—like doing famine/disaster relief in countries that aren’t getting headlines, or doing pandemic early-response stuff before the world realizes it’s a problem, or having some kind of “Pivotal Action Fund” on hair-trigger alert to attempt a response to the potential emergence of transformative AGI capabilities. I’m not sure what specific approaches such a fund would use to reliably improve response times above the current situation (which is presumably “OpenPhil has the ability to spend a lot of money fast if they all start really freaking out about an emerging crisis”), but I’d certainly be interested to hear someone explore this idea.
I think the experience of the FRAPPE donor circle, which formed in response to the first COVID wave in spring 2020, is relevant. We found that it didn’t take that much money or time for us to be able to 1) get access to high-quality, often non-public information about the crisis and how it was unfolding and 2) find strong giving opportunities that not enough other people were paying attention to. I like Chris’s idea because the combination of high salience + fast-moving environment is often a good one for finding high-leverage opportunities, but it’s easier to intervene effectively and take on a leadership role when you have gone to the trouble of setting up some infrastructure for it in advance.