Could you state what your role and involvement is with various charities, and what those charities do, to provide some context? E.g. you mention helping fortify health but I’m not super familiar with what they do or how you helped them.
Reading this, a worry I had is that new charities founded by would often by competing for the same pot of money from EA orgs and/or individual EAs. Do you think this is likely to be a problem? It seems the success of this strategy relies on Open Phil do a lot of the funding. If new EA charities instead raise money from ineffective charities (possible), or raise money from people who would not have donated (not that likely) then this isn’t a problem.
1) I hope to publish a post soon specifically going into the help I gave fortify health and what help I can give future charities, but I can clarify briefly here.
Charity Science Health—I was on the research team to pick the intervention + cofounded + worked full time in a co-ED position for the first 2 years of its existence. Effectively I was involved as much as one could be in a charity.
Fortify Health—I was on the research team to pick the intervention + connected the co-founders when one reached out to me + Gave them a seed grant for their first 6 months + helped them in a consulting role ~5 hours a week over those 6 months. Effectively I was like a highly involved board member.
2) I think this is a huge concern, I generally think EA charities should be aiming to be the highest impact charity in a given field. E.g. a lot of the value of CSH comes from the small chance we can be higher impact than AMF. If CSH for example fell between the effectiveness of GD and AMF, CSH would pretty aggressively try to seek funding outside of the EA community (including GW/OPP). This partly to do with “the last dollar spent” in poverty likely being pretty high impact (see this post on talent gaps http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1ok/ea_doesnt_have_a_talent_gap_different_causes_have/ for more details). In something like AR, given the funding situation I think the more important consideration would be whether a new charity has a good chance of beating the bottom 25% of charities funded by OPP/ACE.
A couple of comments:
Could you state what your role and involvement is with various charities, and what those charities do, to provide some context? E.g. you mention helping fortify health but I’m not super familiar with what they do or how you helped them.
Reading this, a worry I had is that new charities founded by would often by competing for the same pot of money from EA orgs and/or individual EAs. Do you think this is likely to be a problem? It seems the success of this strategy relies on Open Phil do a lot of the funding. If new EA charities instead raise money from ineffective charities (possible), or raise money from people who would not have donated (not that likely) then this isn’t a problem.
1) I hope to publish a post soon specifically going into the help I gave fortify health and what help I can give future charities, but I can clarify briefly here. Charity Science Health—I was on the research team to pick the intervention + cofounded + worked full time in a co-ED position for the first 2 years of its existence. Effectively I was involved as much as one could be in a charity. Fortify Health—I was on the research team to pick the intervention + connected the co-founders when one reached out to me + Gave them a seed grant for their first 6 months + helped them in a consulting role ~5 hours a week over those 6 months. Effectively I was like a highly involved board member.
2) I think this is a huge concern, I generally think EA charities should be aiming to be the highest impact charity in a given field. E.g. a lot of the value of CSH comes from the small chance we can be higher impact than AMF. If CSH for example fell between the effectiveness of GD and AMF, CSH would pretty aggressively try to seek funding outside of the EA community (including GW/OPP). This partly to do with “the last dollar spent” in poverty likely being pretty high impact (see this post on talent gaps http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1ok/ea_doesnt_have_a_talent_gap_different_causes_have/ for more details). In something like AR, given the funding situation I think the more important consideration would be whether a new charity has a good chance of beating the bottom 25% of charities funded by OPP/ACE.