One very important problem (that I don’t have the solution to) is that being “an EA funder” is not binary—all sorts of funders make grants to charities that would be considered EA (and “EA charity” is a fraught definition itself but let’s bracket that). It seems entirely plausible to me, nay perhaps probable (given that the Randomstas and evidence-based GHD predates EA) that the majority of “EA funding” is coming from grantmakers that aren’t being counted here. This would render any trends we see in the data in this post not reflective of what’s actgually happening with “EA funding”.
A bottom-up charity (or specific project or even grant) based method would probably be a lot better (although very hard and not your responsibility to create).
Anyway, meta is hard. Good work for creating this resource!
Thanks for bringing this up Aidan. I raised this topic in both of my versions of the Historical Funding post, and I remain interested in doing this properly if and when I get sufficient time and data. What I have found so far is (a) accessing the bottom-up data for ~all relevant charities seems to be much more difficult than I would have imagined, and (b) I’ve floated this project to a few people and the interest seemed lukewarm (probably mostly due to their sense of intractibility).
One very important problem (that I don’t have the solution to) is that being “an EA funder” is not binary—all sorts of funders make grants to charities that would be considered EA (and “EA charity” is a fraught definition itself but let’s bracket that). It seems entirely plausible to me, nay perhaps probable (given that the Randomstas and evidence-based GHD predates EA) that the majority of “EA funding” is coming from grantmakers that aren’t being counted here. This would render any trends we see in the data in this post not reflective of what’s actgually happening with “EA funding”.
A bottom-up charity (or specific project or even grant) based method would probably be a lot better (although very hard and not your responsibility to create).
Anyway, meta is hard. Good work for creating this resource!
Thanks for bringing this up Aidan. I raised this topic in both of my versions of the Historical Funding post, and I remain interested in doing this properly if and when I get sufficient time and data. What I have found so far is (a) accessing the bottom-up data for ~all relevant charities seems to be much more difficult than I would have imagined, and (b) I’ve floated this project to a few people and the interest seemed lukewarm (probably mostly due to their sense of intractibility).