Thanks for the post Luke… I was also rather perturbed at the language regarding the “funding overhang” and other implications that effective charities were adequately funded. The hundreds of millions in extreme poverty and countless deaths from preventable diseases speak otherwise.
What really frustrates me is that while EA has been very thoughtful and innovative at identifying opportunities where dollars have had the highest impact, it has put very little comparative thought into how to generate more funding. Some notable exceptions are your organization, GWWC, The Life You Can Save, and several other organizations, mostly oriented around motivating people to donate more.
But there are other ways to multiply donation funds.
For instance, Ribon has a system that can multiply donations by between 40-60% by essentially providing a free opportunity for people to direct a donation to an effective charity, which reliably, in aggregate, prompts people to contribute to the charity they directed the free money to.
And I am pretty confident that I have the damn solution to achieving the world envisioned by Natalie Cargill’s TED Talk, but the EA community has been largely disinterested in exploring it. Profit for Good, which is probably best explained and argued in my draft for my upcoming TEDx talk in late July, is plausibly a huge multiplier for philanthropic funds (if you are interested in helping me edit the draft or otherwise have feedback, DM and I can give you editing permission). Of course, it is possible that I am totally wrong, but the sensible response is not endless redteaming (to which I have yet to hear a particularly strong contention), but, rather, to assess the costs of empirically validating/invalidating promising solutions.
Institutions that promote effective giving have been shown to have compelling multiplier effects. However, we need to support new ideas regarding multiplying funds for effective charities if we want to create the world that we want to see. Currently, EA seems to support either interventions and cause areas that fall into categories that are already recognized as high impact, such as AI Safety, so it is great at exploiting opportunities its identified, but it has been less interested in exploration. Often we want the numbers when the most promising thing to do is spend money and effort discovering and revealing the numbers.
Thanks for the post Luke… I was also rather perturbed at the language regarding the “funding overhang” and other implications that effective charities were adequately funded. The hundreds of millions in extreme poverty and countless deaths from preventable diseases speak otherwise.
What really frustrates me is that while EA has been very thoughtful and innovative at identifying opportunities where dollars have had the highest impact, it has put very little comparative thought into how to generate more funding. Some notable exceptions are your organization, GWWC, The Life You Can Save, and several other organizations, mostly oriented around motivating people to donate more.
But there are other ways to multiply donation funds.
For instance, Ribon has a system that can multiply donations by between 40-60% by essentially providing a free opportunity for people to direct a donation to an effective charity, which reliably, in aggregate, prompts people to contribute to the charity they directed the free money to.
And I am pretty confident that I have the damn solution to achieving the world envisioned by Natalie Cargill’s TED Talk, but the EA community has been largely disinterested in exploring it. Profit for Good, which is probably best explained and argued in my draft for my upcoming TEDx talk in late July, is plausibly a huge multiplier for philanthropic funds (if you are interested in helping me edit the draft or otherwise have feedback, DM and I can give you editing permission). Of course, it is possible that I am totally wrong, but the sensible response is not endless redteaming (to which I have yet to hear a particularly strong contention), but, rather, to assess the costs of empirically validating/invalidating promising solutions.
Institutions that promote effective giving have been shown to have compelling multiplier effects. However, we need to support new ideas regarding multiplying funds for effective charities if we want to create the world that we want to see. Currently, EA seems to support either interventions and cause areas that fall into categories that are already recognized as high impact, such as AI Safety, so it is great at exploiting opportunities its identified, but it has been less interested in exploration. Often we want the numbers when the most promising thing to do is spend money and effort discovering and revealing the numbers.