TL;DR: I think the main reason is the same reason we arenât donating to them: we think there are even more promising projects in terms of the effectiveness of a marginal $, and we are extremely funding constrained. I strongly agree with Elizabeth that all these projects (and many others) deserve more money.
Keeping in mind that I havenât researched any of the projects, and Iâm definitely not an expert in grantmaking; I personally think that âthe theory of change seems valuable, and worse projects are regularly fundedâ is not the right bar to estimate the relative value of a marginal dollar, as it doesnât take into account funding-gaps, costs, and actual results achieved.
As a data point on the perspective of a mostly uninformed effectiveness-oriented small donor, hereâs why I personally havenât donated to these projects in 2023, starting from the 2 you mention.
Iâm not writing this because I think they are good reasons to fund other projects, but as a potentially interesting data-point in the psychology of an uninformed giver.
ALLFED:
Their theory of change seems really cool, but research organizations seem very hard to evaluate as a non-expert. I think 3 things all need to go right for research to be impactful:
The research needs to find âsurprisingâ/âânewâ impactful interventions (or show that existing top interventions are surprisingly less cost-effective)
The research needs to be reliable and generally high quality
The research needs to be influential and decision-relevant for the right actors.
Itâs really hard to evaluate each of the three as a non-expert. I would also be surprised if this was particularly neglected, as ALLFED is very famous in EA, and Denkenberger seems to have a good network. I also donât know what more funding would lead to, and their track record is not clear to me after >6 years (but that is very much my ignorance; and because evaluating research is hard)
Theyâre possibly my favourite EA org (which is saying a lot; the bar is very high). I recommended allocating $50k to CE when I won a donor lottery. But because theyâre so obviously cost-effective, if they ever have a funding need, I imagine tons of us would be really eager to jump in and help fill it. Including e.g. the EAIF. So, I personally would consider a donation to CE as counterfactually ~similar to a donation to the EAIF.
Regarding CE-incubated projects, I do donate a bit to them, but I personally believe that some of the medium-large donors in the CE seed network are very thoughtful and experienced grantmakers. So, I donât expect the unfunded projects to be the most promising CE projects. Some projects like Healthier Hens do scale down due to lack of funding after some time, but I think a main reason in that case was that some proposed interventions turned out to not work or cost more than they expected. See their impact estimates.
Faunalytics:
They are super well known and have been funded by OpenPhil and the EA Animal Welfare Fund for specific projects, I defer to them. While they have been a ACE recommended charity for 8 years, I donât know if the marginal dollar has more impact there compared to the other extremely impressive animal orgs.
Exotic Tofu:
It seems really hard to evaluate, Elizabeth mentions some issues, but in general my very uninformed opinion is that if it wouldnât work as a for-profit it might be less promising as a non-profit compared to other (exceptional) animal welfare orgs.
Impact Certificates:
I think the first results werenât promising, and I fear itâs mostly about predicting the judgesâ scores since itâs rare to have good metrics and evaluations. That said, Manifund seems cool, and I made a $12 offer for Legal Impact for Chickens to try it out.[1] Since you donate to them and have relevant specific expertise, you might have alpha here and it might be worth checking out
Edit: see the object-level response from Ozzie; the above is somewhat wrong and I expect other points about other orgs to be wrong in similar ways
Community Building:
Iâm personally unsure about the value of non-impact-oriented community building. I see a lot of events like âEA Karaoke Nightâ, which I think are great but:
Iâm not sure theyâre the most cost-effective way to mitigate burnout
I think there are very big downsides in encouraging people to rely on âEAâ for both social and economic support
I worry that âEAâ is getting increasingly defined in terms of social ties instead of impact-focus, and that makes us less impactful and optimize for the wrong things (hopefully, Iâll write a post soon about this. Basically, I find it suboptimal that someone who doesnât change their career, donate, or volunteer, but goes to EA social events, is sometimes considered closer to the quintessential âEAâ compared to e.g. Bill Gates)
Independent grant-funded researchers:
See ALLFED above for why itâs hard for me to evaluate research projects, but mostly I think this obviously depends a lot on the researcher. But I think the point is about better funding methodology/âinfrastructure and not just more funding.
Lightcone:
I hear conflicting things about the dynamics there (the point about âthe bay area communityâ). Iâm very far from the Bay Area, and I think projects there are really expensive compared to other great projects. I also thought they had less of a funding need nowadays, but again I know very little.
Please donât update much on the above in your decisions on which projects to fund. I know almost nothing about most of the projects above and Iâm probably wrong. I also trust grantmakers and other donors have much more information, experience, and grantmaking skills; and that they have thought much more about each of the orgs mentioned. This is just meant to be an answer to âDoes anyone have a good explanation for the praise-funding mismatch?â that basically is a bunch of guessed examples for: âmany things can be very praise-worthy without being a great funding opportunity for many donorsâ
But I really donât expect to have more information than the AWF on this, and I think theyâll be the judge, so rationally, I should probably just have donated the money to the AWF. I think Iâm just not the target audience for this.
Weâve spent a lot of time at blog posts /â research, and other projects, as well as Squiggle Hub. (Though in the last year especially, weâve focused on Squiggle)
Regarding users, Iâd agree itâs not as many as I would have liked, but think we are having some. If you look through the Squiggle Tag, youâll see several EA groups who have used Squiggle.
Weâve been working with a few EA organizations on Squiggle setups that are mostly private.
Of course! In general Iâm happy for people to make quick best-guess evaluations openlyâin part, that helps others here correct things when there might be some obvious mistakes. :)
For many CE-incubated charities, the obvious counterfactual donation would be to GiveWell top charities, and thatâs a really high bar.
I consider the possibility that a lot of ALLFEDâs potential value proposition comes from a low probability of saving hundreds of millions to billions of lives in scenarios that would counterfactually neither lead to extinction nor produce major continuing effects thousands of years down the road.
If that is so, it is plausible that this kind of value proposition may not be particularly well suited to many neartermist donors (for whom the chain of contingencies leading to impact may be too speculative for their comfort level) or to many strong longtermist donors (for whom the effects thousands to millions of years down the road may be weaker than for other options seen as mitigating extinction risk more).
If you had a moral parliament of 50 neartermists & 50 longtermists that could fund only one organization (and by a 2â3 majority vote), one with this kind of potential impact model might do very well!
For many CE-incubated charities, the obvious counterfactual donation would be to GiveWell top charities, and thatâs a really high bar.
I think this is right and important. Possible additional layer: some donors are more comfortable with experimental or hits based giving than others. Those people disproportionately go into x-risk. The donors remaining in global poverty/âhealth are both more adverse to uncertainty and have options to avoid it (both objectively, and vibe-wise)
I really agree with the first point, and the really high bar is the main reason all of these projects have room for more funding.
I somewhat disagree with the second point: my impression is that many donors are interested in mitigating non-existential global catastrophic risks (e.g. natural pandemics, climate change), but I donât have much data to support this.
I donât think many donors are interested in mitigating non-existential global catastrophic risks is necessarily inconsistent with the potential explanation for why organizations like ALLFED may get substantially more public praise than funding. Itâs plausible to me that an org in that position might be unusually good at rating highly on many donorsâ charts, without being unusually good at rating at the very top of the donorsâ lists:
Thereâs no real limit on how many orgs one can praise, and preventing non-existential GCRs may win enough points on donorsâ scoresheets to receive praise from the two groups I described above (focused neartermists and focused longtermists) in addition to its actual donors.
However, many small/âmid-size donors may fund only their very top donation opportunities (e.g., top two, top five, etc.)
TL;DR: I think the main reason is the same reason we arenât donating to them: we think there are even more promising projects in terms of the effectiveness of a marginal $, and we are extremely funding constrained. I strongly agree with Elizabeth that all these projects (and many others) deserve more money.
Keeping in mind that I havenât researched any of the projects, and Iâm definitely not an expert in grantmaking; I personally think that âthe theory of change seems valuable, and worse projects are regularly fundedâ is not the right bar to estimate the relative value of a marginal dollar, as it doesnât take into account funding-gaps, costs, and actual results achieved.
As a data point on the perspective of a mostly uninformed effectiveness-oriented small donor, hereâs why I personally havenât donated to these projects in 2023, starting from the 2 you mention.
Iâm not writing this because I think they are good reasons to fund other projects, but as a potentially interesting data-point in the psychology of an uninformed giver.
ALLFED:
Their theory of change seems really cool, but research organizations seem very hard to evaluate as a non-expert. I think 3 things all need to go right for research to be impactful:
The research needs to find âsurprisingâ/âânewâ impactful interventions (or show that existing top interventions are surprisingly less cost-effective)
The research needs to be reliable and generally high quality
The research needs to be influential and decision-relevant for the right actors.
Itâs really hard to evaluate each of the three as a non-expert. I would also be surprised if this was particularly neglected, as ALLFED is very famous in EA, and Denkenberger seems to have a good network. I also donât know what more funding would lead to, and their track record is not clear to me after >6 years (but that is very much my ignorance; and because evaluating research is hard)
Charity Entrepreneurship/âAmbitious Impact:
Theyâre possibly my favourite EA org (which is saying a lot; the bar is very high). I recommended allocating $50k to CE when I won a donor lottery. But because theyâre so obviously cost-effective, if they ever have a funding need, I imagine tons of us would be really eager to jump in and help fill it. Including e.g. the EAIF. So, I personally would consider a donation to CE as counterfactually ~similar to a donation to the EAIF.
Regarding CE-incubated projects, I do donate a bit to them, but I personally believe that some of the medium-large donors in the CE seed network are very thoughtful and experienced grantmakers. So, I donât expect the unfunded projects to be the most promising CE projects. Some projects like Healthier Hens do scale down due to lack of funding after some time, but I think a main reason in that case was that some proposed interventions turned out to not work or cost more than they expected. See their impact estimates.
Faunalytics:
They are super well known and have been funded by OpenPhil and the EA Animal Welfare Fund for specific projects, I defer to them. While they have been a ACE recommended charity for 8 years, I donât know if the marginal dollar has more impact there compared to the other extremely impressive animal orgs.
Exotic Tofu:
It seems really hard to evaluate, Elizabeth mentions some issues, but in general my very uninformed opinion is that if it wouldnât work as a for-profit it might be less promising as a non-profit compared to other (exceptional) animal welfare orgs.
Impact Certificates:
I think the first results werenât promising, and I fear itâs mostly about predicting the judgesâ scores since itâs rare to have good metrics and evaluations. That said, Manifund seems cool, and I made a $12 offer for Legal Impact for Chickens to try it out.[1] Since you donate to them and have relevant specific expertise, you might have alpha here and it might be worth checking out
QURI:
My understanding is that most of their focus in the past few years has been building a new programming language. While technically very impressive, I donât fully understand the value proposition and after four years they donât seem to have a lot of users. The previous QURI project www.foretold.io didnât seem to have worked out, which is a small negative update. Iâm personally more optimistic about projects like carlo.app and I like that itâs for-profit.
Edit: see the object-level response from Ozzie; the above is somewhat wrong and I expect other points about other orgs to be wrong in similar ways
Community Building:
Iâm personally unsure about the value of non-impact-oriented community building. I see a lot of events like âEA Karaoke Nightâ, which I think are great but:
Iâm not sure theyâre the most cost-effective way to mitigate burnout
I think there are very big downsides in encouraging people to rely on âEAâ for both social and economic support
I worry that âEAâ is getting increasingly defined in terms of social ties instead of impact-focus, and that makes us less impactful and optimize for the wrong things (hopefully, Iâll write a post soon about this. Basically, I find it suboptimal that someone who doesnât change their career, donate, or volunteer, but goes to EA social events, is sometimes considered closer to the quintessential âEAâ compared to e.g. Bill Gates)
Independent grant-funded researchers:
See ALLFED above for why itâs hard for me to evaluate research projects, but mostly I think this obviously depends a lot on the researcher. But I think the point is about better funding methodology/âinfrastructure and not just more funding.
Lightcone:
I hear conflicting things about the dynamics there (the point about âthe bay area communityâ). Iâm very far from the Bay Area, and I think projects there are really expensive compared to other great projects. I also thought they had less of a funding need nowadays, but again I know very little.
Please donât update much on the above in your decisions on which projects to fund. I know almost nothing about most of the projects above and Iâm probably wrong. I also trust grantmakers and other donors have much more information, experience, and grantmaking skills; and that they have thought much more about each of the orgs mentioned. This is just meant to be an answer to âDoes anyone have a good explanation for the praise-funding mismatch?â that basically is a bunch of guessed examples for: âmany things can be very praise-worthy without being a great funding opportunity for many donorsâ
But I really donât expect to have more information than the AWF on this, and I think theyâll be the judge, so rationally, I should probably just have donated the money to the AWF. I think Iâm just not the target audience for this.
Quick notes on your QURI section:
âafter four years they donât seem to have a lot of usersâ â I think itâs more fair to say this has been about 2 years. If you look at the commit history you can see that there was very little development for the first two years of that time.
https://ââgithub.com/ââquantified-uncertainty/ââsquiggle/ââgraphs/ââcontributors
Weâve spent a lot of time at blog posts /â research, and other projects, as well as Squiggle Hub. (Though in the last year especially, weâve focused on Squiggle)
Regarding users, Iâd agree itâs not as many as I would have liked, but think we are having some. If you look through the Squiggle Tag, youâll see several EA groups who have used Squiggle.
Weâve been working with a few EA organizations on Squiggle setups that are mostly private.
I think for-profits have their space, but I also think that nonprofits and open-source/âopen organizations have a lot of benefits.
Thank you for the context! Useful example of why itâs not trivial to evaluate projects without looking into the details
Of course! In general Iâm happy for people to make quick best-guess evaluations openlyâin part, that helps others here correct things when there might be some obvious mistakes. :)
My thoughts were:
For many CE-incubated charities, the obvious counterfactual donation would be to GiveWell top charities, and thatâs a really high bar.
I consider the possibility that a lot of ALLFEDâs potential value proposition comes from a low probability of saving hundreds of millions to billions of lives in scenarios that would counterfactually neither lead to extinction nor produce major continuing effects thousands of years down the road.
If that is so, it is plausible that this kind of value proposition may not be particularly well suited to many neartermist donors (for whom the chain of contingencies leading to impact may be too speculative for their comfort level) or to many strong longtermist donors (for whom the effects thousands to millions of years down the road may be weaker than for other options seen as mitigating extinction risk more).
If you had a moral parliament of 50 neartermists & 50 longtermists that could fund only one organization (and by a 2â3 majority vote), one with this kind of potential impact model might do very well!
I think this is right and important. Possible additional layer: some donors are more comfortable with experimental or hits based giving than others. Those people disproportionately go into x-risk. The donors remaining in global poverty/âhealth are both more adverse to uncertainty and have options to avoid it (both objectively, and vibe-wise)
I really agree with the first point, and the really high bar is the main reason all of these projects have room for more funding.
I somewhat disagree with the second point: my impression is that many donors are interested in mitigating non-existential global catastrophic risks (e.g. natural pandemics, climate change), but I donât have much data to support this.
I donât think many donors are interested in mitigating non-existential global catastrophic risks is necessarily inconsistent with the potential explanation for why organizations like ALLFED may get substantially more public praise than funding. Itâs plausible to me that an org in that position might be unusually good at rating highly on many donorsâ charts, without being unusually good at rating at the very top of the donorsâ lists:
Thereâs no real limit on how many orgs one can praise, and preventing non-existential GCRs may win enough points on donorsâ scoresheets to receive praise from the two groups I described above (focused neartermists and focused longtermists) in addition to its actual donors.
However, many small/âmid-size donors may fund only their very top donation opportunities (e.g., top two, top five, etc.)