Two approaches not mentioned in the article that I would advocate:
Giving to global priorities research.
You mentioned patient philanthropy (whether a few years or centuries), and one of the main motivations of waiting to give is to benefit from a more-developed landscape of EA thought. If the sophistication of EA thought is a key bottleneck, why not contribute today to global priorities research efforts, thus accelerating the pace of intellectual development that other patient philanthropists are waiting on?
I’m not confident that giving to global priorities research today beats waiting and giving later, since it’s unclear how much the intellectual development of the movement would be accelerated by additional cash, but it should be on the table of options you look at.
(To some extent, new ideas are generated naturally & for free as people think about problems, write comments on blog posts, etc. Meanwhile, there might be some ways where gaining experience simply takes calendar time. So perhaps only a small portion of the EA movement’s development could actually be accelerated with more global-priorities-research funding. On the other hand, a marginally more well-developed field would almost certainly pull in marginally more donations, so helping to kick-start the growth and (hopefully) eventual mainstreaming of EA while we are still in its early days could be very valuable. Anyways, if you are considering waiting for the EA community to learn more, I think it’s worth also considering being the change you want to see in the movement, and trying to accelerate the global-priorities-research timeline.)
Giving to various up-and-coming cause areas within EA.
Despite being a very nimble and open-minded movement actively searching for new cause areas, it seems to me that there is still some inertia and path-dependency when it comes to bringing new causes online alongside traditional, established EA focus areas. In my mind, this creates a kind of inefficiency, where new causes are recognized as “likely to become a bigger EA focus in the future”, but haven’t yet fully scaled up due in part to intellectual inertia within the movement. You could help accelerate this onboarding process by making grants to a portfolio of newer and less-familiar causes. For example:
The “global health and wellbeing” side of EA has for years been focused on GiveWell top charities. Recently, OpenPhil has expanded into new programs devoted to south asian air quality and global aid advocacy. These interventions seem like great ideas, which plausibly do even better than GiveWell’s recommendations, so it might be helpful to jump in early and help get projects in these areas off the ground.
Charter cities have been studied for their EA potential in several ways—reducing poverty directly via economic growth, providing a model for improved governance that might spread to nearby regions, and (most exciting from my longtermist EA perspective) acting as laboratories to experiment with new institutions, new policies, and new forms of government. As far as I know, charter city initiatives haven’t yet received large support from EA donors, but personally I think that ought to change.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I’m slightly pessimistic about the idea of actually doing patient philanthropy over centuries on a large scale, but the idea is nevertheless promising enough that we should help get some experiments up and running.
There are a whole host of promising, niche ideas within EA that might benefit from dedicated funding—although some of these areas are so small that there’s no organization ready and waiting to accept the cash. Research into things like wild-animal welfare or risks of stable totalitarianism seem like good things to investigate, as would be experiments with improved institution-design mechanisms (like prediction markets, quadratic funding, improved voting systems, etc) or civilizational resilience plans along the lines of ALLFED.
I’d note that the LTFF definitely invests money into some global priorities research, and some up-and-coming cause areas. Longview is likely to do so as well.
Right now we don’t seem to have many options to donate to funders that will re-fund to non-longtermist (a broadly defined longtermist), experimental work. In this particular case, Patrick is trying to donate to longtermist causes, so I think the funding options are acceptable, but I imagine this could be frustrating to non-longtermists.
Two approaches not mentioned in the article that I would advocate:
Giving to global priorities research. You mentioned patient philanthropy (whether a few years or centuries), and one of the main motivations of waiting to give is to benefit from a more-developed landscape of EA thought. If the sophistication of EA thought is a key bottleneck, why not contribute today to global priorities research efforts, thus accelerating the pace of intellectual development that other patient philanthropists are waiting on? I’m not confident that giving to global priorities research today beats waiting and giving later, since it’s unclear how much the intellectual development of the movement would be accelerated by additional cash, but it should be on the table of options you look at. (To some extent, new ideas are generated naturally & for free as people think about problems, write comments on blog posts, etc. Meanwhile, there might be some ways where gaining experience simply takes calendar time. So perhaps only a small portion of the EA movement’s development could actually be accelerated with more global-priorities-research funding. On the other hand, a marginally more well-developed field would almost certainly pull in marginally more donations, so helping to kick-start the growth and (hopefully) eventual mainstreaming of EA while we are still in its early days could be very valuable. Anyways, if you are considering waiting for the EA community to learn more, I think it’s worth also considering being the change you want to see in the movement, and trying to accelerate the global-priorities-research timeline.)
Giving to various up-and-coming cause areas within EA. Despite being a very nimble and open-minded movement actively searching for new cause areas, it seems to me that there is still some inertia and path-dependency when it comes to bringing new causes online alongside traditional, established EA focus areas. In my mind, this creates a kind of inefficiency, where new causes are recognized as “likely to become a bigger EA focus in the future”, but haven’t yet fully scaled up due in part to intellectual inertia within the movement. You could help accelerate this onboarding process by making grants to a portfolio of newer and less-familiar causes. For example:
The “global health and wellbeing” side of EA has for years been focused on GiveWell top charities. Recently, OpenPhil has expanded into new programs devoted to south asian air quality and global aid advocacy. These interventions seem like great ideas, which plausibly do even better than GiveWell’s recommendations, so it might be helpful to jump in early and help get projects in these areas off the ground.
Charter cities have been studied for their EA potential in several ways—reducing poverty directly via economic growth, providing a model for improved governance that might spread to nearby regions, and (most exciting from my longtermist EA perspective) acting as laboratories to experiment with new institutions, new policies, and new forms of government. As far as I know, charter city initiatives haven’t yet received large support from EA donors, but personally I think that ought to change.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I’m slightly pessimistic about the idea of actually doing patient philanthropy over centuries on a large scale, but the idea is nevertheless promising enough that we should help get some experiments up and running.
There are a whole host of promising, niche ideas within EA that might benefit from dedicated funding—although some of these areas are so small that there’s no organization ready and waiting to accept the cash. Research into things like wild-animal welfare or risks of stable totalitarianism seem like good things to investigate, as would be experiments with improved institution-design mechanisms (like prediction markets, quadratic funding, improved voting systems, etc) or civilizational resilience plans along the lines of ALLFED.
Thanks for the thoughts here!
I’d note that the LTFF definitely invests money into some global priorities research, and some up-and-coming cause areas. Longview is likely to do so as well.
Right now we don’t seem to have many options to donate to funders that will re-fund to non-longtermist (a broadly defined longtermist), experimental work. In this particular case, Patrick is trying to donate to longtermist causes, so I think the funding options are acceptable, but I imagine this could be frustrating to non-longtermists.