One effect of the new funding, IMO, should be to push individual donors towards giving to up-and-coming causes that are currently adjacent to EA, rather than pumping money into the core areas of the movement. Putting lots of money into the already proven-out causes (like global health & development, AI safety research, etc) is what the big institutional funds will be best suited for, so individuals should seek to complement that by funding more experimental causes and interventions. (Of course big institutional funds also try to make small development grants to a range of up-and-coming charities. But I think it’s maybe not their comparative advantage vs individuals.)
This is potentially helpful in two ways:
As core areas with the highest expected value become more crowded with funding, the value of donating a marginal dollar to them goes down. Moving your donations to peripheral areas with lower-expected-value but less crowding could thus be the impact-maximizing thing to do on an individual level.
But more importantly, funding currently-peripheral causes is an experiment with positive externalities. Early funding can help a charity scale up to a point where it can better demonstrate benefits and room-for-more-funding. This in turn can help move it closer to the core of the movement and unlock another stream of big institutional dollars.
One effect of the new funding, IMO, should be to push individual donors towards giving to up-and-coming causes that are currently adjacent to EA, rather than pumping money into the core areas of the movement. Putting lots of money into the already proven-out causes (like global health & development, AI safety research, etc) is what the big institutional funds will be best suited for, so individuals should seek to complement that by funding more experimental causes and interventions. (Of course big institutional funds also try to make small development grants to a range of up-and-coming charities. But I think it’s maybe not their comparative advantage vs individuals.)
This is potentially helpful in two ways:
As core areas with the highest expected value become more crowded with funding, the value of donating a marginal dollar to them goes down. Moving your donations to peripheral areas with lower-expected-value but less crowding could thus be the impact-maximizing thing to do on an individual level.
But more importantly, funding currently-peripheral causes is an experiment with positive externalities. Early funding can help a charity scale up to a point where it can better demonstrate benefits and room-for-more-funding. This in turn can help move it closer to the core of the movement and unlock another stream of big institutional dollars.
I explain my reasoning more and list a few examples here, but by definition there are a lot of adjacent / non-core cause areas… here is a giant list of cause candidates with lots of EA-adjacent ideas which mostly aren’t yet receiving billion-dollar donor commitments.
See this post by Ben Todd for an overview of where current spending is going, by cause area.