How do you time your donations? E.g. do you donate as soon as possible or do you do “patient philanthropy” and invest the money to donate later?
How do(did?) you decide how to allocate your donations across cause areas?
Given the current funding situation and talks about funding diversification, do you think that EtG is ~2x more valuable compared to when you wrote this, or is it closer to ~10x more valuable?
I put donations into a DAF immediately after the acquisition, for tax reasons, but I think have distributed only ~20% so far. I also calculated that it was more tax effective to cut my salary than to donate to CEA and have that money go to my salary, so I did that (and didn’t put some money into the DAF as a result).
I think my cause-area-level strategy is basically “donate to the things where I disagree with OpenPhil” which more or less cashes out to “animals + downside-focused”. (Additionally there are some things that I think OP finds hard to fund for non-impact reasons, e.g. I gave a small donation to a political campaign.)
I want to be annoying and say it really depends? E.g. if you are a lobbyist, my guess is that EtG looks worse this year than it did last year (because the opportunities to have direct impact through lobbying seem to have increased more than the funding has decreased). Some low confidence takes that admit a bunch of exceptions:
Farmed animal welfare: EtG maybe 2-5x more valuable, although a lot of FAW organizations that I’m excited about are for-profit, which makes this a little weird.
AI Safety: EtG 0.5-2x more valuable? My impression is that the influx of new AI safety donors has come close to offsetting FTX leaving, and opportunities for direct work seem stronger than a year ago. I’m not well calibrated on whether there’s more stuff to fund, and would guess that your answer to that question depends a lot on how you evaluate the well-funded labs.
Meta EA: EtG 2-10x more valuable? My impression is that the aforementioned AI safety donors think EA is weird/too indirect, so funding for meta stuff has been substantially hit. Hopefully as they gain more familiarity with the community they will change their mind, but right now it feels like things are not that well-funded.
GH&WB: 1.5-3x more valuable? It seems like OP might be scaling down their funding, though I don’t have a lot of insight here
How do you time your donations? E.g. do you donate as soon as possible or do you do “patient philanthropy” and invest the money to donate later?
How do(did?) you decide how to allocate your donations across cause areas?
Given the current funding situation and talks about funding diversification, do you think that EtG is ~2x more valuable compared to when you wrote this, or is it closer to ~10x more valuable?
Thanks for the questions!
I put donations into a DAF immediately after the acquisition, for tax reasons, but I think have distributed only ~20% so far. I also calculated that it was more tax effective to cut my salary than to donate to CEA and have that money go to my salary, so I did that (and didn’t put some money into the DAF as a result).
I think my cause-area-level strategy is basically “donate to the things where I disagree with OpenPhil” which more or less cashes out to “animals + downside-focused”. (Additionally there are some things that I think OP finds hard to fund for non-impact reasons, e.g. I gave a small donation to a political campaign.)
I want to be annoying and say it really depends? E.g. if you are a lobbyist, my guess is that EtG looks worse this year than it did last year (because the opportunities to have direct impact through lobbying seem to have increased more than the funding has decreased). Some low confidence takes that admit a bunch of exceptions:
Farmed animal welfare: EtG maybe 2-5x more valuable, although a lot of FAW organizations that I’m excited about are for-profit, which makes this a little weird.
AI Safety: EtG 0.5-2x more valuable? My impression is that the influx of new AI safety donors has come close to offsetting FTX leaving, and opportunities for direct work seem stronger than a year ago. I’m not well calibrated on whether there’s more stuff to fund, and would guess that your answer to that question depends a lot on how you evaluate the well-funded labs.
Meta EA: EtG 2-10x more valuable? My impression is that the aforementioned AI safety donors think EA is weird/too indirect, so funding for meta stuff has been substantially hit. Hopefully as they gain more familiarity with the community they will change their mind, but right now it feels like things are not that well-funded.
GH&WB: 1.5-3x more valuable? It seems like OP might be scaling down their funding, though I don’t have a lot of insight here
3. is such a great answer, thank you!