Donation Election Discussion Thread
A place to explain your preferences, discuss them, and maybe change your mind.
Some comments on this thread are cross-posted from a text box which appears when you reach the end of the voting process, but everyone is welcome to post here whenever.
You can read about all the candidates here.
I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
Since founding and leaving WAI, I’ve just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can’t do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.
Incidentally, I work on AI alignment and strongly agree with your points here, especially “Wild animal welfare is downstream (upstream, I think you mean?) from ~every other cause area”
I also think Wild Animal Initiative R&D may eventually wind up being extremely impactful for AI alignment.
Since it’s so unbelievably neglected and potentially high impact, I view it as a fairly high EV neglected approach that could contribute enormously to AI alignment.
Additionally, and a bit more out there, but the more we invest in this today, the better it may be for us in acausal trade with future intelligences that we’d want to prioritize our wellbeing too.
Nice! And yeah, I shouldn’t have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn’t just a problem for WAI — it’s a problem for everyone.
I ranked the Shrimp Welfare Project 1st because I think their Humane Slaughter Initiative is the most cost-effective intervention around.
Though I’ve made some comments that disagree with some of Vasco’s specific numbers, I agree that SWP is extraordinarily effective and ranked them a close second after Arthropoda!
+1 for doing a Fermi estimate, I would like to see more of those.
I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).
With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropoda’s project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWP’s operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropoda’s projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since they’re more existential. But all of this is held loosely and I’m very open to counterarguments.
I also ranked Arthropoda first! I’m quite bullish on the value of information in the animal welfare space, and think that on the current margin they would do extremely valuable work.
Organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project or the Fish Welfare Initiative have high utilitarian returns, but are difficult to sell to people outside of EA, so it makes sense for dollars coming directly from the core of the community to go to these niche but highly effective cause areas.
To what extent are people voting in a manner that is consistent / not consistent with their past or intended future personal donations? I notice that my current ranking doesn’t really align with the last time I handed out donations of my own money (end of 2023, for tax reasons). Some of that may reflect changed priorities and development over the past year, but I doubt all of it does.
To the extent that some of us have different impulses when handing out my own money versus (largely) other people’s money, how might we disentangle the extent to which each set of impulses is correct? (For a third data point, my votes in the Equal Hands pilot have been somewhere between these two.)
I think the difference may largely come down to psychological factors, such as:
I am probably more conservative with my own donations than in voting for where to send pooled donations.
I sometimes want to give most people at least half a loaf, and this tendency feels more realizable when spending other people’s money because I am thinking more at a group level. In contrast, I don’t have enough in the pot to give a meaningful amount of money to a dozen different orgs, and still have most of my money for those I think most important to fund.
Some of the difference in votes vs. personal donations comes from the tax deductible status of donations. Donations to (for example) Arthropoda are only tax-deductible in the USA, meaning that many potential donors living in other countries might donate elsewhere. In a donor lottery this is no longer a concern.
Other factors like currency conversion fees when donating to charities that only take donations in dollars may have similar effects.
Kind of a funny selection effect going on here here where if you pick sufficiently promising / legible / successful orgs (like Against Malaria Foundation), isn’t that just funging against OpenPhil funding? This leads me to want to upweight new and not-yet-proven orgs (like the several new AIM-incubated charities), plus things like PauseAI and Wild Animal Initiative that OpenPhil feels they can’t fund for political reasons. (Same argument would apply for invertebrate welfare, but I personally don’t really believe in invertebrate welfare. Sorry!)
I’m also somewhat saddened by the inevitable popularity-contest nature of the vote; I feel like people are picking orgs they’ve heard of and picking orgs that match their personal cause-prioritization “team” (global health vs x-risk vs animals). I like the idea that EA should be experimental and exploratory, so (although I am a longtermist myself), I tried to further upweight some really interesting new cause areas that I just learned about while reading these various posts:
- Accion Transformadora’s crime-reduction stuff seems like a promising new space to explore for potential effective interventions in medium-income countries.
- One Acre Fund is potentially neat, I’m into the idea of economic-growth-boosting interventions and this might be a good one.
- It’s neat that Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos is doing a bunch of cool x-risk-related projects throughout latin america; their nuclear-winter-resilience-planning stuff in Argentina and Brazil seems like a particularly well-placed bit of local lobbying/activism.
But alas, there can only be three top-three winners, so I ultimately spent my top votes on Team Popular Longtermist Stuff (Nucleic Acid Observatory, PauseAI, MATS) in the hopes that one of them, probably PauseAI, would become a winner.
(longtermist stuff)
1. Nucleic Acid Observatory
2. Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos
3. PauseAI
4. MATS
(interesting stuff in more niche cause areas, which i sadly doubt can actually win)
5. Accion Transformadora
6. One Acre Fund
7. Unjournal
(if longtermism loses across the board, I prefer wild animal welfare to invertebrate welfare)
8. Wild Animal Inititative
9. Faunalytics
We’ve just resolved some launch issues with the voting portal. The portal was limited to 30 candidates, so a randomised group of organisations was missing for each voter.
If you’ve already voted, consider re-voting with a full list of candidates.
Given that OP is not funding WAW and invertebrate welfare, I’ve selected Wild Animal Initiative and the Arthropoda Foundation as my top votes. SWP was also a high vote but slightly less because I’m more bullish on the VOI of Wild Animal initiative and Arthropoda foundation
That said, I’m guilty of “not enough time to research the orgs”. There’s a reasonably high chance (~75%) that I would change these top votes with more reading, probably by prioritising less well-known orgs.
(Edited at 19:35 UTC-5 as I misunderstood how the voting system works)
My top 10 right now look something like:
1. The Midas Project
2. EA Animal Welfare Fund
3. Rethink Priorities
4. MATS Research
5. Shrimp Welfare Project
6. Apart Research
7. Legal Impact for Chickens
8. PauseAI
9. Wild Animal Initiative
10. High Impact Professionals
I ranked my organization, The Midas Project, first on my ballot. I don’t think we have a stronger track record than many of the organizations in this election (and I expect the winners will be a few familiar top contenders like Rethink Priorities, who certainly deserve to be there), but I do think the election will undervalue our project due to general information asymmetries and most of our value being speculative/heavy-tailed. This seems in line with the tactical voting suggestion, but it does feel a bit icky/full of hubris.
Also, in making this list, I realized that I favored large orgs whose work I’m familiar with, and most skipped over small orgs who I know little about (including ones that made posts for marginal funding week that I just haven’t read). This was a funny feeling because (as mentioned) I run a small org that I expect many people don’t know about and will skip over.
One way people can counteract this would be, in making your selection, choose 1-2 orgs you’ve never heard of at random, do a deep dive on them, and place them somewhere in your rankings (even at the bottom if you aren’t excited about them). With enough people doing this, there should be enough coverage of small orgs for the results of the election to be a bit more informative, at least in terms of how smaller orgs compare to each other.
One’s second, third, etc. choices would only come into play when/if their first choice is eliminated by the IRV system. Although there could be some circumstances in which voting solely for one’s #1 choice could be tactically wise, I believe they are rather narrow and would only be knowable in the last day or two.
Is there any scenario where only voting for your first choice would be wise? I don’t think there is any downside to listing a second choice, assuming that you do actually prefer that second choice over any of the other options should your first choice be eliminated.
There may not be, I don’t feel I’ve exhausted the list of possibilities so hedged my comment a bit.
I can envision worlds in which supporters of one’s second choice would have an incentive to knock your first choice out—so the vote would flow to their supported charity instead. I suppose those people could write a comment critical of your first choice to try to get it eliminated before theirs? That seems awfully speculative, only seems a plausible attack if one knows most/all of the voting orders for people who ranked the org first. Especially since only the top three are in the money and changing the order of elimination ordinarily won’t change the top three.
Ooh interesting. Thanks for pointing this out, I’m revising my ballot now.
The current leaders, going into the final stretch… are the EA Animal Welfare Fund, The Shrimp Welfare Project, and Rethink Priorities.
The Against Malaria Foundation, Pause AI US, Wild Animal Initiative and MATS are runners up, with AMF being particularly close to getting into the top three.
You can expand the leaderboard at any time to see the runners up.
Now is the time to make the case for the runners up you think should be more highly ranked…
This isn’t an institutional take from CEA, but I’m personally a bit surprised that the Arthropoda Foundation isn’t up there, since the Shrimp Welfare Project is. They seem to appeal to the same worldview to me. If you put SWP near the top of your list, but didn’t vote for Arthropoda, why is that?
I don’t think that is surprising where only one’s first-place vote among non-eliminated orgs counts. The screenshots below suggest that when Arthropoda is eliminated, about half of its votes go to SWP, with most of the rest going to WAI and RP. From public information, we don’t know where SWP votes would go if it were eliminated, but it’s plausible that many would go to Arthropoda if it were still in the race.
Moreover, at the time of Arthropoda’s elimination, it was behind SWP 46-31, so while there’s evidence of a clear rank ordering preference among the electorate I would not call it overwhelming.
Thanks Jason! I’m guessing a fairly large part of this is name recognition, so maybe there aren’t unwritten takes to extract here.
This also makes me think we can make the UI clearer next year- it’d have been easier to see this effect if I could also click a button to “eliminate one candidate”.
We did have some more fancy schemes where chunks of votes would be visually redistributed, but it would have taken too long.
Time for the strategic voting to begin!
One observation is that RP has a strategic advantage here as a cross-cause org where voters may be unsure which cause area the marginal funding will benefit. This makes it a potentially attractive second-choice option when the top votegetter in a cause area is eliminated. Compare, for instance, its current significant lead in the top-3 with the top-5 results (with AMF and PauseAI present as the last orgs standing in global health and x-risk).
Rules are rules and should be followed, but I think the top-5 better represents the will of the electorate than the top-3. (There are also a non-trivial number of voters who did not indicate a preference in the top-3 but who did in the top-5 or at least top-8.)
Has anyone changed their minds because of the results/ for any other reason during this election so far?
PS- I’m open to replies along the lines of “no I haven’t changed my mind, and this sort of thing wouldn’t because...”
Personally I found it really helpful to listen through the Spotify playlist of Marginal Funding Week posts during a recent flight. (Note that unfortunately many of the candidates aren’t in that playlist, apologies!)
In particular, I found @Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s PauseAI post surprisingly convincing, given that I am generally a bit skeptical of pausing AI as a strategy for reducing risk. I’m also sympathetic to the argument that the EA Forum should allocate our money to charities that are harder to fundraise for elsewhere, and PauseAI scores well there. So I’ve made PauseAI my top choice, which I didn’t spend too much time debating since my one vote isn’t currently the winning one. I may revisit my vote if that changes.
In general I recommend listening to the Spotify playlist (or even reading through all the Marginal Funding Week posts/comments if you’re extra virtuous!) — I found the experience both inspiring (hearing about all the work people are doing to improve the world) and sad (realizing how much more money we need to do all these things).
As noted in this comment, my willingness to update on the results themselves is limited by concerns that the results could be significantly influenced by different levels of get-out-the-vote-efforts (which I would consider noise). Unless I can find a way to minimize that potential noise source, I expect to change my mind insofar as promoting a few organizations that ranked higher than expected to my consider/research list for early 2025 donations—but I won’t assign significant weight per se to the vote totals in my final decisions.
I think the main reason to update one’s vote based on the results is if you voted number 1 for a charity that is first or second, but a charity you also quite like is e.g. fourth or fifth, then strategically switching to rank the latter first would make sense. But this was not the case for me.
Overall my guess is the live vote tallies adds to the excitement but doesn’t actually contribute much epistemically?
I’d like to see far more of EA’s budget be going towards animal welfare, in particular to the most numerous and neglected beings, invertebrates. This puts Arthropoda above SWP at the top since the former is more neglected and urgent. After that, the EA AWF has good insight to the EAA movement’s needs and Rethink Priorities functions as a public good for the EA community and I think have shown themselves to be worthy of having more discretion in their budget given their incredibly impressive track record.
Apart from that, I find the case for FWI and WAI and LIC to be convincing. I’m a bit unsure of LIC’s impact and thus it ranks behind FWI and WAI.
I still need to do more research so my votes will probably change, but I’m generally focusing on what I think are ongoing, large scale moral catastrophes—ie. factory farming and wild animal suffering.
After some reading I moved my votes around slightly as I can’t rationally justify not giving more weight to potential invertebrate suffering + these causes likely won’t attract too many philanthropists from outside EA.
Here’s my longtermist, AI focused list. I really haven’t done my research, e.g. I read zero marginal funding posts. This is mostly a vote for MATS.
I would have ranked The Midas Project around 5 but it wasn’t an option.
Hey Zach- Midas Project should be visible to you now!
~All of the EV from the donation election probably comes from nudging OpenPhil toward the realization that they’re pretty dramatically out of line with “consensus EA” in continuing to give most marginal dollars to global health. If this was explicitly thought through, brilliant.
(See this comment for sourcing and context on the table, which was my attempt to categorize all OP grants not too long ago)
hmm not sure it’s fair to make claims about what “consensus EA” believes based on the donation election honestly
“consensus EA” seems like it is likely to be something other than “people who are on the Forum between Nov 18 and Dec 3″
I only pay attention to climate, but as a cause area it tends to be more prominent in “EA-wide” surveys/giving than it is among the most highly-engaged EAs (Forum readers)[1]
people are literally voting based on what OP is not funding
I didn’t even vote for GG bc I know it won’t win, but it does warm my cold dead heart that four whole people did
Given that Aaron’s point was about “marginal dollars,” this doesn’t strike me as a major reason against it. RP is currently #1. EA Animal Welfare Fund is currently #2, and I don’t think it the kinds of work it funds are necessarily things OP won’t fund.
You should vote for your honest preference for data-gathering purposes (and because it’s epistemically good for your cold dead heart!). Under the IRV system, your vote will be transferred to your next-highest-ranked charity once GG is eliminated, so it is not a “wasted vote” by any means.
I think this is only partially true. Since RP gets significant funding from OP, my understanding based on their communications is that they tend to often use unrestricted funding specifically in areas that can’t get funding for from OP. And similarly, AWF has specifically highlighted funding areas that OP won’t as one of their top areas.
hahaha no I know, more seriously I just don’t want to vote for a marginal funding post that I wrote! feels like it’s not the point of the endeavor, I’d rather support other orgs in the community in a small way~
I think those are both good points. In my experience, different subsets of EA can vary a lot in terms of cause prioritization. Though I’m guessing that Aaron means something slightly different than you do when he says “consensus EA”.
hi sarah! yeah i think that’s true as well. i think in my head it was already obvious and therefore not realization-worthy that engaged EAs believe AW is underfunded, but i also probably talk to people with this belief disproportionately often due to the climate/AW funding overlap bc i am learning elsewhere on the internet that people think this is weird
I’d update significantly more in that direction if the final outcomes for the subset of voters with over X karma (1000? 2000? I dunno) were similar to the current all-voter data.
I say that not because I think only medium-plus karma voters have value, but because it’s the cleanest way I can think of to mitigate the risk that the results have been affected by off-Forum advocacy and organizing. Those efforts have been blessed by the mods within certain bounds, but the effects of superior get-out-the-vote efforts are noise insofar as determining what the “consensus EA” is, and the resulting electorate may be rather unrepresentative. In contrast, the set of medium-plus karma voters seems more like to be representative of the broader community’s thinking regarding cause areas. (If there are other voter characteristics that could be analyzed and would be expected to be broadly representative, those would be worth looking at too.)
For example, it seemed fairly clear to me that animal-advocacy folks were significantly more on the ball in claiming funds during Manifund’s EA Community Choice event than other folks. This makes sense given how funding constrained animal advocacy is. So the possibility that something similar could be going on here caps how much I’d be willing to update on the current data.
I’m not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it’s higher than Manifund’s event was) — it’s quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.
I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.
Not really—I think the creation-date rule mostly addresses a somewhat different concern, that of ringers (people who are not really part of the Forum community but join for the primary purpose of voting). This would be—to use an analogy from where I grew up—the rough equivalent of people who didn’t go to a particular church showing up to play for that church’s softball team (this happened, by the way).
My concern here is more that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts may make the population that voted significantly unrepresentative of the Forum population as a whole. In contrast to ringers, those voters are not illegitimate or shady. However, the results would be slanted in favor of the organizations and cause areas that spent energy on GOTV efforts. So in a sense, I worry that if I defer too much to the results, I am in a sense deferring to organizational decisions on whether to conduct GOTV efforts rather than a representative / unbiased read of the broader community’s opinion.
I voted for promising early-stage orgs, as they seem often more funding-constrained and more cost-effective on the margin than established organizations (who have a much easier time fundraising). More speculative, but seemed worth the risk. I like this format, thanks for organizing this!
I made a shortlist of around 15 from a quick scan and then read more in detail for those (and discussing my biggest concerns for any that seemed interesting with Claude). I want to say that the process of reading many funding requests next to each other was interesting and, dare I say, almost fun!
I’m voting for charities that have the biggest room for funding considering the impact the want to make. I am also prioritising meta charities, because they are less likely to receive votes due to most people supporting direct work, while meta charities are important for us to grow as a community.
Pause AI has been neglected in funding from eg Open Philanthropy
I think work on animals is comparatively neglected, due to the high numbers of individuals of bad conditions. More specifically, the smaller the animals, the more numerous and neglected they tend to be, which leads to underfunding.
I voted for mainly animal welfare/rights charities first, particularly ones which focused on highly neglected, large-scale populations like insects, shrimps, and fishes. I also voted highly for PauseAI because I believe in creating greater public pressure to slow AI progress and shifting the Overton Window, even if I am agnostic about pausing AI progress itself. After these, I voted for some of the meta/mixed organizations which I thought were especially promising, including Rethink Priorities and the Unjournal. Then I voted for mental health/resilience interventions. Then I voted for GCR initiatives. I did not vote for any human welfare interventions which I expected to cause net harm to animals. I did not vote for any other AI organizations because I did not trust that they were sufficiently decelerationist.
Please consider using
starscore (or approval) voting next year instead of RCVYes, the Instant-Runoff/Hare form of RCV is a broken system that elects candidates based on incomplete information, which means it can eliminate the most-preferred candidates through vote-splitting.
There are other ranked systems that are good, like Total Vote Runoff or Ranked Robin, but in an election like this with many candidates, it can be tedious to rank every one.
A score-based ballot is probably a better choice, with less cognitive burden. (Though STAR is specifically designed for single-winner elections, not 3-winner elections. I’m not sure how well it performs in strategy-resistance in the multi-winner case. They have a proportional multi-winner variant, too.)
The cognitive burden of any election with 39 candidates will always be significant. What about a system—whether score-based on ranking-based—in which each voter is only presented with 8-12 of the candidates?
While the nominal goal of the election is to identify three winners, I think the information-gathering objective is much more important here than in political elections. The broader ranking list, and more so than the ultimate outcome, is what matters for helping donors identify orgs they should research more, should re-consider, etc. I’d rather get a chance at the considered opinion of ~25% of the electorate vs. a possible but more cursory assessment by 100%.
I’m not an expert, but this may be a good idea. Apparently ranked-choice voting is always vulnerable to certain types of failures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem), but these can be avoided with rated voting systems.
I’m not going to say who I voted for because I think a secret ballot is important. I will say I strongly agree with the idea of using more democracy in EA for making decisions so I applaud the forum and the organizers for having this event week and letting us vote.
AMF is very cost-effective.
I ultimately decided to vote for the animal welfare groups, because I believe that animal welfare, in both it’s farmed and wild variants is probably one of the most robust and large problems in the world, and with the exception of groups that are the logistical/epistemic backbone of the movements (they are valuable for gathering data and making sure that the animal welfare groups can do their actions), I’ve become more skeptical that other causes were robustly net-positive, especially reducing existential risks.
I made a shortlist consisting mostly of animal-welfare organisations (because I’ve been led to believe that they are usually extremely funding-constrained, but very cost-effective in terms of QALYs per marginal dollar) then ranked that shortlist based on my best ITN-based guesses.
After going through the comments on this thread, I decided to upweight some of the ‘weird’ ones like the Shrimp Welfare Project that I initially ranked quite low, because most people won’t fund them, and so most of their funding is going to come from sources like this donation election.
I voted for the animal welfare projects that seem to have more funding constraints, show more EV, and/or are more CE-aligned. Animal welfare is disproportionately underfunded within EA, so I did not vote for other groups in other cause areas.
I’m confused why the comments aren’t more about cause prioritization as that’s the primary choice here. Maybe that’s too big of a discussion for this comment section.
I don’t view cause prioritisation as the primary choice here.
To illustrate, consider only ‘farmed animal welfare’ charities: Shrimp welfare project, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Arthropoda Foundation, the Humane League, Hive, Legal Impact for Chickens, Animetrics, Veganuary, Sentient, Fish Welfare Institute. Here are the most relevant questions that would influence which organisation I would prioritise.
What is the track record of each organisation, or the people in the organisation, or other organisations which seem similar to each organisation?
How effective do I think interventions in: community building, policy advocacy, the law, public advocacy, vegan advocacy, research, data improvements, etc. are, relative to one another?
How much do I think success or failure in each of those classes of interventions is predictive of future success or failure?
What will each organisation fund on the margin?
What factors do I think play into the “moral weight” of different groups of animals, and how do different animals score on these factors?
How much can each charity do about the above factors?
Of these, I would consider only question (5), maybe (6), to be “cause prioritisation” questions. In this election, information relating to questions (1) and (4) is more easily available to me than usual, and I’m forced to consider the range of interventions discussed in (2) and (3) if I want to produce a full ranking, where in most circumstances I would just go with the intervention I think is most effective and not think about how the rest are ordered.
People > Animals > AI
Can people who are downvoting this say why? I feel like roboton has provided useful information about why they have voted a certain way, even if its not very detailed information
The donation election post (meet the candidates) and the actual voting platform need to be cross-checked. I saw that Animetrics was included in the vote but not in the post, while Giving Green was included in the post and not in the vote. There may be other errors which I missed.
Thanks so much for flagging this, and really sorry for the mistakes. I’ve gone through and updated both, hopefully they are now both up-to-date. Please let me know if you see any other issues.
I ranked the more neglected charities higher as they will benefit from funding more than others
I don’t have a lot of confidence in this vote, and it’s quite possible my ranking will change in important ways. Because only the top three organizations place in the money, we will all have the ability to narrow down which placements are likely to be outcome-relevant as the running counts start displaying. I’m quite sure I have not given all 36 organizations a fair shake in the 5-10 minutes I devoted to actually voted.
How do you feel about the current leaderboard? Would you like to see anything change? What’s the best argument for a radically different leaderboard (given the current list of candidates)?
I read this at first as about the programming of the leaderboard and thought of an answer, but (now with caffeine) think that isn’t what you are asking! Anyway, the answer was to include both the current “in the money” section and a “last ones eliminated / in the hunt” section of the 4th/5th/maybe 6th place choices on the front page.
This would allow the reader to see at a glance what the most outcome-relevant pairwise comparisons are and how close they are. In turn, this would encourage them to vote if they had a clear opinion on those and focus their attention on the most impactful elements of their ranking. (They should still vote honestly for statistical purposes but may want to pay special attention to the pairwise comparisons that will determine money moved.)
Have you tried expanding the list to add candidates? We added that feature for this purpose, but it is interesting to know if it isn’t fulfilling that.
I have been doing that, but from a UI/UX perspective people need to first intuit that there is a race between the three listed and the ~2 next in line and then click 2-3 times in succession. I think top-three only was the correct default UI/UX early, but at this stage in the process the choice between those pairwise comparisons is pretty important.
It’s hard for me to assess how successful the current mechanism is, but I noticed that ~20-25% of people with votes for orgs that made the top 8 do not have a vote listed when we get down to the top 3. There are various possible reasons for that, but it does raise the possibility that nudging people toward the outcome-determinative elements of the ranking process would be helpful in the final days.
Largely but not entirely informed by https://manifold.markets/AaronBergman18/what-donationaccepting-entity-eg-ch#sU2ldPLZ0Edd
Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn’t be where I am now!
Cause prioritisation (global health and poverty first, then catastrophic risk and meta, then animal welfare (farmed above wild/marine, environmental included above welfare) and then AI last. Within causes, personal interest (eg antibiotics) and having heard of them before.
Like @Toby Tremlett🔹 I did a quick initial vote and will come back and edit my vote once I’ve read more marginal funding posts + see who’s in the lead.
(Another plug here for the Spotify playlist we created with the marginal funding posts in case you (like me) prefer listening to posts)
I voted for The Humane League UK (meat/broiler chicken welfare), Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation for cost-effective programs for animal welfare with low risk of backfire. I’m specifically concerned with backfire due to wild animal effects (also here), or increasing keel bone fractures for cage-free hens, so I avoid reducing animal product consumption/production and cage-free work.
What was your thinking on Humane League UK vs Humane League?
THL UK is focusing on meat/broiler chicken welfare, while I’d guess THL is doing a lot of cage-free egg work, which I want to avoid.
Write that’s A but confusing for your average punter 😂.
It’s still very unclear that the decrease in pain in cage-free system would not be significant enough to make the intervention not worth funding. What has convinced you specifically?
Rather than being convinced that cage-free is worse, I’m just not convinced it’s better, so why support it?
I’m not convinced nest deprivation reaches the disabling intensity. It’s definitely possible, and I not very unlikely, but it’s hard to say either way based on the current evidence. And whether or not it does, maybe keel bone fracture inflammation pain could still just be at least few more times intense anyway.
I believe that making better decisions is the first order of priority, followed by catastrophic risks. I tried to incorporate issue neglectedness in my vote.
Going through the list of eligible organizations by cause area, I tried to identify less prominent organizations (that weren’t the top-ranked and thus most famous organizations among EA previously recommenden by Effective Giving / Giving what you can in the past years) and looked for a) a possibly neglected but promising approach (according to my gut feeling) and b) that made their funding goals concrete, sizeable and transparent through concrete measures. The organizations I chose claimed to be in the intermediate phase of growth with operations already running effectively but that I assume to be at a crossroads regarding strategy consolidation and current (temporary) funding deficits. The three organizations of choice seem promising for leveraging impact since I feel they 1. set an example for appropriate farming conditions and act with publicity; 2. attract and persuade new early career donors; 3. serve as a platform for organized campaigns.
I voted for more mental health funding: Vida Plena and Kaya. They increase WELLBYs with a very high ROI
I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.
I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.
I’m kind of confused why I don’t think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don’t...
I’ve put together a quick initial vote, but I’ll vote again at least once before the deadline. I’ll go more in depth and closely read the marginal funding posts of the top 5 or so candidates when there are clear front-runners.
I used the comment field in the form to note that a field in the form was marked as optional when it was actually mandatory. That comment got automatically published here, and out of context it made no sense whatsoever. I think it would’ve been clearer to not automatically transfer this form feedback here (some people might’ve even assumed that it’s private feedback).
I went for the organizations with those plans which will actually work. Their aims and goals aren’t just on paper or hypothetical, they might actually make a difference. Moreover, it was also based on personal preferences. The country I live in, is an agricultural country and also suffers with countless cases of domestic violence and animal abuse. So those problems naturally got my attention. Nothing would make me happier than to alleviate such crimes in any part of the world.
I would really love to see the Good Food Institute (GFI) included on the list as well!
AI Safety seems to be the most urgent and is pretty neglected, while being tractable
In case humanity faces a GCR, there will be no focus on other topics, so putting focus on GCR prevention and mitigation seems legit to me
Animal welfare is pretty neglected, while IMHO being not so urgent
I don’t know most of the organisations, so just picked all/some to represent the points above.
Sticking with choices I know a lot about and I’m confident have a big impact
PauseAI seem funding constraint—probably needs more runway for returns to be seen on their work
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Animals are suffering and they deserve as much or more help than we give to other humans. They demonostrate no malice, hatred, jealousy, they only wish to survive. How we care for them reflects how we care for other humans.
Hey @Toby Tremlett🔹 , when people leave their rationales with their votes and they end up as comments here, they often don’t say what they voted for, and it doesn’t show in this thread. So, I don’t know what orgs they’re talking about. Is that intended?
In the field where you can leave a comment after voting it says the comment will be copied here but not who you voted for, probably some people just missed that info though.
I strongly believe animal welfare should be prioritized above all other cause areas, due to effectiveness per dollar donated.
Aligning powerful AI is hard
Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn’t be where I am now!
To give more people basic agency over their own lives.
There are millions of cries and bleeding in every single minute across the world from the farmed animal. The collective efforts to rescue and help the suffering souls has been made through EA animal welfare funds as the EA hands of support reaches all corners of the world to support those who dedicates their life to advocates and support in ending the sufferings of animals. So they deserve this support as the impact they are bringing in globally is huge.
Having a human-centric core in EA seems robustly good to me, so we’re sure to make the world a better place even if our other ideas don’t pan out.
My previous experience assessing the projects of the listed organizations (I did not vote for those I’m unfamiliar with), how neglected the work they’re doing is, and the marginal impact I expect from funding them.
I believe these are the most effective organisations and will use the money wisely
Which ones?
The ones I voted for, I thought this showed up in the comments, but obviously not. I voted SWP, EAAWF and THL.
Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.
I believe these are organisations most deserving of funding
(Your ranking isn’t displayed on the comment thread, so if you were intending to communicate which organizations you were referring to with the readership you may want to edit your comment here)
I just didn’t want to waste this money on shrimps
I did not know this would be public
A lot of these orgs are IMO -EV:
-I’m opposed to (most) animal rights
-some of the choices regarding AI look like potential backfires via feeding capabilities (PauseAI is the only one where this is completely implausible)
If someone has information suggesting that the Nucleic Acid Observatory and/or Midas Project might be -EV, please tell me (as biorisk and AI risk are the ones most susceptible to this).
Can you say more about why you’re opposed to most animal rights / what you mean more specifically by “animal rights”? At risk of sounding facetious, I assume you aren’t eg. a proponent of torturing animals for no reason?
Can you explain why you think its completely implausible that PauseAI “feeds capabilities” but plausible that The Midas Project does? I can think of many similar ways PauseAI and The Midas Project can both backfire (mostly gaining public attention in an undesirable way), and have a hard time imagining either of them directly contributing to capabilities improvements.
X-Risk is most important.
Helping animals might do more direct good than helping people, but it doesn’t seem like people care much about animals, so helping people is second most important.