A further point is donor coordination / moral trade / fair-share giving. Treating it as a tax (as Larks suggests) could often amount to defecting in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma between donors who care about different causes. E.g., if the EAIF funded only one org, which raised $0.90 for MIRI, $0.90 for AMF, and $0.90 for GFI for every dollar spent, this approach would lead to it not getting funded, even though co-funding with donors who care about other cause areas would be a substantially better approach.
You might respond that there’s no easy way to verify whether others are cooperating. I might respond that you can verify how much money the fund gets in total and can ask EA Funds about the funding sources. (Also, I think that acausal cooperation works in practice, though perhaps the number of donors who think about it in this way is too small for it to work here.)
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why such an org would end up unfunded. Such an organisation is not longtermist or animal rights or global poverty specific, and hence seems to fall within the natural remit of the Meta/Infrastructure fund. Indeed according to the goal of the EAIF it seems like a natural fit:
While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities. [emphasis added]
Nor would this be disallowed by weeatquince’s policy, as no other fund is more appropriate than EAIF:
we aim for the funds to be mutually exclusive. If multiple funds would fund the same project we make the grant from whichever of the Funds seems most appropriate to the project in question.
A further point is donor coordination / moral trade / fair-share giving. Treating it as a tax (as Larks suggests) could often amount to defecting in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma between donors who care about different causes. E.g., if the EAIF funded only one org, which raised $0.90 for MIRI, $0.90 for AMF, and $0.90 for GFI for every dollar spent, this approach would lead to it not getting funded, even though co-funding with donors who care about other cause areas would be a substantially better approach.
You might respond that there’s no easy way to verify whether others are cooperating. I might respond that you can verify how much money the fund gets in total and can ask EA Funds about the funding sources. (Also, I think that acausal cooperation works in practice, though perhaps the number of donors who think about it in this way is too small for it to work here.)
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why such an org would end up unfunded. Such an organisation is not longtermist or animal rights or global poverty specific, and hence seems to fall within the natural remit of the Meta/Infrastructure fund. Indeed according to the goal of the EAIF it seems like a natural fit:
Nor would this be disallowed by weeatquince’s policy, as no other fund is more appropriate than EAIF: