“Wow, we need to help current people, current animals, and future people and future animals, all with a subset of present-day resources. What a tremendous task.”
Surely you mean we have a tremendous OPPORTUNITY! 😋
In all seriousness, this is a great post. In recent months with everybody talking about how wealthy EA is as a movement, we risk alienating individual donors—but it’s still important for folks to donate. There is SOO much good we can do as individuals.
This post is excellent—thank you for writing and sharing. ❤️
Regarding this suggestion:
“Given the unilateralist’s curse, perhaps there should be some central forum for EA funders to coordinate / agree upon policies with an optics perspective in mind.”
I think this would be hugely helpful, and that such a forum should be open and accessible to the rest of the EA community. I agree that SBF and Dustin+Cari have made amazing strides and are funding generally awesome things, but there’s something unsettling about them being able to unilaterally move the needle so significantly. They hire staff and researchers, and I think that’s wonderful (since determining where to deploy money effectively is one of the hardest problems we face), but one proposal to move the community more in line with what you had suggested would be a donor voting system.
Imagine Open Phil has its team of dozens of researchers write up proposals that then get widely distributed among the EA community—some researchers advocating more spending in biorisk, others on public health, etc. - and then members of the EA community vote on which proposal they think would be most effective. OP’s yearly budget for giving could then be spent proportionally according to the votes that each proposal receives. This has the benefits of incorporating the wisdom of the crowd (enlisting the help of tens of thousands of intelligent, thoughtful EAs rather than on the few dozen OP researchers themselves), while also acting as a yearly referendum on the values of EA. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out concretely how much money EA would dedicate to each cause area if we were all collectively voting on where to spend it?
It’s kind of like a reverse donor lottery—everyone pools their money, then you collectively determine where to spend it, knowing that your preferred cause area might not be the one that’s favored by others, but trusting that tens of thousands of EAs are smarter than one.
Love you all!
These are all great suggestions! ❤️
I’d add that even for those who aren’t willing/able to put the time into working on projects like these, there’s still so much you can do by merely talking about EA and bringing it up slightly more often in casual conversations. Word of mouth is far more powerful than people give it credit for, so simply talking about EA and why it matters to you could be a huge force for good!
Woo! Way to go Ken! This is dope!
Thank you for writing this, Michelle. It’s so inspiring to see.
I agree with your sentiment that EA can be a demanding, onerous philosophy at times. It’s really heartening to hear that there are so many people who join the movement despite its demandingness.
In my eyes, EA is such a tremendous opportunity—a genuine gift—that I’ve stopped thinking of it over the past year as something that we ought to do, but as something we get to do.
I’d be curious to hear if you feel similarly!
WOOOHOOO!! Way to go!
Lost it at Toby Ordering! 😂
This is my first time commenting/interacting in writing on a forum post! 🎉
This year, I donated my 10% (as per GWWC) in an even three-way split between AMF, Malaria Consortium, and GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund.
I did it through Giving Tuesday, and I practiced on the simulator a bunch and was able to call my credit card company to make sure they were aware of the charges, so the timestamp on my donation for all charges read “8:00am” ET. I’m optimistic it got matched, though of course I can’t know for sure! 🤞
I wasn’t planning on donating to GiveWell’s fund, but then I saw the name “Maximum Impact Fund” and couldn’t resist! It was SO well named! Whoever picked that name deserves a raise!
Love this idea! 😍