https://pandemic.metaculus.com/works for me. The link you have is for https://www.pandemic.metaculus.com/ though, which does not work. Maybe that’s the problem?
Avi Norowitz
Karma: 692
EA Giving Tuesday Donation Matching Initiative 2019 Retrospective
Because Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is part of Johns Hopkins University rather than its own US registered nonprofit, it may not be feasible to create a Facebook fundraiser for them.
I think the main potential benefits of GiveDirectly’s COVID-19 response are (a) good PR for cash transfers, (b) an experiment to learn from, (c) bringing in more donors, and (d) persuading people to stay home rather than work. In terms of benefits for recipients though, it seems much less cost-effective than cash transfers to the extreme poor.
I think Open Philanthropy probably would not reduce it’s grantmaking because of a recession. It seems Open Philanthropy is recommending around $200 million in grants per year. Forbes estimates that Dustin Moskovitz has a net worth of around $10 billion. So they’re only spending down a mere 2% of Moskovitz’s net worth each year. If Moskovitz’s net worth declined to $5 billion that would still only be 4% of Moskovitz’s net worth. In addition, better funding opportunities for Open Philanthropy may arise during a recession as other large funders pull back.
This seems to be based on one study of 21 pigs.
I’d expect some effect from that, but probably orders of magnitude smaller than the effect of increasing prices via taxation.
Assuming you’re in the US: How about a Vanguard Brokerage account and a Google spreadsheet?
In a Vanguard Brokerage account, you can invest in something like Total World Stock Market. Then to donate from the account, you could do any of the following:
Donate appreciated shares through a Vanguard DAF. I understand that you can open a DAF and close it after you’re done making your donation to avoid annual minimums and fees.
Donate appreciated shares directly, which you should do only if the recipient organization can easily accept them.
Sell the shares, preferably after holding them for at least 1 year, and then donate cash. This might be worthwhile (a) if you decide to donate to something that is not a 501(c)(3) or (b) to try to get your donations matched by Facebook on Giving Tuesday, if you judge the expected value to be higher than the tax benefits forfeited.
You should also tax loss harvest as needed.
And then you can keep track of your contributions, donations, and other details you want to keep track of in a Google spreadsheet.
Hi Brian. Thanks for the feedback and letting us know about your experience.
So, in our testing from the US this year, we’ve seen that donations made at :00 on the dot typically generate receipts with :02. It seems plausible that being in Manila is causing longer than expected delays. Though if you’ve only tried one $5 donation, perhaps you could try a few more of them?
It’s also normal for Facebook to take much longer to return a “Thank you for your purchase … ” than it shows up in your receipt. I’ll make a note to clarify this in our practice instructions.
When we say “try to donate within the first second,” we’ve left that a bit vague, to avoid being too verbose. However, it seems that this language may be confusing. Do you think maybe a footnote would help? Or do you have other suggestions on how we could make it more clear what we mean?
Hi Mike. Do you think we should be more clear in our language? We’re recommending donating within the first second because (a) we want to emphasize the importance of speed and (b) it is plausible the match will actually end in 1 second, even though a few seconds is probably more likely. But we also don’t want people to misunderstand the difficulty of this and feel hopeless.
A $9,999 donation can be finalized in 1 click, so with some preparation and practice, it can be done in 1 second. It’s also possible to finalize 2 x $9,999 donations in 1 second, though it requires skill and more practice.
A 1 second match end time is plausible, but it’s not the most likely outcome. So probably 2 x $9,999 successful donations in 2 seconds would get matched. The max match amount per donor is $20,000 and this is just $2 short of that.
The difference in effectiveness between even EA-aligned organizations may differ by a large factor, much larger than 3x. For instance:
This 80,000 Hours survey found that a sample of EA leaders believe that the cost-effectiveness of donating to different EA Funds (representing different cause areas) may differ by up to 33x.
GiveWell estimates that the cost effectiveness of their top charities may differ by up to 9x.
So I’d exercise caution before making donation decisions based on a 3x matching opportunity. You could end up donating to something that’s much less than 1⁄3 effective.
This all sounds correct to me. Just to add: the organization had a revenue of $31 million in 2017, so they’re not going to sell their domain for cheap.
I attended only 1 talk aside from the opening and closing session. I filled up most of my time with (a) meetings and office hours with specific goals, (b) conversations with random people, and (c) time to myself. This strategy worked well for me and I’ll probably make it a point to attend 0 talks next year.
Through the planned meetings I had, I learned more about (a) career decisions, specifically infosec careers in GCR (b) how to run EA Giving Tuesday better, and (c) prioritizing causes better.
They can now be found as “GiveWell” in San Francisco, CA. I think they changed their legal name at some point.
You can share one login and password among multiple people if you trust your team members enough.
You can do this for free with Rebrandly, though only the admin account can create links.
(I’m not arguing any particular position here. Just mentioning some considerations.)
I think tweeting to Jeff Bezos seems fine, though I’d hope that someone’s first response would be “I should make sure Effective Giving saw this” rather than “I should tweet my favorite EA charity at him”.
Maybe? Although I think there were some advantages to tweeting him directly:
He was asking for tweets, not for organizations to reach out to him via some other way.
I imagine it’s going to be very, very difficult for organizations to get a hold of Bezos, and I don’t think his tweet changed that.
A grassroots EA tweeting effort could generate maybe 100 tweets from different individuals which was 0.2% of the overall 47k tweets. That seems to have provided a nontrivial chance of getting his attention, which seems net positive if the tweeters are careful about content.
Still, it might be the case that the best course of action would have been to run it by Effective Giving, either beforehand or in addition.
I don’t read Ricky Gervais as being entirely unserious, so responding to him might be reasonable.
I think he was partially serious too, but he didn’t explicitly ask for suggestions like Bezos did.
Some considerations I’d make before tweeting at him:
* What’s his history in this area? Does he have a record of supporting animal charities? Does he Tweet about bacon all the time, making this an obvious joke?
He’s very pro-animals.
* Do the PR people at the animal charities I support know about this Tweet? Should they be the ones to send something, if anyone does?
I think they found out about it from my post, or possibly via some other method. There are a number of tweets there by Animal Charity Evaluators, The Humane League, Vegan Outreach, the Nonhuman Rights Project, etc, or from their employees.
* Are people already deluging him with charity suggestions? If so, how can I make my Tweet stand out, if I plan to send one at all?
As noted above, merely increasing the ratio of EA to non-EA tweet replies would likely increase the probability that it gets his attention. There is of course the possibility that the attention is counterproductive if looks like charity spam.
Thanks for sharing your views on this. I’m now updating towards the view of “don’t tweet wealthy people about EA unless they explicitly ask for donation suggestions.”
Here are some past examples of EAs tweeting wealthy people with donation advice:
Jeff Bezos: In this case he’s asking for advice, so tweets that are consistent with what he’s asking for seem appropriate. For instance, I think I suggested GiveDirectly to him. Do you share this view?
Ricky Gervais: This seems like the kind of tweet that EAs should not reply to in your view, since it’s a (half-joking?) mention of his intention to donate to help animals, without asking for suggestions. Does that capture your view on this? (Disclaimer: I crossposted this to the Facebook EAA group and may be indirectly responsible for most of the tweets from EAs here. Maybe that was a mistake.)
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