I currently lead EA funds.
Before that, I worked on improving epistemics in the EA community at CEA (as a contractor), as a research assistant at the Global Priorities Institute, on community building, and Global Health Policy.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s.
You can give me positive and negative feedback here.
(to be clear, I do donate I just haven’t signed the pledge, and I’m confused about how much I am already donating)
I think the main things are:
whilst I think donating now > donating in the future + interest, the cost of waiting to donate is fairly low (if you’re not worried about value drift)
I can think of many situations in the past where an extra $10k would have been extremely useful to me to move to more impactful work.
I don’t think that it always makes sense for funders to give this kind of money to people in my position.
I now have friends who could probably do this for me, but it has some social cost.
I think it’s important for me to be able to walk away from my job without worrying about personal finances.
My job has a certain kind of responsibility that sometimes makes me feel uneasy, and being able to walk away without having another reason not to seems important.
I think I’ve seen several EAs make poor decisions from a place of poor personal finance and unusual financial security strategies. I think the epistemic effects of worrying about money are pretty real for me.
Also:
If I were trying to have the most impact with my money via donations, I think I would donate to various small things that I sometimes see that funders aren’t well positioned to fund. This would probably mean saving my money and not giving right now.
(I think that this kind of strategy is especially good for me as I have a good sense of what funders can and can’t fund—I think people tend to overestimate the set of things funders can’t fund)
I don’t see why the GWWC 10% number should generalise well to my situation. I don’t think it’s a bad number. I don’t weigh the community prior very strongly relative to my inside view here.
The average EA today is far less “committed” to EA than in 2016. By committed, I mean making personal sacrifices for altruism. Here is a website I found for Jeff Kauffman and Julia Wise where you can see them giving 50% of their income since ~2012. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve had a family for most of that time. This behavior is significantly less common nowadays, particularly as a proportion of people in the movement where I suspect a good fraction of people in the community donate relatively little, let alone 50% of their income.
Given how much the community has grown, isn’t this just what you’d expect? There are way more people than there were in 2016, which pushes down how weird the community is on average due to regression to the mean. The obvious solution is that EA should just be smaller and more selected for altruism (which I think would be an error).
Salaries at EA organizations have grown a lot. People used to take massive pay cuts to do EA non-profit work. Hopefully people from the early days can fill in some numbers here but there is a picture here of an office in the basement of an estate agent, salaries being 15k/year pre-tax and lunch being the same every day. In the OP, Abraham talks about a $500 donation allowing him to hire a contractor and being able to hire staff after ~75k of donations. Apart from a select few CE incubated charities, 75k doesn’t even cover a single person’s salary for a year at most EA orgs. Most salaries I see today for EA positions are 100k+, particularly at longtermist organizations.
I think the simplest explanation for this is that there are just more roles with well-paying counterfactuals e.g. ml engineering. Excluding those roles, after you adjust for the cost of living, most EA roles aren’t particularly well paid e.g. Open Phil salaries aren’t much higher than the median in SF and maybe less than the BART (Bay Area metro) police.
Which grants would you like to hear more reasoning for? Our grants aren’t very heavytailed wrt grant size, so I am not sure which to pick—but I am happy to explain the case for a few specific grants.
I also like these analogies!
Does the marriage analogy as you perceive it include that breaking the pledge further down the line is pretty common and socially okay, but also that it’s a serious thing and breaking it is not to be taken lightly?
Yes, we do that fairly regularly. We haven’t discussed people’s counterfactual options above, but this often makes a 20% reduction in grant size unattractive.
Grants that are just over the bar look pretty similar to these. I don’t think there’s a sharp drop-off in quality around the funding bar (though there has been in the past).
I guess there are two questions it might be helpful to separate.
what is the best thing to do with my money if I am purely optimising for the good?
how much of my money does the good demand?
Looking at the first question (1), I think engaging with the cost of giving (as opposed to the cost of building runway) wrt doing the most good is also helpful. It feels to me like donating $10K to AMF could make me much less able to transition my career to a more impactful path, costing me months, which could mean that several people die that I could have saved via donating to Givewell charities.
It feels like the “cost” applies symmetrically to the runway and donating cases and pushes towards “you should take this seriously” instead of having a high bar for spending money on runway/personal consumption.
Looking at (2) - Again I broadly agree with the overall point, but it doesn’t really push me towards a particular percentage to give.
We just published a longer post with some more grants here.
Fwiw my personal take (and this is not in my capacity as a grantmaker) is that building up your runway seems really important, and I personally think that it should be a higher priority than donating 10%. My guess is that GWWC would suggest dropping your commitment to say 2% as a temporary measure while you build up your savings.
Thanks for writing this, I found many of these points relatable. As I read the post I found it a little surprising that I haven’t seen more of this kind of discussion.
The epistemics and independence point feels particularly important—I think this is one of the main factors that makes me want to build more runway. I don’t have a very principled view of how much runway is “reasonable”, if people have numbers in mind I’d love to see them.
Thanks for these thoughts. It’s nice to get such detailed engagement. I’m going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - I’m not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I don’t think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, I’ve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I don’t think that I am particularly worthy of praise—but I do think that I score reasonably well on “moral credibility”. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamics—I don’t want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I don’t think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if that’s useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donations—and that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesn’t increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I don’t think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but it’s more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that I’d like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than that—I am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesn’t really lead to resentment/unhappiness. It wasn’t clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesn’t mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/hardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I don’t resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
So there are organisations spending more than $1m per year who have encouraged people to donate a significant fraction of their income (for example founders pledge, GWWC and OFTW though I’m not sure of OFTWs budget).
80k hours have also looked into which careers pay the best (e.g. writing about quant trading and being an early startup employee) - I think they have a budget of around $5m/year. So it sounds like the ETG outreach organisation would need to do both of these things and focus on e2g rather than other things. “How do I optimise my career make money” is a pretty common question and I think you should be somewhat sceptical of EAs ability to beat non-EA resources.
It’s worth noting that there aren’t any multimillion dollar organisations that I’m aware of that do the equivalent thing (outreach + career advice) for solely AI safety, biosecurity or global health.
I feel a bit confused about how much I should be donating.
On the one hand there’s just a straight forward case that donating could help many sentient beings to a greater degree than it helps me. On the other hand, donating 10% for me feels like it’s coming from a place of fitting in with the EA consensus, gaining a certain kind of status and feeling good rather than believing it’s the best thing for me to do.
I’m also confused about whether I’m already donating a substantial fraction of my income.
I’m pretty confident that I’m taking at least a 10% pay-cut in my current role. If nothing else my salary right now is not adjusted for inflation which was ~8% last year so it feels like I’m at least underpaid by that amount (though it’s possible they were overpaying me before). Many of my friends earn more than twice as much as I do and I think if I negotiated hard for a 100% salary increase the board would likely comply.
So how much of my lost salary should I consider to be a donation? I think numbers between 0% and 100% are plausible. −50% also isn’t insane to me as my salary does funge with other peoples donations to charities.
One solution is that I should just negotiate for my salary from a non-altruistic perspective, and then decide how much I want to donate back to my organisation after that. This seems a bit inefficient though and I think we should be able to do better.
One reason I don’t donate ~50% of my salary is that I genuinely believe it’s more cost-effective for me to build runway than donate right now. I quite like the idea of discussing this with someone who strongly disagrees with me and I admire and see if they come round to my position. It feels a bit too easy to find reasons not to give, and I’m very aware of my own selfishness in many parts of my life.
I guess I don’t really know what you have in mind. I’m particularly confused as to what definition of outreach you’re using if it excludes Longview.
Gwwc almost certainly has an annual budget of over $1m per year and is also pretty clearly investing in e2g.
I don’t think there’s much e2g as a career stuff since 80k pivoted away from that message—but that’s obviously much narrower than e2g outreach.
The GWWC numbers are hard to interpret, because I don’t think anything like massive, multi-million dollar E2G outreach has been tried, at least as far as I know.
I’m pretty sure that GWWC, Founders Pledge, Longview and Effective Giving all have operating costs of over $1M per year. It seems like quite a lot of effort has gone into testing the e2g growth hypothesis.
So is it reasonable to interpret your process as saying FAR was similarly impactful to AI safety events over the last year?
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn’t it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that’s gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
As Henri says I don’t think this is their model. Also, they haven’t operated for very long, and I don’t think they claim to have much expertise in funding meta-charities (though that’s not to say they won’t do an excellent job—I think it’s just a bit more of a judgment call).
Congratulations!
Giving some more information on what the role is, which organisation you’re at etc. might make it easier for people to connect you to others. Alternatively, information like organisation budget size and which field you’re working in could be helpful.
(I don’t work on the Animal Welfare Fund directly)
I think hiring a fundraiser for EA Funds could make sense (particularly if we were able to make a quick hire for giving season before deciding about a longer commitment); feel free to refer fundraisers that you have a high opinion of.
I don’t think we have the capacity to run a proper hiring round for a fundraiser right now.