I am a biomed engineer PhD who is working as a field medical scientist in immuno-oncology for a pharmaceutical company. I’m currently pursing an earn-to-give path, taking full advantage of my company’s yearly $30k matching program, and partnering with an EA colleague to start a small community called ‘Match for More’, which similar to GWWC, looks to foster EA advocates in the professional workspace who leverage their company’s matching programs and seek to bring EA principles into mainstream corporate consideration.
I’m very keen to get advice on various earn-to-give strategies, and especially interested in meeting other regular donors who contribute yearly 5-figure+ donations, as I’m also developing a ‘sort of’ charity swap schema that could help increase our impact together with ‘patient philanthropists’ who utilize Donor-advised Funds.
I’m particularly interested in rational decision making, moral philosophy, the potential conflict between Negative Utilitarianism and Classical Utilitarianism approaches to EA, strategies to spread EA ideas to the general public, the potential of spreading our ideas to ‘less secular’ areas of western societies, and much more.
Always keen to have a chat about anything EA-related, especially if you have ideas/feedback on the sort of work I’m pursuing or it seems like my areas of interest might be helpful to yours!
Huge fan of the work your team has done, so thank you all for everything! A couple questions :)
1. For potential donors who are particularly interested in wild animal welfare research, how would you describe any key differentiating factors between the approaches of Rethink Priorities and Wild Animal Initiative?
2. For donors who might want to earmark donations to go specifically towards wild animal welfare research within your organization, would this in turn affect the allocation of priority-agnostic donations otherwise made to Rethink? Or is there a way in which such earmarked donations indeed counterfactually support this specific area as opposed to the general areas you cover? (This question applies to most multi-focused orgs.)
3. With respect to invertebrate research, and specifically ‘invertebrate sentience’, it seems that the sheer number of invertebrates existing would be the driving factor in calculating any expected benefit of pursuing interventions. Are there ‘sentience probabilities’ low enough to put such an expected value of intervention in question? (I have not thoroughly looked through your publicly available work, so feel free to point to relevant resources if this question has been addressed!)
Thanks in advance for all your thoughts!