I think the moment you try and compare charities across causes, especially for the ones that have harder-to-evaluate assumptions like global catastrophic risk and animal welfare, it very quickly becomes clear how impossibly crazy any solid numbers are, and how much they rest on uncertain philosophical assumptions, and how wide the error margins are. I think at that point you’re either left with worldview diversification or some incredibly complex, as-yet-not-very-well-settled, cause prioritisation.
My understanding is that all of the EA high net worth donor advisors like Longview, GiveWell, Coefficient Giving, (the org I work at) Senterra Funders, and many others are able to pitch their various offers to folks in Anthropic.
What has been missing is some recommended course prio split and/or resources, but that some orgs are starting to work on this now.
I think that any way to systematise this, where you complete a quiz and it gives you an answer, is too superficial to be useful. High net worth funders need to decide for themselves whether or not they trust specific grant makers beyond whether or not those grant makers are aligned with their values on paper.
Oh, this is nice to read as I agree that we might be able to get some reasonable enough answers about Shrimp Welfare Project vs AMF (e.g. RP’s moral weights project).
Some rough thoughts: It’s when we get to comparing Shrimp Welfare Project to AI safety PACs in the US that I think the task goes from crazy hard but worth it to maybe too gargantuan a task (although some have tried). I also think here the uncertainty is so large that it’s harder to defer to experts in the way that one can defer to GiveWell if they care about helping the world’s poorest people alive today.
But I do agree that people need a way to decide, and Anthropic staff are incredibly time poor and some of these interventions are very time sensitive if you have short timelines, so that just begs the question: if I’m recommending worldview diversification, which cause areas get attention and how do we split among them?
I am legitimately very interested in thoughtful quantitative ways of going about this (my job involves a non-zero amount of advising Anthropic folks). Right now, it seems like Rethink Priorities is the only group doing this in public (e.g. here). To be honest, I find their work has gone over my heard, and while I don’t want to speak for them my understanding is they might be doing more in this space soon.