I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
huw
Karma: 1,923
All of the headlines are trying to run with the narrative that this is due to Trump pressure, but I can’t see a clear mechanism for this. Does anyone have a good read on why he’s changed his mind? (Recent events feel like: Buffet moving his money to his kids’ foundations & retiring from BH, divorce)
I liked Bob Jacob’s essay Is Effective Altruism neocolonial?.
Aid dependency is a really interesting problem, where charities can become victims of their own success. I think we should be very thoughtful about counterfactual government funding—even when, due to natural government inefficiencies, it might be less cost-effective.
One place I think EAs can do a lot of good is in charity entrepreneurship. There are often good emerging ideas that need a strong evidence base before governments will adopt them, but a shortage of ambitious people willing to take these risks. At Kaya Guides, we see our role as pioneering a novel treatment method, and then working with governments to implement. Even if we don’t do this ourselves, our counterfactual impact will always have been to create an evidence base that encourages others to do so!
Thanks for the feedback! I’m not really smart enough to figure something like that out tbh, and by the point I’d seen that my realistic options were within an order of magnitude of each other (and both high-risk with high overlap) I was pretty satisfied that my decision was likely gonna hinge on something else.
Maybe your adjustment would take it outside that range but I think at the point of extreme success these charities would be selling impact at competitive rates (so funders would be getting marginal value out of them), and more than likely going to counterfactual funders (ex. government). Maybe this is truer in GHD and especially mental health than in animal welfare, which seems more concentrated. But yeah, at this point I was pretty satisfied that Kaya Guides had minimal risk of substantial funding displacement in a success scenario (I can’t be too specific about this in public), so I picked it.
(Maybe again—I’m just highlighting my specific scenario, there’s definitely an attempt to generalise here but I didn’t think too hard through it)
No, but I think that’s reasonable in most cases (although hard to figure out exactly how to allocate it).
I didn’t. It evidently works—as do cooperatives, which I was also excited to found—but I think the big worry is up the top end. It’s very hard to imagine a FAANG company structured this way. And some of the average-case calculations above are skewed upwards by a handful of top success stories.
I looked at a handful of mental health startups to inform my guesses on impact. I looked the most deeply into BetterHelp, but you can clearly see through their numbers that their prices have almost doubled in 5 years (and steadily, too, this wasn’t a COVID thing). From the research I did, my sense was that it wasn’t getting passed back onto their counsellors, nor fuelling an increase in growth spending. There’s no way it got twice as expensive to deliver therapy.
I think if we had to point to a single mechanism, once you run out of user growth—as BetterHelp have—your investors push you to find an equilibrium price. That price is necessarily going to be higher than the price that guarantees the broadest impact, and likely to be higher than the price for the most (breadth x depth) impact.
My best guess is regional pricing can act as a crude form of means-testing, but this probably comes with a perverse incentive to ignore the cheaper regions (as BetterHelp have—almost all of their users are in the U.S.).
(All of that goes out the window if you don’t go direct to consumers—I think deeper forms of healthtech might be quite value-aligned!)
what does these numbers represent?
How much money a CE charity might be able to raise on average. (This makes the assumption that deployed cash from a charity is roughly equivalent to donated cash from Founding to Give which is what the other numbers represent).
I actually made this exact decision, just in the opposite direction! Last year, I had a pending offer from AIM’s Founding to Give programme, and another to be CTO at Kaya Guides (my current role).
Odds & magnitude of success
For AIM incubatees, using historical data, I calculated that:
30% of CE incubatees received funding from a top funder (OP or GiveWell)
About 2⁄3 of funding for CE incubatees came from OP and GiveWell, so we can multiply by 3⁄2 to get the total funding amount they would’ve received
Based on real-world grant data from OP and GiveWell, the median AIM charity could expect to receive US$1.4M in lifetime funding, the mean could get US$20M, and the top handful (i.e. a GiveWell Top Charity) could get hundreds of millions
For FTG incubatees, I borrowed from AIM’s own BOTEC, but substituted more real-world data when I had it to model distributions. This models:
The rate of incubator (ex. YC) acceptance should be about 20–60%, given that ~40% of CE charities don’t languish.
The historical odds of a YC company getting a substantial exit is about 11–16%
AIM then model out company valuations and founder shares at exit.
The median YC startup might yield about US$2M donations at exit, and the mean about US$56M
The median YC healthtech startup might yield about US$2M at exit, and the mean about US$4M. (Much less of a long tail)
A healthtech startup might also have significant positive impact through its work, so I decided to model that in too. It increased the potential value by about 5× on average.
Mutliplying through, the summary statistics I came up with for each option (in value-equivalent US dollars):
CE incubatee
p5: ~$100k
Median: ~$500K
Mean: ~$6M
p95: ~$23M
FTG incubatee
p5: ~$0 (actually negative in the model, but intuitively, many startups fail, make no money, and have no positive impact)
Median: ~$2M
Mean: ~$56M
p95: ~$11B
FTG incubatee (healthtech)
p5: ~$6M
Median: ~$14M
Mean: ~$21M
p95: ~$64M
For Kaya Guides specifically, I also added a counterfactual impact factor that bumped it up a little bit, because I think we have an unusually unique opportunity to pioneer a new intervention globally.
Here’s the notebook I used to calculate all this. Maybe I should write this up as a full post someday.
Personal fit / corporate pressure
I spoke to a great deal of people, and one thing that came up repeatedly is that if you’re in the for-profit game to have a direct impact, you should probably forget about it. Opinions differ a lot here, but I’ve seen the inside of a handful of tech companies—and many more products from the outside—and I do generally believe that at the point you’re big enough to have a significant impact, it’s quite likely that your investors will pressure you to squeeze money out of it in a way that will likely ruin said impact. This is especially true if you’re relying on some of your impact coming from donated exit money, which will, in all likelihood, reduce your control over the company.
The rest of my decision here is personal, but I’m still not fully sold on Earning to Give. I tried it earlier in my career, and I found that the toll of not doing direct work was so mentally debilitating that I wasn’t able to effectively work that hard. I think that being a highly successful startup founder is probably really hard, and I’m evidently not constitutionally motivated enough to just make money.
Conclusion
Broadly, I would see the decision like this: I think founding a startup and founding a charity have highly transferrable skillsets, but require extremely different personalities and constitutions. For me, then, this narrowed the FTG paths I would be effective at to just healthtech, which had a much lower ceiling. Frankly, my model for healthtech wasn’t meaningfully larger than my model for Kaya Guides, and at this point, I just went with my gut feeling.
(I know this comment is a bit structurally messy but I hope it elucidates something of value and provides some harder numbers to Nick’s intuitions)
The plan for FTG is to get the founders into those programmes or to good seed funding, it’s trying to fill a different niche in the market which is value-aligned co-founder matching (harder than you think!)
Per Bloomberg, the Trump administration is considering restricting the equivalency determination for 501(c)3s as early as Tuesday. The equivalency determination allows for 501(c)3s to regrant money to foreign, non-tax-exempt organisations while maintaining tax-exempt status, so long as an attorney or tax practitioner claims the organisation is equivalent to a local tax-exempt one.
I’m not an expert on this, but it sounds really bad. I guess it remains to be seen if they go through with it.
Regardless, the administration is allegedly also preparing to directly strip environmental and political (i.e. groups he doesn’t like, not necessarily just any policy org) non-profits of their tax exempt status. In the past week, he’s also floated trying to rescind the tax exempt status of Harvard. From what I understand, such an Executive Order is illegal under U.S. law (to whatever extent that matters anymore), unless Trump instructs the State Department to designate them foreign terrorist organisations, at which point all their funds are frozen too.
These are dark times. Stay safe 🖤
For you or others reading this, I can really recommend protesting if you’re not already. I also doubt it passes the ITN test (although, I wouldn’t discount it!), but it does provide (a) a good outlet for your feelings and (b) a real sense that you’re not alone, that there are people out there who are gonna fight alongside you. I come back from protests feeling a mix of emotions, but depressed and disempowered is rarely one of them.
A few quotes I wanna speak on:
Richard Hanania specifically was coming, and Hanania was one of the several speakers cited in the Guardian article as like a, person who had like a troubled background.
I just think Hanania himself as a person has been, growing. He recently voiced strong support for the Shrimp welfare project.
I think it’s heavy downplaying—potentially even disingenuous—to leave racism out of the discussion when talking about Hanania. It’s a demonstrable fact that he wrote for neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations in the past, but when Austin talks about him ‘growing’, it’s not that he has denounced this work (FWIW, he has), but that he now supports animal welfare. It’s a bit of a non sequitur, nobody is arguing he used to be racist against shrimp?
it is the case that we care a lot about things that are outside the traditional overton window, you might say, like modifying, genetics of, embryos, for example, or like doing screening on embryos. It’s like a kind of thing that we had people come and talk about, and sometimes it’s very controversial
The same goes for the other speakers. They aren’t controversial because of their opinions on embryo selection. They are controversial because they routinely endorse human biodiversity. Austin knows this, because all of the controversy around Manifest was about the topic of human biodiversity.
I think it is probably the case that like, because of the speakers, we chose some people who are more on the, oh, I want to like, argue about race. thought oh, this is the conference for me
I’m worried actually about something like an evaporative cooling effect where people who are more sensitive to this, stop showing up to manifests and people who feel like, oh yeah, I want to argue about, I do, things do show up.
Evidently, Austin understands something about the dynamics here. But the language such as ‘people who are more sensitive to this’ feels indicative that he doesn’t believe that the racism is the problem; rather, it is the reactions of a particular profile of person.
I don’t feel like Austin has internalised that people aren’t merely offended or sensitive to racism; they are harmed by it, and want to both avoid spaces that cause them harm, and prevent future harm caused by spreading those ideas. The difference is that offence is a reaction that you can behaviourally train yourself out of, but harm is a thing that is done to you.
More broadly, Austin repeatedly speaks about trade-offs between ‘winning’ (success, sometimes framed as harmony) and ‘standing up for what’s right’, which is sometimes framed as a form of truth-seeking. But this implicitly frames inquiry into and discussion of human biodiversity as a form of truth-seeking. David Thorstad has already written at length about why that’s harmful, so I’ll defer to his work on that.
Microsoft continue to pull back on their data centre plans, in a trend that’s been going on for the past few months, since before the tariff crash (Archive).
Frankly, the economics of this seem complex (the article mentions it’s cheaper to build data centres slowly, if you can), so I’m not super sure how to interpret this, beyond that this probably rules out the most aggressive timelines. I’m thinking about it like this:
Sam Altman and other AI leaders are talking about AGI 2027, at which point every dollar spent on compute yields more than a dollar of revenue, with essentially no limits
Their models are requiring exponentially more compute for training (ex. Grok 3, GPT-5) and inference (ex. o3), but producing… idk, models that don’t seem to be exponentially better?
Regardless of the breakdown in relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, OpenAI can’t lie about their short- and medium-term compute projections, because Microsoft have to fulfil that demand
Even in the long term, Microsoft are on Stargate, so still have to be privy to OpenAI’s projections even if they’re not exclusively fulfilling them
Until a few days ago, Microsoft’s investors were spectacularly rewarding them for going all in on AI, so there’s little investor pressure to be cautious
So if Microsoft, who should know the trajectory of AI compute better than anyone, are ruling out the most aggressive scaling scenarios, what do/did they know that contradicts AGI by 2027?
Just wanted to say I thought the mental health report is really good! I think it does a great job of highlighting where mental health is at as an EA cause area and where the big challenges are. Thanks for shouting out Kaya Guides!
What evidence would you need to see to conclude that an Orbanisation of the US government is beginning, but still early enough to prevent it?
We’re probably already violating Forum rules by discussing partisan politics, but I’m curious to hear how you view Trump’s claim that he is “not joking” about a third term. Is this:
A lie (it cannot be hyperbole as the claim he made was very specifically framed)
Legal under the constitution, because he would do it via running for Vice President and having the elected President resign, and anything technically legal is not an ‘authoritarian takeover’
Illegal under the constitution, but he would legally amend the constitution to remove term limits
Something else?
And then, for whichever you believe, could you explain how it isn’t an authoritarian takeover?
(I choose this example because it’s relatively clear-cut, but we could point to Trump vs. United States, the refusal to follow court orders related to deportations, instructing the AG not to prosecute companies for unbanning Tik Tok, the attempts from his surrogates to buy votes, freezing funding for agencies established by acts of Congress, bombing Yemen without seeking approval from Congress, kidnapping and holding legal residents without due process, etc. etc. etc., I just think those have greyer areas)
Heya Vasco, I think I might be missing something here. I’m struggling to see the connection between this post and your recommendation to donate to WAI.
In the past, I’ve heard that wild animal suffering is probably not very tractable. Is that true for both insects and vertebrates? What about WAI sets them up for success here? (You mention they support research into pesticides, but not direct work?)
Richest 1% wealth share, US (admittedly, this has been flat for the last 20 years, but you can see the trend since 1980):
Pre-tax income shares, US:
A 3–4% change for most income categories isn’t anything to sneeze at (even if this is pre-tax).
You can explore the WID data through OWID to see the effect for other countries; it’s less pronounced for many but the broad trend in high-income neoliberalised countries is similar (as you’d expect to happen with lower taxation).
I think it’s tractable, right? The rich had a far greater hold over American politics in the early 1900s, and after financial devastation coupled with the threat of communism, the U.S. got the New Deal and a 90% marginal tax rate for 20 years following the war (well after the war effort had been fully paid off), during the most prosperous period in U.S. history. My sense of these changes is that widespread labour & political organisation threatened the government into a compromise in order to protect liberalism & capitalism from a near-total overthrow. It can be done.
But equally, that story suggests that things will probably have to get much worse before the political will is there to be activated. And there’s no guarantee that any money raised from taxation will be spent on the global poor!
My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes. They should be producing policy briefs and papers that, and possibly public-facing outputs, on the same level as the current YIMBY/abundance movement, who are far more developed than the redistributionists on these capabilities. When the backlash hits and taxes get raised, we should already have people well-placed to push for high redistribution on an international and non-speciesist level.
How robust is your assumption about the value life events staying constant? If it were not true, then there may not be any rescaling to explain. Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much. In other words, if my life is already a 9, is it realistic to expect getting married will take me to a 10—a perfect life?
HLI have a good, but very preliminary, look at the linearity/compression of wellbeing here, and it seems like linearity/compression is actually very under-studied. This seems odd to me, considering that it would probably dramatically shift where you allocate resources if linearity was true vs if there were bigger gains to be made in the middle of the spectrum.
(Apologies if you have addressed this somewhere)