I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
Jason
Karma: 18,031
It’s unclear how demanding this promise is—I find it to be considerably more vague than the GWWC 10% Pledge in terms of how much sacrifice is expected, but let’s assume for the time being that it is ~equally demanding as the 10% Pledge. It’s taken many years and FTEs to get GWWC to ~10,000 pledgers, a rate of progress which makes me think that gaining promisers would be considerably more difficult than your model assumes.
It’s true that there is a theoretical “benefit to those who join the promise” in that they obtain the ability to ask other promisers for material resources. However, for those who currently have enough food, water, peace, and shelter, there is zero marginal benefit to pledging now as one could always defer pledging until one had a need. One could perhaps get around this with an open season and a registry (e.g., people can only promise from Jan 1 to Jan 15 of each year, or else they can’t claim the promise until the next year)? But even then, this system needs a balance between people who have excess resources and people who need basic resources, or ~everyone will likely get frustrated and give up. I’m not sure you’d get that.
The idea of closed communities of promisers in the postscript is interesting, although there would be awkwardness about who is allowed / not allowed into the group, whether people would be screened on various underwriting criteria, and so on.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchin’ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/attendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its members’ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organization’s broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norway’s ability to attract non-member/supporter funding. As a practical matter, “EA org in a small country” may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. That’s relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than “EA org in a small country” does.
If I’m reading Patrick’s comment correctly, there are two different ideas going on:
The democratic approach requires greater overhead (e.g., “the overhead for organizing a general assembly”) without producing better results to justify the extra overhead
Fewer / geographically broader orgs would have greater efficiency for ~the usual reasons we might think larger orgs might do better than smaller ones
These effects should be, in theory, somewhat separate—one could envision a nationally focused org without membership/democracy, or a big transnational group with it. Do you think your list of advantages is more about localness or more about being democratic?
(I express no opinion on whether ACE’s recommendations in 2025 are being influenced by “woke ideology” in a way a meaningful number of donors would find objectionable, so I wrote the comment below about an evaluator more generically.)
Pressuring an organization to commit to flagging cases in which “woke ideology” (or similar controversial factor) upgraded or downgraded a classification might be more viable. That’s imperfect, but so is the idea of a secondary organization trying to identify and flag those cases.
An evaluator’s best defense against claims of bias might be that it’s a private organization that can consider whatever it wants (as long as it is sufficiently transparent about that so would-be donors are not misled). I could respect that, but I think that rationale would affect the extent to which other community actors should be deferring to the evaluator absent flagging. For instance, when effective-giving organizations defer to an evaluator to decide which organizations can receive donations on their website, it is implicitly ratifying the evaluator’s idiosyncrasies in a sense. That strikes me as more problematic than the direct effect of evaluator’s recommendations—it closes off third-party opportunities for disfavored organizations, gives one organization’s views on a controversial topic too much weight, and makes interorganizational cooperation unreasonably difficult.
Current language for Movement Grants is: “However, we are not able to fund groups or projects that: . . . . Conflict with our commitment to representation, equity, and inclusion.” That is indeed softer than the requirements language in the 2021 Forum post.
This is plausible, but not obvious, to me:
I think you’re right that “woke signaling” is pretty off-putting to significant portions of the population (at least in the US). What’s less clear is how many put-off people were counterfactually going to listen to ACE’s recommendations anyway.
The flipside is that “woke signaling” probably has beneficial effects for some donors on the left, those who are more likely to defer to evaluators who they see as sharing their values. In addition, to the extent that the larger non-EA animal-welfare community is very left-leaning, “woke signaling” might help build bridges to it.
I don’t know which effect would be stronger, but I don’t think you can assume (1) predominates.
I think your argument would be stronger for most object-level charities than for a charity evaluator. I’d think the target audience for the latter is a smaller group of people who are predisposed to be sympathetic to the cause. The key win would be getting someone excited enough to donate; the shared real-world outcome for moderately supportive through strongly opposed is that the person won’t defer to the org’s recommendations. What follows is a oversimplified model.
If “woke signaling” moves someone from moderately supportive to unsympathetic, that isn’t great but the counterfactual loss in donations is still $0. But moving someone from moderately supportive to highly supportive has more concrete value if it triggers a counterfactual donation. If there are more people at moderately supportive who would respond positively to “woke signaling” than there are people at highly supportive who would respond negatively, it could be a strategic move.
I was hesitant on this one, but I looked at last month’s posts and saw a lot of them with few votes and little engagement, which made me more sympathetic to the concern about the frontpage. Maybe it’s a viable idea with some safeguards:
I think a limitation to application against “new users” mitigates some of the downside risk as long as that definition is operationalized well. In particular, people use throwaways to post criticisms, and the newness of an account should not necessarily establish a “new user” for purpose of this policy. I think mods are capable of figuring out if a throwaway post shows enough EA knowledge, but they should err on the side of letting throwaway criticism posts through to the frontpage. For certain critical posts, the decision to demote should be affirmed by someone independent of CEA.
The risk of being demoted to Personal Blog could be a significant demotivator for people investing the time to write posts.
You could mitigate this by being very clear and objective about what will trigger classification and then applying the stated criteria in a conservative fashion. But based on your stated goals, I think you may have a hard time defining the boundaries with enough objective precision.
You could also invite people to submit 1-2 paragraph pitches if they were concerned about demotion, and establish a safe harbor for anyone who got a thumbs-up on their pitch. But that approach risks being a little too censorious for my tastes, as the likely outcome of a decision not to pre-clear is that the author never completes their idea into a post.
If something is getting any meaningful number of upvotes or comments after being consigned to Personal Blog as lower-quality content, you probably made a mistake that should be reverted ASAP. (When thinking what the thresholds for reversal should be, the much lower visibility of Personal Blogs should carry significant weight.)
I would be hesitant to reject more content—people selecting to show Personal Blog posts presumably know what they are getting themselves into and have implicitly decided to opt out of your filtering efforts.
The biggest risk is, I believe, disability resulting in long-term income loss. My US-centric understanding is that private disability insurance that is both portable (not bound to a specific employer) and broad (e.g., covers any condition that causes a significant loss in earnings capacity) can be difficult to find if you’re not in particularly excellent health.
Basefund was working on the broader issue of donors who subsequently experience financial hardship, although I haven’t heard much about them recently. My assumption was that limitations imposed by the project’s non-profit status would preclude the Basefund model from working for people considering larger donations but worried about needing them back down the road if a crisis happens.
Meeting those needs for those unable to access general-purpose private disability insurance would probably require some sort of model under which the donor paid an insurance premium and reduced their would-be donation accordingly. If there were enough interest, I could see one of the big disability insurance shops underwriting a product like that. Probably wouldn’t be cheap, though. Of course, if someone were willing to financially guarantee claims payment, thus removing any financial risk from the policy administrator, that would make the program more attractive for a would-be administrator.
It’s also important to address the deeper assumption here: that I am somehow morally or legally obligated to permanently align my actions with the preferences or ideological views of past philanthropic funders who supported an organization that employed me. That notion seems absurd. It has no basis in ordinary social norms, legal standards, or moral expectations. People routinely change roles, perspectives evolve, and institutions have limited scopes and timelines. Holding someone to an indefinite obligation based solely on past philanthropic support would be unreasonable.
I don’t think a lifetime obligation is the steelmanned version of your critics’ narrative, though. A time-limited version will work just as well for them.In many circumstances, I do think society does recognize a time-limited moral obligation and social norm not to work for the other side from those providing you significant resources,[1] --although I am not convinced it would in the specific circumstances involving you and Epoch. So although I would probably acquit you of the alleged norm violation here, I would not want others drawing larger conclusions about the obligation / norm from that acquittal than warranted.[2]
There is something else here, though. At least in the government sector, time-limited post-employment restrictions are not uncommon. They are intended to avoid the appearance of impropriety as much as actual impropriety itself. In those cases, we don’t trust the departing employee not to use their prior public service for private gain in certain ways. Moreover, we recognize that even the appearance that they are doing so creates social costs. The AIS community generally can’t establish and enforce legally binding post-employment restrictions, but is of course free to criticize people whose post-employment conduct it finds inappropriate under community standards. (“Traitor” is rather poorly calibrated to those circumstances, but most of the on-Forum criticism has been somewhat more measured than that.)
Although I’d defer to people with subject-matter expertise on whether there is an appearance of impropriety here, [3] I would note that is a significant lower standard for your critics to satisfy than proving actual impropriety. If there’s a close enough fit between your prior employment and new enterprise, that could be enough to establish a rebuttable presumption of an appearance.
- ^
For instance, I would consider it shady for a new lawyer to accept a competitive job with Treehuggers (made up organization); gain skill, reputation, and career capital for several years through Treehuggers’ investment of money and mentorship resources; and then use said skill and reputation to jump directly to a position at Big Timber with a big financial upside. I would generally consider anyone who did that as something of . . . well, a traitor and a sellout to Treehuggers and the environmental movement.
- ^
This should also not be seen as endorsing your specific defense rationale. For instance, I don’t think an explicit “stipulation about slowing down AI” in grant language would be necessary to create an obligation.
- ^
My deference extends to deciding what impropriety means here, but “meaningfully making use of benchmarks, datasets, or tools that were developed during [your] previous roles” in a way that was substantially assisted by your previous roles sounds like a plausible first draft of at least one form of impropriety.
- ^
Talented people getting jobs or funding is a major theory of impact for EA meta orgs, and that objective can be seen in their activities. I don’t think it is problematic that people seem to be viewing career-related stuff as a major part of the EA meta. Indeed, I would submit that we want people to know that EA has career opportunities. For instance, if someone is interested in AI safety, we want them to know that they could find a position or funding to work in that area. Deciding to engage involves opportunity costs, so it’s reasonable for people to consider whether community involvement would help them achieve their altruistic goals.
Given that, we also need to take reasonable steps so that “[p]eople passionate about education policy, conservation, or other lower-prioritised areas” know fairly early that certain important forms of engagement are not realistically open to people working in these areas. And the post describes more than the absence of funding or jobs—if people feel that they won’t get value out of going to conferences because too much of the content is geared toward a few cause areas, they should be made aware of that in advance as well.
I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience.
If having too many org-promotional posts is unhealthy for the Forum, one could argue for structuring the Frontpage to prevent org promotions/announcements from becoming too prominent. That could mean a weighting adjustment, a hard cap on how many org-promo posts can appear on Frontpage (e.g., the community section), or adjusting the Frontpage algorithm to more heavily weight comments/interaction (which these posts tend to have less of).
There may be an ideal stable range of activity level for the Forum. Users feel they can commit a certain amount of time to keeping up with things, and they may experience having too much content to wade through as frustrating and off-putting. And most authors will experience getting pushed off the Frontpage soon due to the volume of other content as demotivating. If that’s correct, then there’s a point at which seeking more discussion-related content to dilute org-promotional posts could backfire. I’m not suggesting that we are outside the ideal stable range at the moment.
However, techniques to limit the prominence of org promotions/announcements should require a fairly modest investment of upfront staff time (with monitoring by volunteers or the community if necessary). Thus, calculating the risk that reducing paid staff time devoted to the Forum and/or content development will lead to bulletin-board-ization should account for mitigating measures.
How much paid staff time was devoted to content development work in the past? I briefly skimmed the list of top posts in years past, and I didn’t get the impression that the Forum was a “bulletin board” in years past. If there were less paid staff time devoted to content development in years past, it would make me think it less likely that reducing that effort now would trigger a meaningful loss of Forum quality. It’s of course possible that something is different now—either to justify a greater or lesser level of content work than for years prior.
My guess is that the optimal number of FTEs working on the Forum is greater than 0.0 (let’s please not go to Reddit) and less than 3.0. But it’s hard for me to say where I think it should be within that range.
The EA equivalent could be things like discounted or early access to EAG(x) events, member-only discussion groups, or eligibility to complete advanced courses offered by national EA associations.
Maybe, but this sounds to me a lot like erecting new pay gates for engagement with the community (both the membership fee and any extra fee for the advanced courses, etc.). Maybe that’s unavoidable, but it does carry some significant downsides that aren’t present with a mountaineering club (where the benefits of participation are intended to flow mainly to the participant rather than to third parties like animals or future people)
It also seems at tension with the current recruitment strategy by increasing barriers/friction to deeper engagement. And it seems that people most commonly become interested in EA in their 20s, an age at which imposing financial barriers to deeper engagement may be particularly negative. While I think people would be okay lowering pay gates based on certain objectively-applied markers of merit or need, I am not confident that this could be done in a way that both didn’t impede “core” recruitment and that “supporter” members experienced as fair and acceptable. Most people don’t want to pay for something others are getting for free / near-free without a sufficiently compelling reason.
I don’t really understand what would be in it for the corporation, but I haven’t thought very deeply about it. (This is all from a US perspective. I’m using Coca-Cola as the company in my examples given its use in the post, and GiveWell as the potential charity).
Under I.R.C. 170(b)(2)(A), most corporations can deduct charitable contributions up to 10% of their taxable income. More discussion here. Maybe companies could try claiming their matching donations as an employment-related business expense instead of as a charitable donation per se, but I doubt (e.g.) Coca-Cola is running up against that 10% cap on the latter. I suspect that few corporations need the matching program to get credit for donating more from a tax perspective.[1]
If Coca-Cola wanted to give money to GiveWell (conditioned on strangers also giving money), trying to do this through an employee-matching system rather than through a more direct method seems awfully convoluted to me. I’m guessing Coca-Cola would prefer to give in a way that maximized the reputational benefits flowing it to / made its donation look as big as possible, and that experts in fundraising could tell them how to best accomplish that. I’m not sure why Coca-Cola would want to reinvent the wheel here.
If for some reason Coca-Cola wanted to give more money through employee matching in general, then it would have the option of increasing the generosity of their matches for authentic employee donations. From its perspective, that seems a superior option in light of the usual goals of an employee-match program. To the extent that the corporation thinks there is PR benefit from higher employee donations, that isn’t going to fly when it comes to light that the employees were acting as mere conduits for strangers. Moreover, one would expect more of an employee morale/retention boost for charities the staff strongly cared about (and their willingness to donate some of their own money is a signal about existence and intensity of staff preference).
So I’m not sure I see a clear use case here unless an employer (1) wants to give money to specific charities we endorse, (2) wants to do that through an employee-matching program for reasons that I am not predicting, and (3) feels that public disclosure of what is going on would not undermine the employer’s objectives. If I’m missing something, then figuring out what it is might be helpful in thinking through strategy.
If a company is willing to match $10,000 per employee per year, they may be flexible about whether the money comes from the employee or others in the community — the company’s contribution is the same either way and the company still enjoys the upsides of giving.
That being said: I assume that a company that is willing to match up to $10,000 per year first obtained projections on how much that policy would actually cost on a per-employee basis. I doubt they budgeted close to $10K/employee/year for this, although I don’t know what the participation rates are in reality. This site suggests ~31.25% of matching funds might be claimed.
- ^
The most obvious exception would be those without taxable income. But even then, I suspect there may be less risky ways to justify charitable donations as an ordinary business expense than through what sounds a whole lot like straw donors. Cf. Marquis v. Comm’r, 49 T.C. 485 (1968) (charitable deductions allowed as business expenses, albeit under somewhat unusual circumstances).
- ^
(US perspective)
There’s a limit of $50 for anonymous cash donations to a candidate. They could be annoying enough to account for—and vaguely disreputable enough—that they are of no meaningful benefit to the candidate. I don’t recall ever seeing a candidate provide a clear mechanism for such donations, and that may be why (although my experience is limited).
Donating through a straw donor to evade campaign-finance laws is an excellent way to end up in trouble with the feds.
I think an organization like that is plausible, but I get the sense that it is a much different animal than the Dutch mountaineering association.
Although the financial breakdown is sparse (and I can’t read Dutch), a glance at the website suggests the association offers a lot of activities and other sources of value for its members—which I am guessing are significantly more costly than a card, sticker, e-mail, and so on. If you’re even moderately interested in mountaineering, it makes sense that joining would provide you with a lot of value. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised that a large fraction of people who are moderately interested in mountaineering join.
That doesn’t strike me as the right joining-percentage base rate for an organization in which members don’t get much to show for their membership fees. For example, one might consider the number of individuals who support the free / open source software movement versus the number who are paying members of a FOSS software organization. If the conversion rate of interested people into membership of a sticker-and-card organization is rather low, you need a rather large group of interested people to end up with a sizable membership.
Don’t get me wrong; a membership organization with 80,000 people would be great! I just don’t see that a low-cost membership organization as a likely way to reduce net funding pressures.
I suspect that a delayed-allocation model is going to add a lot of complexity (and potentially create user-trust issues). It seems to me that such a model would require significantly more engineering and legal/operational work than a model in which GoodWallet transfers money directly from the donor to the creator’s preselected charity (“immediate model”). It requires the user to have more trust in GoodWallet as custodian of the funds, [1] and is likely to either cost the donor a potential tax deduction or require GoodWallet to jump through some hoops to qualify as a proper charity in its own right. And I think would-be donors do consider the tax-deductibility of a donation as a signal that things are on the up and up.
The advantages of such a delayed-allocation model over an immediate model are not clear to me. In particular, even if the universe of eligible charities is drawn from GiveWell’s recommended-charity list, the possible choices are not that different from each other and I suspect few creators would place much value on the ability to defer a decision on which one to point their supporters to.
As for “mini-DAF functionality for everyone”: as I understand it from a US perspective, the classic reason for DAFs is to allow donors to take the tax deduction now while letting the donation grow for a while and deferring the choice of charity until later. Especially with changes to the US tax code a few years ago, people with modest sums to give aren’t generally in a position to itemize donations anyway, and I didn’t see anything about offering investment opportunities. So I’m not sure who the target audience is for this functionality.
- ^
As a potential donor with limited knowledge of anyone involved, I’d be relatively less worried about GoodWallet’s leaders being dishonest but relatively more concerned about whether those leaders had structured things in a way that protected funds intended for charitable purposes from GoodWallet’s potential creditors.
- ^
On the income side of the ledger, having more members might help. But the more members you have, the more you need to spend on member-service activities (i.e., whatever it is that you’re offering that makes people want to pay the membership fee).
On the one hand, I don’t think that member-service activity expenditure would scale linearly with increased membership. On the other hand, current spend on meta / community building activities is far more than €50/involved person. So my assumption is that—at best—the marginal costs of serving additional members would be equal to the membership revenue. A meta in which the spend per average member was anywhere close to that would be a very different meta indeed.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that making a partisan donation could be an issue for some non-governmental roles either. I don’t have a strong sense of that, but recall that people looking to assert that an organization has a partisan bent will search their employees’ contribution records and then report that as evidence of bent. So I were trying to come across as a non-partisan organization, I might be concerned about hiring a bunch of people who had all donated to the same team.
That’s admittedly speculative . . . but probably not more speculative than a ~$10 donation being outcome-determinative in a major US political race, either.
With facial recognition, one could argue that it’s the camera more than the badge that poses the OPSEC risk here. If you don’t want the broader world to know you attended an event, taking your name off the badge shouldn’t make you OK with being photographed.