Software Developer at Giving What We Can, trying to make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
Lorenzo Buonanno🔸
Karma: 5,533
I don’t think “EA Funding” is that useful of a term here. My sense is that forecasting is not funded by a large number of small retail donors thinking about forecasting as a category, but by few large institutions funding specific projects for specific reasons (which are sometimes not just effectiveness-related, and usually not public so hard to evaluate)
[The internet] was then not very useful until the 1990′s.
I don’t think this is true. Emails and FTP were established in 1971 and used a lot by academics, scientists, and the military[1]
- ^
From Gemini:
The utility of email, FTP, and remote login (Telnet) during the 1970s and 1980s repaid the original government grants in three primary ways:1. Elimination of Duplicate Hardware Costs
In the 1960s and 1970s, computers were multi-million-dollar mainframes. Prior to ARPANET, ARPA frequently had to purchase separate, identical computers for different research institutions. The network allowed a researcher at UCLA to log into and utilize a specialized mainframe at MIT. The cost of developing and laying the network infrastructure was significantly lower than the cost of buying duplicate hardware for every university the Department of Defense funded.2. Accelerated Scientific and Defense R&D
Email and FTP collapsed the time required for complex collaboration. Instead of mailing magnetic tapes or waiting months for academic papers to be published and circulated, researchers shared datasets, software code, and peer reviews instantly. This rapid iteration sped up advancements in computer science, aerospace engineering, and defense logistics, delivering immense strategic value to the military and government.
- ^
And to add some obligatory nitpicking, “Individual starfish typically consume around 0.5 mussel per day although maximum feeding rates of 0.8 mussels per hour have been recorded for larger individuals”
I agree that the value of many interventions is sensitive to specific moral weights, but I disagree with “therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work”.
The increase in subjective wellbeing from GiveWell-funded work seems really high, and it could be competitive with mental health types of work. (or not, as different kinds of wellbeing can be reasonably valued in very different ways)
E.g. HLI “higher risk, higher reward” “Promising Charities” at https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/charities/ are both also funded/recommended by GiveWell.
Worth noting that besides HLI focusing on happiness, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship just incubated https://www.betterfuturesguide.org/ which seems to focus entirely on poverty reduction, and GiveWell is expanding their work on ”Livelihoods Programs”, which weigh income gains 2x higher than they normally would.
(I’m sure you know all the above, just writing it out for people with less context)
That’s not clear to me: all GiveWell interventions have lots of life-improving benefits besides life-saving.
E.g. for the AMF, 33% of the estimated value comes from long-term income increases, and for each life saved there’s ~200 malaria cases averted, which likely significantly increases subjective wellbeing
Thank you! Here’s a link from web.archive.org of the EA Forum citation https://web.archive.org/web/20230715000000*/https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0255/4986/5032/files/DC-CASE-STUDY_NEW-BRAND_WEB2.pdf?v=1653689936
But yeah if we can’t trust that there was a real significant population reduction it doesn’t mean much
I haven’t read the whole post, but “519 g of fertility bait prevents one rodent birth” seemed implausibly high. I asked Gemini to review it, and it came out with this:
This 519g figure assumes wild rats will drink 10% of their body weight in bait every day as their exclusive hydration source. But real-world data shows intermittent grazing is enough to cause cumulative infertility.
For example, in the Washington D.C. ContraPest pilot trial (Nov 2019–Oct 2020):
Site A had a starting colony of 391 rats.
Over 12 months, the population crashed by 88% (the juvenile count specifically dropped from 121 to just 2).
The entire colony consumed only 1.8L of bait all year.
If it truly took 519g to prevent one birth, 1,800g would have only prevented ~3.5 births for the whole colony.
Was it correct? I’m mostly curious about whether current LLMs can already help improving these estimates, or their reviews have too much noise
orgs like GiveWell are still getting a lot of funding
It’s not just that these orgs are still getting a lot of funding:
their funding is significantly increasing
there’s many more of them
many of them are making more and more varied grants themselves, e.g. GiveWell making 2 <$100k grants in 2026 which they didn’t use to do 5 years ago, Founders Pledge brand new Catalytic Impact Fund
there were more fellowship and grant and award opportunities than I could possibly apply to. It does not feel like that today.
I’m surprised by this, I think there’s a ton today. I’m not following this space actively but, besides the >100 job openings and >3 AIM programs mentioned above, here’s some off the top of my head:
CEA bootcamp (which as far as I know is not mainly about AI)
School for Moral Ambition fellowships and circles
Magnify Mentoring mentee applications (I think it now accepts more people than WANBAM did five years ago, but can’t quickly find numbers. I see it got $371k from Coefficient Giving in August 2025, and their revenue seems to be increasing)
Animal Advocacy Careers course and career advising
Their Job Board has 21 job openings from last week
You can also have a look at the most recent posts tagged “opportunities to take action” and the EA opportunities board, there’s lots of non-AI stuff, enough to overwhelm newcomers as much as EA in 2021, and likely way more than EA in 2017.
Also in general if Coefficient Giving and others are making more grants to more things, it likely means that there are more opportunities.
funding for non-AI projects has dried up
What are you basing this on? I think the opposite is going on. Some datapoints that come to mind:
Coefficient Giving more than doubled their funding for GiveWell for 2026, adding $175M on top of the existing $100M. They also started two new funds
GiveWell’s funding from non-Coefficient Giving donors is also increasing
Founders Pledge went from $25M money moved in 2022 → $80M in 2023 → $140M in 2024, and other major funders are emerging
Giving Green influences >$17M/year in climate donations, and recently started research into biodiversity projects
The EA Animal Welfare fund raised >$10M/y last year and is now targeting $20M/y
https://jobs.probablygood.org/ has 148 roles published in the last 4 days, only 10 of which are explicitly categorized as AI safety (although a few more involve AI)
Charity Entrepreneurship is launching more and more charities per year, and AIM as a whole has more programs
Thanks for sharing! I’d have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!
my first post on LessWrong was scrapped because they identified it as AI written
I’m surprised to read this, can you check your post on https://www.pangram.com/ ?
The link seems to be broken
https://benefficienza.it/ (spelled with two Fs) has a lot of material on effective giving in Italian, in case it’s useful, although nothing on catholicism as far as I’m aware.
Some EA articles were translated here: https://altruismoefficace.it/blog
And the EA handbook a few years ago was translated here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/ea-italy (I don’t know if it changed much since then)
There was also this article in the major Italian Catholic newspaper after the FTX scandals, which was not entirely negative, but still mostly skeptical.
To clarify, it was just in a Google Reviews carousel they also have on the homepage, at the bottom of the page, and it was quickly removed
But I’m not sure how fruitful it is for all of us to have a vibes-based conversation about the possible merits of this campaign.
I think promoting good norms and making them more “common knowledge” is one of the few ways that EA Forum conversations can maybe be useful.
As in, I think it’s good that “everyone knows that everyone knows” that we should have a strong bias to be collaborative towards other projects with similar goals, and these threads can help a bit with that.
(To be clear, my sense is that FarmKind is already well aware of this and this is collaborative campaign, especially after reading their comment. I mean for the EA Forum readers community as a whole)
Edit: new comment from FarmKind
Thank you for sharing this. I’m personally very surprised to see this campaign from FarmKind after reading “With friends like these” from Lewis Bollard and “professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot” from Joey Savoie.
I would have expected the ideal way to promote donations to animal welfare charities to be less antagonizing towards vegan-adjacent people.
@Vasco Grilo🔸given that your name is on thehttps://www.forgetveganuary.com/campaign and you’re active on this forum, I’m curious what you think about this. Were you informed?Edit: they will remove that section from the page
My understanding is that $47k is the estimated time-discounted average lifetime high-impact donations from a 10% pledger, but does not discount for the fact that many pledgers (especially the largest donors giving much more than 10%) would have donated significantly with or without a 10% pledge, so only a fraction of that is counterfactually due to the existence of the 10% pledge and pledge advocacy (whether by gwwc or by others)
Giving What We Can conservatively values the lifetime value of a 🔸 10% Pledge at $100K USD (inflation adjusted to 2024)
Quick note that the number on the GWWC website is about one order of magnitude lower
But of course these are averages, and the people you inspire could give significantly more/less, or significantly more/less counterfactually
will downvote myself for spreading false info, and wasting people’s time here.
That seems excessive, it was a reasonable question. I would let other readers decide whether it should be upvoted or downvoted.
But I am surprised you didn’t Google “Against Malaria Foundation Crypto” or something like that, it seems faster than asking here.
You can use https://web.archive.org/ for deleted web pages, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20250426145325/https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pc3CFbYxPXgyjoDpB/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic
The author also deleted their EA Forum and LessWrong accounts, so you’d need to reach out to them directly to ask why