Software Developer at Giving What We Can, trying to make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
Lorenzo Buonanno🔸
Karma: 5,443
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.
Yes this post is very much “why I donate” and definitely not “why everyone should donate”.
Most people are also not atheists, much poorer ( see gwwc.org/hrai ), value their wellbeing hundreds of times more then the wellbeing of others, and don’t view spending money as voting on how the global economy allocates its resources, so all other paragraphs in this post would also not apply.
In that paragraph I mention what I perceive the effect of extra spending vs extra donating to be on others because that informs why I personally donate, I could have phrased it better.
From what I can tell, most orgs I’ve checked don’t offer this option through their websites (for example, GWWC, Horizon, and AMF).
GWWC accepts crypto donations (from most countries) and stock donations (from the US) above $1,000 USD, see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/faq/can-i-donate-cryptocurrency-stocks-or-other-appreciated-assets
AMF accepts crypto donations: https://www.againstmalaria.com/donate_Crypto.aspx and stock donations: https://www.againstmalaria.com/donate_securities.aspxFor others, I see that Effective Altruism DC mentions contacting them via email on https://www.effectivealtruismdc.org/contribute , I think sending a quick email can often help.
Yeah you literally wrote:
“Under my Christian worldview, nothing I have is really ‘mine’ anyway, and part of being a good human is to pass on what I’ve been handed, and even better multiply it if possible.”
I think how I see it feels a bit different because I see money more as tool to use than as a resource to share. I think it should be used to help improve the lives of others, but it does importantly feel that it’s my responsibility that mine gets used that way. Not sure if that makes sense.
Thanks! I wouldn’t overgeneralize the model of “money as votes”: I’m not an economist but I think the situation in practice is much more complex and wouldn’t apply well to “burning money” (e.g. buying things gives the market information and incentives, and central banks have a target inflation rate, so your “votes” wouldn’t be redistributed in the way you’d expect)
I do find it a useful model to keep in mind when thinking about spending, and I think it applies well enough to “yachts/pizza vs bednets” to be useful.
You probably want to reach out to the EA Global team about these kinds of things. You can find their contact info on the EAG page here:
Thank you! Quick note that “money not being yours” is not what I personally believe or wanted to convey in the post. I (sometimes) think my money is my votes, and I want to use them to vote for the things I think are most valuable.
I think it was Amrit’s great post and others that mentioned things like “I don’t think there’s an especially important sense in which “my” money is mine”
Thanks! I think that’s a great way to phrase it and captures a core reason why I donate, and what I wanted to express in this post.
I give because it’s the most rational way to spend my money
Not run by Giving What We Can, see GWWC is retiring 10 initiatives.
If there is enough interest, I guess people could self-organize like with the first one
Quick flag that the FAQ right below hasn’t been updated
Not sure how useful this is, and you mentioned you can’t speak for the choice of principles, but sharing on a personal note that the collaborative spirit value was one of the things I appreciated the most about EA when I first came across it.
I think that infighting is a major reason why EA and many similar movements achieve far less than they could. I really like when EA is a place where people with very different beliefs who prioritise very different projects can collaborate productively, and I think it’s a major reason for its success. It seems more unique/specific than acknodwledging tradeoffs, more important to have explicitly written as a core value to prevent the community from drifting away from it, and a great value proposition.
As James, I also found it weird that what had become a canonical definition of EA was changed without a heads-up to its community.
In any case, thank you so much for all your work, and I’m grateful that thanks to you it survives as a paragraph in the essay.
It looks like this is driven entirely by Givewell/global health and development reduction, and that actually the other fields have been stable or even expanding.
This seems the opposite of what the data says up to 2024
Comparing 2024 to 2022, GH decreased by 9%, LTXR decreased by 13%, AW decreased by 23%, Meta decreased by 21% and “Other” increased by 23%
I think the data for 2025 is too noisy and mostly sensitive to reporting timing (whether an org publishes their grant reports early in the year or later in the year) to inform an opinion
Hopefully this is auspicious for things to come?
My understanding is that they already raise and donate millions of dollars per year to effective projects in global health (especially tuberculosis)
For what it’s worth, their subreddit seems a bit ambivalent about explicit “effective altruism” connections (see here or here)Btw, I would be surprised if the ITN framework was independently developed from first principles:
He says exactly the same 3 things in the same order
They have known about effective altruism for at least 11 years (see the top comment here)
There have been many effective altruism themed videos in their “Project for Awesome” campaign several years
They have collaborated several times with 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can
There are many other reasonable things you can come up with (e.g. urgency)
The link seems to be broken