Hi!
Iâm currently (Aug 2023) a Software Developer at Giving What We Can, helping make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
Iâm also a forum mod, which, shamelessly stealing from Edo, âmostly means that I care about this forum and about you! So let me know if thereâs anything I can do to help.â
Please have a very low bar for reaching out!
I won the 2022 donor lottery, happy to chat about that as well
How many of them have made that choice recently though?
A lot![1]
80k seems to mostly care about x-risk, but (perhaps surprisingly) their messaging is not just âHoly Shit, X-Riskâ or âCEOs are playing Russian roulette with you and your childrenâ.
They instead also cover a lot of cause-neutral EA arguments (e.g. scope sensitivity and the importance of effectiveness)
So I donât think itâs surprising that Rutger doesnât recommend them if he doesnât share (or even actively disagrees with?) those priorities even if his current focus on persuading mid-career professionals to look into alternative proteins and tobacco prevention sounds very EA-ish in other respects.
Yeah agree with this, but I still think that 80k is more than useless for altruists who donât value the long-term future, or are skeptical of 80kâs approach to trying to influence it.
Iâm curious whether he mentioned ProbablyGood or if heâs even aware of them?
My understanding is that the SMA team knows much more about the space than I do, so Iâm sure they are aware of them if Iâm aware of them.
I donât have an exact number, but I would conservatively guess more than 100 people and more than $100k in total donations for 2024
Iâve noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma
Note that the number of karma votes is not accurate, I think it gives users the impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are.
I donât have any insider information, but my speculation would be that they just think that they counterfactually reach more people by having a very separate brand.
i.e. SMA closely related to the EA brand/âflavor/âway of communicating would counterfactually help X more people do more good than EA by itself, while SMA as a separate movement with its own ideas/âstyle on how to do the most good would counterfactually help Y extra people, and Y > X.
I also think itâs likely that SMA believes that for their target audience it would be more valuable to interact with AIM than with 80k or CEA, not necessarily for the 3 reasons you mention.
I used to think the same, but now I see that many GWWC pledgers and donors mention 80k as the reason why theyâre pledging or donating, often to neartermist causes.
Iâve also heard several stories like this one of people being able to do more good in a neartermist cause thanks to 80k.
I think we tend to overestimate how common it is to consider âconsequentialist cosmopolitanismâ when thinking about doing good in the world. The vast majority of people donât consider important things like counterfactuals, or that they can help many more people abroad.
See for example Part 2 and Part 3 of the 80k career guide: I think they can definitely be valuable for an introduction to neartermist EA.
You could maybe say that Probably Goodâs career guide is better, so it makes sense to omit 80k, but I donât know if they cover all the neartermist-valuable topics covered by 80k.
The 80k job board also has a lot of non-longtermist roles (but maybe itâs a subset of the Probably Good job board, Iâm not sure)
Thanks for all the work!
I found it a bit strange that this is the first thing you can filter on:
Was there a lot of user demand for this?
I also found some of the tags surprising: I think some orgs marked as âPart of the EA Communityâ might not consider themselves such, have you checked with them that they are ok with the categorization?
The EA Forum/âLessWrong codebase is open source, you can see it just means that your karma change for 2024 was >= 500
https://ââgithub.com/ââsearch?q=repo%3AForumMagnum%2FForumMagnum%20karma%20farmer&type=code
(And beloved means that the most common reaction was receiving hearts)
I liked the cute animation I got for karma farming https://ââres.cloudinary.com/ââcea/ââvideo/ââupload/ââv1734615259/ââwrapped-2024/ââKarma-farmer-green.mp4
I agree that salaries in EA should be more in line with the rest of the non-profit sector[1], that Open Philanthropy is the main funder of many projects, that funding diversification has tradeoffs, and that members of the EA community should donate (much) more.
But I think this post exaggerates the % of effectiveness-oriented funding that comes from OpenPhil, at least for projects outside of EA community building.
I think the main reason is that most effectiveness-minded donors (including billionaires and agencies like USAID) are not part of the EA community, but still fund âcauses the EA community cares aboutâ.
Other/âIndividual EA donors 15mm (GWWC donors, etc. based on some rough math from (source). Iâm very interested if someone has a better or more accurate figure.
Here are estimated appproximate amounts donated via the GWWC donation platform in the past year, by rough cause area. (Note, these have not been double-checked and should not be considered official numbers, and they donât include donations reported by pledgers made outside the GWWC platform)
| Cause Area | USD |
| Addressing climate change | $13M[2] |
| Global health and wellbeing | $10M |
| Animal welfare | $5M |
| Reducing global catastrophic risks | $4M |
| Effective giving and/âor effective altruism | $2M[3] |
| Unknown (e.g. donor lottery) | $0.1M |
For donors not using the GWWC platform, I think this hinges a lot on how you define âEA donorsâ (see below)
Iâm not sure if Givewell and Open Phil is double counting here (since Open Phil gives to Givewell) but Iâm going to ignore Givewell as EA funding since a lot of this comes from what many would consider outside of the EA community (many people and philanthropists who wouldnât consider themselves to be EAs though Iâm not sure this is completely fair).
I think most GWWC donors also donât consider themselves part of the EA community[4], I donât think this matters much in terms of our willingness to fund the most impactful projects that help improve the lives of others.
Here are some other effectiveness-oriented sources of donations:
The Life You Can Save recently announced $100M in donations since 2013.
Via Effektiv Spenden ânearly 10,000 individuals in Germany and Switzerland donated 19 million euros to highly effective organizations in 2023.â
The Founders Pledge community also donates significant amounts to high-impact projects https://ââwww.founderspledge.com/ââour-impact.
All the partners of the new Lead Exposure Action Fund (and many other large philanthropists) donate very significant amounts to high-impact projects, but I think only Good Ventures ever claimed to be part of the EA community.
The problem, I think, is that most causes the EA community cares about donât have a lot of outside support. Who outside of the EA community would fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare?
As you mention in a footnote, the Navigation Fund is funding the Shrimp Welfare Project, and many other high-impact projects in causes that the EA community cares about, even if (as far as I know) itâs not explicitly part of the EA community, and you donât include it in the funding amounts in this post.
Crustacean Compassion was started in 2016 and only got funding from OpenPhil in 2021. I donât think that only people in the EA community donate significantly to crustacean welfare.
I think itâs weird to mention âfund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfareâ as causes in a post on how OpenPhil is the main funder of many EA projects, given that OpenPhil stopped funding those.
I think if you were to ask a well-calibrated Toby Ord/âWill Macaskill back in 2009 the odds of the movement having billions of dollars committed to it in a few years, they would have put the odds incredibly low.
In his 2013 TED Talk, Peter Singer claims that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet were âthe most effective altruists in historyâ, and in 2023 MacAskill keeps defining EA not in terms of a specific movement/âcommunity but in terms of âusing evidence and careful reasoning to try to do more good.â
I think probably in their mind EA (as they define it) already had billions of dollars committed to it in 2009.
See also We need more nuance regarding funding gaps from 2022 with an estimate of the number of funding sources for different cause areas at different scales. I think for most cause areas the number of funding sources of more than ~$1M/âyear increased since 2022.
Besides the Shrimp Welfare Project mentioned above, other interesting examples of non-OpenPhil funding are that Lightcone stopped receiving funding from OpenPhil but managed to raise >$1.1M in a month and that EAIF isnât *currently* funding constrained.
I think currently EA salaries are higher for non-leadership roles and probably lower for leadership roles
Mostly this $10M donation
Note that this area might be over-represented in this table, as the main way to donate to GWWC and to Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund is via the GWWC platform, while donations to projects in other cause areas are usually made outside of it
For what itâs worth, I also donât consider myself part of the EA community.
Sorry for the very late reply, basically my understanding is that interest rates now are high, so this post implies that we should consider investing now and donating later.
Is that a correct interpretation? Are you following that strategy yourself?
How do you decide the timing of your donations?
I initially felt a strong sense of urgency to donate as soon as I can:
There are likely compounding positive returns to donations (e.g. LLINs could slightly increase the rate of growth of the local economy)
I thought that the best funding opportunities get covered with time
I might lose all the money
I might stop wanting to donate it (e.g. if a family member gets ill)
Iâm considering leaning a bit on the âinvesting to give laterâ side for 2025:
Interest rates seem much higher[1]
Inequality seems to be increasing (which means that by investing now I might be able to pay more people in the future to work on impactful projects)
I see many people like you havenât lost interest in donating after 11 years
But I donât know how to balance all those considerations, and if I do decide to give later I wouldnât know how to decide when.
I think itâs normal, and even good that the EA community doesnât have a clear prioritization of where to donate. People have different values and different beliefs, and so prioritize donations to different projects.
It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones
What do you mean? I donât understand how animal welfare campaigns interact with x-risks, except for reducing the risk of future pandemics, but I donât think thatâs what you had in mind (and even then, I donât think those are the kinds of pandemics that x-risk minded people worry about)
I donât know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are
It seems clear to me that there is no general consensus, and some of the most vocal groups are actively fighting against each other.
I donât really know what orgs do all-considered work on this topic. I guess the LTFF?
You can see Giving What We Can recommendations for global catrastrophic risk reduction on this page[1] (i.e. thereâs also Longviewâs Emerging Challenges Fund). Many other orgs and foundations work on x-risk reduction, e.g. Open Philanthropy.
I am more confused/âinattentive and this community is covering a larger set of possible choices so itâs harder to track what consensus is
I think that if there were consensus that a single project was obviously the best, we would all have funded it already, unless it was able to productively use very very high amounts of money (e.g., cash transfers)
Disclaimer: I work at GWWC
20% of the global cost of growing chickens is probably in the order of at least ~$20B, which is much more than the global economy is willing to spend on animal welfare.
As mentioned in the other comment, I think itâs extremely unlikely that there is a way to stop âmostâ of the chicken suffering while increasing costs by only ~20%.
Some estimate the better chicken commitment already increases costs by 20% (although there is no consensus on that, and factory farmers estimate 37.5%), and my understanding is that it doesnât stop most of the suffering, but âjustâ reduces it a lot.
You can also right-click â inspect element on the time indicator:
I think it is discussed every now and then, see e.g. comments here: New EA cause area: Breeding really dumb chickens and this comment
And note that the Better Chicken Commitment includes a policy of moving to higher welfare breeds.
Naively, I would expect that suffering is extremely evolutionarily advantageous for chickens in factory farm conditions, so chickens that feel less suffering will not grow as much meat (or require more space/âresources). For example, based on my impression that broiler chickens are constantly hungry, I wouldnât be surprised if they would try to eat themselves unless they felt pain when doing so. But this is a very uninformed take based on a vague understanding of what broiler chickens are optimized for, which might not be true in practice.
I think this idea might be more interesting to explore in less price-sensitive contexts, where thereâs less evolutionary pressure and animals live in much better conditions, mostly animals used in scientific research. But of course it would help much fewer animals who usually suffer much less.
Donât know if this is useful, but years ago HLI tried to estimate spillover effects from therapy in Happiness for the whole household: accounting for household spillovers when comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers, and already found that spillover effects were likely significantly higher for cash transfers compared to therapy.
In 2023 in Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded they estimated that the difference is even greater in favour of cash transfers. (after feedback like Why I donât agree with HLIâs estimate of household spillovers from therapy and Assessment of Happier Lives Instituteâs Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds)
I wouldnât update too strongly on this single comparison, and I donât know if there are better analyses of spillover effects for different kinds of interventions, but it seems that there are reasons to believe that spillover effects from cash transfers are relatively greater than for other interventions.
Hereâs a comment from the 80k interviewer 2 years ago: https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââRPTPo8eHTnruoFyRH/ââsome-important-questions-for-the-ea-leadership?commentId=Xr27yCbC72ZPh5Fzn
Hi Oli â I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.
I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didnât contradict me.
Itâs only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Samâs reference to ânice apartmentsâ in the interview:
âI donât know, I kind of like nice apartments. ⌠Iâm not really that much of a consumer exactly. Itâs never been whatâs important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets.â
Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.
In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, Iâve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the âcryptoâ social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.
Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.
Two years later, after having read way too many posts, comments, podcasts and a book about SBF, my understanding is that the most likely interpretation is that SBF was actually frugal for a billionaire.
By far the main thing is the Bahamas luxury penthouse and properties, where he lived with at least 6 other coworkers. The person who bought the property recently did an interview claiming that the high cost was due to a lack of supply of real estate in the Bahamas, the need to incentivize employees to move there, and the fact that FTX believed it was very rich: https://ââx.com/ââTuckerCarlson/ââstatus/ââ1844100642979099054?t=3585 . I think this not an absurd explanation even in hindsight. That person does not talk positively about SBF or the âeffective altruism cultâ at all in the interview, but describes SBF as obsessed with work and not caring about much else.
On cars: Caroline Ellison during her testimony against SBF testified that they were originally assigned luxury cars, but Bankman-Fried suggested they switch to a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic. I canât find any reliable source that Bankman owned a $110k âBMW X7â. The source that Thorsdad uses is this website which doesnât look reliable. It seems that the Judge who sentenced Bankman drives a BMW X7, so maybe it was generated from that? In any case, $110k seems a cheap car for a billionaire, and the fact that it made the list of most luxurious expenditures seems telling.
On restaurants, the fact that they spent up to ~$40 per day per employee (if Iâm doing the math right) doesnât seem crazy to me.
On the extravagant lifestyle article, most of the expenses seem to be buying favour with the local authorities, the most extravagant thing for employees seems to be this:
employees could request any groceries they wanted twice a week and frequently received comped meals. And there were parties at Albany, which âat some point I got tired of.â
The level of spoilage was such that once, she recalled an FTX employee requesting a pair of toenail clippers over Slack, which was quickly delivered.
Even Habryka, who (after the FTX collapse) claimed that SBF âwas actually living a quite lavish lifestyleâ[1] also claimed that SBF was in many ways frugal. Two years later, as far as I know, zero of the people who were close to SBF at the time described him as lavish.
In general, I would encourage a lot of scepticism when reading Thorstad. I think that if he was writing similar articles on any topic besides âEA criticismâ, people would point out that they are extremely misleading and often straight-up false.
But note that two independent sources told me in private that the post-FTX-collapse comments from Habryka are inconsistent with what he used to say about SBF/âFTX as late as April 2022, so I donât know how reliable they are, and afaik there are no public claims from anyone before November 2022 that SBF himself was lavish.
There can be ties at any point during the iterative elimination process, not just during the final round (if anything they are more likely in earlier rounds).
From the link above:
For small IRV elections, there can be frequent last-place ties that prevent clear bottom elimination, so itâs critically important to have a clear tie-breaking mechanism in jurisdictions with few voters.
If there are more than 3 candidates with any votes, eliminate the least popular, and redistribute those votes according to the votersâ next favourite choice.
What happens if thereâs a tie? E.g. if there are 4 candidates with 30, 20, 10, 10 votes each.
I guess itâs unlikely to be determinant in practice but might be worth stating just in case.
ETA: https://ââelectowiki.org/ââwiki/ââInstant-runoff_voting#Handling_ties_in_IRV_elections
Having read your reflections, Iâm still curious as to why you donât think non-OpenPhil donors should give to farmed animal welfare, if you feel comfortable sharing it publicly. I guessed four options, ordered from most to least likely, but I might have misunderstood the post
We should donate to wild animal welfare instead, as itâs more cost-effective
There are no donation opportunities that counterfactually help a significant amount of farmed animals
There is no strong moral obligation to improve future lives, and donations to farmed animal welfare necessarily improve future lives, as farmed animal lives are very short
Tomasik-style arguments on the impact of animal farming on the amount of wild animal suffering
Is it a combination of these? As a concrete example, Iâm curious if you believe that the Shrimp Welfare Project shouldnât be funded, should be funded by ânon-EAâ donors, or will be funded anyway and donors shouldnât worry about it.
By the way, thank you for nudging towards sharing evaluations with the evaluated organization before posting, I think itâs a really valuable norm.
I think 2 and especially 3 are very likely, but I think itâs also likely that Bregman was very impressed with AIM, and possibly found it more inspiring than 80k/âCEA, and/âor more pragmatic, or a better fit for the kind of people he wanted to reach regardless of their views on AI.