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
Thank you for raising this!
After your email last week, we agreed to edit that section and copy EVâs terms on Feedback. Iâve just changed the text on the website.
We only removed the part about âall Feedback we request from you will be collected on an anonymous basisâ, as we might want to collect non-anonymous feedback in the future.
If anyone else has any feedback, make sure to also send us an email (like Eevee did) as we might miss things on the EA Forum.
(Disclaimer: I work at Giving What We Can but I was not involved in this program, and this is just my personal take)
Hi Daniela, could you clarify what you mean by âmost of the EA funds are being given to only 2 organizations? (At least for Animal welfare)â
There is no consensus on what counts as âEA fundsâ, but people usually include Open Philanthropy, which is by far the largest funder and funds many organizations. Are you referring to the EA Animal Welfare Fund? They also support many organizations.
Many national effective giving orgs currently only show The Humane League and Good Food Institute on their website, but that does not imply âmost of the EA fundsâ are being given to them. Also, Giving What We Can allows donors to support several other projects in animal welfare, I imagine that as other effective giving organizations grow, they might also add more projects if thereâs enough interest from donors (but Iâm just speculating.)
On âevaluating the evaluatorsâ you might be interested in this page from Giving What We Can and the evaluation of ACE and the EA Animal Welfare Fund
Note that I expect more recent numbers will be significantly different, if nothing else because of this $10,000,000 donation to the Giving Green Fund (which is more than the total for âCreating a better futureâ in the linked spreadsheet)
Thank you for doing this, and huge thanks to the anonymous donor!
Three quick questions on the implementation side of things:
How will you verify the conditions for the bonuses? E.g. as far as I know anyone can claim to organize a local EA group, itâs not clear what counts as an âEA orgâ or âEA grantâ, and I donât think lists of EAG(x) volunteers are public.
Do you have plans to mitigate some of the main drawbacks of quadratic funding? E.g. Vulnerability to collusion
How do you define âcommunity memberâ? E.g. what prevents someone from making 100 accounts or sharing this on X and encouraging hundreds of random people to vote for their favourite project?
Apologies if these were already answered somewhere, Iâm really curious to see the results of this experiment!
Iâm surprised that the âtop 10â doesnât include Denmark, Austria, Belgium, and Germany, since they all have more population-adjusted participants than Ireland, are not English-speaking, are more distant from London, and have lower GDP per capita[1]
Are we using different data?
In general, Iâm a bit sceptical of these analyses, compared to looking at the countries/âcities with the most participants in absolute terms. I also expect Claude to make lots of random mistakes.
But of course, Irelandâs GDP is very artificial
You can DM a moderator (e.g. me) or ask forum staff via these channels
Usernames can be changed here: https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââaccount but only once
Adding Teaching At the Right Level to the list of education interventions that might be interesting to support
feels like weâre violently agreeing here or something
Yes, I think this is a great summary. Hopefully not too violently?
I mostly wanted to share my (outsider) understanding of MA and its relationship with EA
In general, I think the articleâs main point was to promote Moral Ambition, not to be a criticism of EA, so itâs not surprising that itâs not great as a criticism of EA.
Not really sure how donating ~10% of my income to Global Health and Animal Welfare charities matches that framework tbqh. But yeah âweaponizeâ is highly aggressive language here, if you take it out thereâs not much wrong with it. Maybe Rutger or the interviewer think Capitalism is inherently bad or something?
For what itâs worth, Rutger has been donating 10% to effective charities for a while and has advocated for the GWWC pledge many times:
So I donât think heâs against that, and lots of people have taken the 10% pledge specifically because of his advocacy.
Is this implying that EA is dead (news to me) or that is in terminal decline (arguable, but knowledge of the future is difficult etc etc)?
I think sadly this is a relatively common view, see e.g. the deaths of effective altruism, good riddance to effective altruism, EA is no longer in ascendancy
I mean, this doesnât sound like an argument against EA or EA ideas?
I think this is also a common criticism of the movement though (e.g. Emmet Shear on why he doesnât sign the 10% pledge)
This just falls victim to classic EA Judo, we win by ippon.
I think this mixes effective altruism ideals/âgoals (which everyone agrees with) with EAâs specific implementation, movement, culture and community. Also, arguments and alternatives are not really about âwinningâ and âlosingâ
So whereâs the EA hate coming from?I think âEA hateâ is too strong and is mostly/âactually coming from the interviewer, maybe more than Rutger. Seems Rutger is very disillusioned with the state of EA, but many EAs feel that way too!
Then you probably agree that itâs great that theyâre starting a new movement with similar ideals! Personally, I think it has a huge potential, if nothing else because of this:
If we want millions of people to e.g. give effectively, I think we need to have multiple âmovementsâ, âflavoursâ or âinterpretationsâ of EA projects.
You might also be interested in this previous thread on the difference between EA and Moral Ambition.
After watching Darrenâs recent talk, Iâm more curious to hear what he thinks about GiveWellâs analysis of water quality interventions, e.g. Evidence Actionâs Dispensers for Safe Water program.
How did Beast Philanthropy decide what to focus on for your next water security project?
Is talk about vegan diets being more healthy is mostly just confirmation bias and tribal thinking?
I also think if often is. I find discussions for and against veganism surprisingly divisive and emotionally-charged (see e.g. r/âAntiVegan and r/âexvegans )
That said, my understanding is that many studies do control for things like socio-economic status, and they mostly find positive results for many diets (including, but not exclusively, plant-based ones). You can see some mentioned in a previous discussion here.
In general, I think itâs very reasonable when deciding whether something is âmore healthyâ to compare it to a âstandardâ. As an extreme example, I would expect a typical chocolate-based diet to be less healthy than the standard American diet. So, while it would be healthier than a cyanide-based diet, it would still be true and useful to say that a chocolate-based diet is unhealthy.
You should be able to change it here: https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââaccount
Maybe non-moderators can only change it once, to prevent abuse?
If anyone doesnât see that option, just send me a DM and I can change it or ask the admins
The orange line above the circles makes it look like thereâs a similar number of people at the extreme left and the extreme right, which doesnât seem to be the case
Thanks! Should be fixed now. I think that was mostly built for internal use, so itâs not polished or vetted
Here are more Giving What We Can Stats linked from a thread last year
Here is our Growth Dashboard (live metrics, unaudited, but mostly accurate) and a specific monthly graph for when pledges are created (as opposed to their start date which can be any date a pledger chooses, although it is often the day they pledge).
Looks great!
I tried to make it into a beeswarm, and while IMHO it does look nice it also needs a bunch more vertical space (and/âor smaller circles)
I would personally go for a beeswarm plot.
But even just adding some random y and some transparency seems to improve things
document.querySelectorAll(â.ForumEventPoll-userVoteâ).forEach(e â e.style.top = `${Math.random()*100-50}px`);
document.querySelectorAll(â.ForumEventPoll-userVoteâ).forEach(e â e.style.opacity = `0.7`);
We donât usually set up prediction markets but someone else would be welcome to!
Andri set up this Manifold market a few months ago, itâs the only one Iâm aware of
Investing to give more later can definitely be a reasonable strategy, depending on many things. Thereâs a whole forum topic with 10 years of posts on the timing of philanthropy.
Re: animals, I think by donating to animal charities the power transfer would be from you to the organizations you would be supporting, and by investing the power transfer would be to your future self.
But I think this model is too zero-sum. I think the overall influence of animal rights proponents can increase as a consequence of better allocation of capital between the different actors. Similarly, by investing the extra influence of your future self could be greater than the reduced influence of your present self, depending on your returns.
I havenât looked at this model, but in GWWCâs 2020â2022 Impact evaluation, you can change the annual discount rate here or here (and other key parameters in cells nearby)
If I understand correctly, a ~10% yearly discount rate ~halves the expected value of a pledge and changes the best guess non-marginal multiplier from 30x to 23x
I think the equivalent in this model is here and a ~10% discount rate changes the marginal multiplier from 14x to 8x