Software Developer at Giving What We Can, trying to make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
Lorenzo Buonannođ¸
Karma: 5,290
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 hasnât been updated
Not sure how useful this is, and you mentioned you canât 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 itâs a major reason for its success. It seems more unique/âspecific 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 Iâm grateful that thanks to you it survives as a paragraph in the essay.
It looks like this is driven entirely by Givewell/âglobal 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 âOtherâ 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 itâs worth, their subreddit seems a bit ambivalent about explicit âeffective altruismâ 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 âProject for Awesomeâ 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)
It also formats weirdly on mobile
DoneThat is also significantly cheaper (at least for now) and Christoph is very responsive to feedback/ârequests (once replied to an email within 6 minutes)
I used DoneThat for a while and also highly recommend it, especially given the low cost (5$/âmonth)
As a piece of feedback, I think you should have included this video in the post: https://ââwww.loom.com/ââshare/ââ53d45343051846ca8328ccd91fa4c3a8 and people should look at it before deciding whether to download it. It made me feel much more confident in the privacy aspects (especially when using oneâs own Gemini API key)
If you upload it to YouTube you can also easily embed it in a bunch of places (including this forum)
I personally found it a very refreshing change of language/âthinking/âstyle from the usual EA Forum/âLessWrong post, and found spending some extra effort to (hopefully) understand it worth it and highly enjoyable.
My one sentence summary/âtranslation would be that advocating for longtermism would likely benefit on the margin from using more of a virtue ethics approach (e.g. using saints and heroes as examples) instead of a rationalist/âutilitarian approach, as most people feel even less of an obligation towards future beings than towards the global poor, and many of the most altruistic people act altruistically for emotional/âspiritual reasons rather than rational ones.
I could have definitely misunderstood the post though, so someone correct me if I misinterpreted it, and there are a lot more valuable points. E.g. that most people agree on an abstract level that future people matter, and that actively causing them harm is bad. So I think it claims that longtermists should focus less on strengthening that case and more on other things. Another interesting point is that to âmitigate hazards we create for ourselvesâ we could take advantage of the fact that âcausing harm is intuitively worse than not producing benefitâ for most people.
I think SummaryBot below also did a good job at translating.
Reposting this comment from the CEO of Open Philanthropy 12 days ago, as I think some people missed it:
A quick update on this: Good Ventures is now open to supporting work that Open Phil recommends on digital minds/âAI moral patienthood. Weâre still figuring out where that work should slot in (including whether weâd open a public call for applications) and will update people working in the field when we do. Additionally, Good Ventures are now open to considering a wider range of recommendations in right-of-center AI policy and a couple other smaller areas (e.g. in macrostrategy/âfuturism), though those will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for now. Weâll hopefully develop clearer parameters for GV interest over time (and share more when we have those). In practice, given our increasing work with other donors, we donât think any of this is a huge update; weâd like to continue to hear about and expect to be able to direct funding to the most promising opportunities whether or not they are a fit for Good Ventures.
(More info on the filmâs creation in the FLI interview: Suzy Shepherd on Imagining Superintelligence and âWriting Doomâ)
Correct link: https://ââwww.youtube.com/ââwatch?v=McnNjFgQzyc
Another FLI-funded YouTube channel is https://ââwww.youtube.com/ââ@Siliconversations, which has ~2M views on AI Safety
Posts on this topic that I liked:
âI would summarize a lot of effective altruism as âpretending to actually tryââ
And this response: In praise of pretending to really try (although Iâm not sure I agree, I think itâs an interesting point)
Altruism sharpens altruism (I always misremember this as âaltruism begets altruismâ, which I think is catchier)
I fairly strongly disagree with âbe honest about your counterfactual impactâmost people overestimate it.â, and on only working at a nonprofit you consider effective if you think youâre ~10x better than the counterfactual hire or âirreplaceable.â
As an example, Iâm confident that there are software developers who would have been significantly more impactful than me at my role at GWWC, but didnât apply, and the extra ~$/âyear that they are donating (if they are actually donating more in practice than what they would have) does not compensate for that.
I also think that thereâs a good chance that I would have done other vaguely impactful work, or donated more myself, if they had been hired instead of me, largely compensating for their missed donations.
I remember wondering the same a few years ago, and I came to the opposite conclusion. I think the biggest differences in my reasoning were:
I think in practice it takes much more than 30 minutes on average to write a will, even more so if itâs a significant amount of wealth (like $100k)
I think the annualized chance of death for someone worth $100k at 25 is significantly lower than the population average
People with no risk factors (e.g. heart disease, cancer) have a significantly lower chance of death, and if someone discovers a risk factor they can think about a will after that discovery
Also quickly noting that youâre using the annualized chance of death for males in the US, but a significant percentage of EA Forum readers are women, so have less than half the mortality rate between 15 and 37, and/âor live in countries with a much lower youth mortality risk (e.g.in the UK itâs 0.6 per 1,000 25 y/âo males, in Italy 0.4, in the Netherlands 0.4 if Iâm interpreting this correctly, I expect Germany and other european countries to be similar, Canada 0.97, Australia 0.6)
The community tag was originally introduced as a way to separate out FTX-scandal related tags.
I donât think thatâs true, based on what CEA staff were posting publicly and some conversations I had at the time.
Some relevant posts and comment threads:
1. https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââwvBfYnNeRvfEXvezP/ââmoving-community-discussion-to-a-separate-tab-a-test-we#Why_consider_doing_this_at_all_
When I was a moderator, my understanding was that the community tag was more about separating posts related to EA as in âdoing goodâ from posts related to EA as in âa specific community of peopleâ. E.g. People uninterested in the community but still interested in AI Safety would still be the target audience of a post on âAI safety talent developmentâ
That said, there were plenty of ambiguous cases, and users can tag any of their own posts as community when posting, so I agree that itâs somewhat inconsistently applied.
Thank you for running the numbers!
Iâm not sure about using these results to update your estimates of Ĺ (as there are too many other differences between the US and LMICs, e.g. access to hospitals, no tubercolosis). But it does seem that reasonable values of Ĺ would explain most of the lack of effects, especially for the study where mothers received âjustâ $333/âmonth and similar ones.
I havenât run the numbers, and this is not my field so the below is very low confidence, but now that you mention it I wouldnât be surprised if isoelastic utility would be enough to explain the lack of results.
LLMs claim that if the effect size is 10 times smaller, you need a sample size 100x larger to have the same statistical significance (someone correct me if this is wrong)
So if a GiveDirectly RCT in Kenya needs a sample size of 2,000 individuals to detect a statistically significant effect; an RCT in the US where you expect the effect to be 10x smaller would need 200,000 individuals, which is intractable[1].
Another intuition is that the effects of cash transfers in LMIC are significant but not huge, and iirc many experts claim that after ~5 years from the transfer there are negligible effects on subjective well-being, so it wouldnât take that much for the effect to become undetectable.
But again, this is all an uninformed vague guess.
- ^
Edit: Gemini raises a good point that variance could also be higher in the US. If the standard deviation of wellbeing for beneficiaries in the US is 2x larger than in Kenya, and the effect is 10x smaller, I think youâd need a 400x larger sample size, not âjustâ 100x
- ^
I think these studies are just more evidence on the difference between US poverty and global poverty.
Some comments from the post:
Kelsey Piper wrote a nice article on recent results of cash transfers in the US: Giving people money helped less than I thought it would
If you give a new mom [in the US] a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, thatâs gotta show up in the data, right?
Alas.
A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America. Some programs targeted the homeless, some new mothers and some families living beneath the poverty line. The goal was to figure out whether sizable monthly payments help people lead better lives, get better educations and jobs, care more for their children and achieve better health outcomes.
Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results arenât âuncertain.â Theyâre pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesnât correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction.
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And itâs practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid.
I cannot stress how shocking I find this and I want to be clear that this is not âwe got some weak counterevidence.â These are careful, well-conducted studies. They are large enough to rule out even small positive effects and they are all very similar. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context weâd consider definitive.
[...]
Overall, the larger and more credible studies in this space have tended to find worse effects.
While itâs sad that the lives of people in those studies didnât improve, I think this is some evidence that Giving isnât demanding, and that giving 10% wouldnât worsen the life of a median person in the US in a measurable way.
Someone just mentioned that they accidentally pledged twice in 2015 and 2022, so we merged the accounts and weâre back at 10,000 đ
Congratulations on indeed being the 10,000th active pledger!
Thanks! I think thatâs a great way to phrase it and captures a core reason why I donate, and what I wanted to express in this post.