Thank you so much for sharing this! I updated the post.
Miri
Karma: 178
Hi Saul,
Thank you for flagging this! I updated the citation.
From what I can tell, the expenses published are the salaries, which are about $1m/year. I am sure that there must be other costs, but unsure how substantial they are.
This post is only comparing yearly budgets, so I have not included investments/donations raised, cash in the bank or other similar metrics for any of the orgs—not because I don´t find this important and interesting, but because it´s even harder to find this information than just the yearly budgets.
Thank you for pointing that out—I had also linked to an EV report for the UK. I removed that link as it could indeed be misleading, and only left the link referencing only the CEA budget.
I only linked to the information I could find publicly, I am unsure why organisations would share additional budgets for me to include in a forum post that they are not publishing themselves.
I am sure I might have missed stuff though, so if you know of additional public information—or have insider information you can share—please let me know!
RP seems to have a somewhat unique view among research organisations in identifying a funding gap rather than a talent gap for research staff. I would be very curious why you think this is the case and how you have solved the talent constraints.
Is RP research donor-driven in terms of priorities? Do you worry that Rethink could become vastly more focused on some cause areas over others due to available funding in the space, as opposed to more neglected areas that could be more impactful?
Hey Rob,
Thank you so much for your answer, it´s really interesting to learn more about this. I understand that there are good reasons to not provide full reasoning transparency, but if these judgment calls are being made and underpin the work of CEA’s groups team, that seems very relevant for the EA movement.
Do I interpret your comment correctly, that the CEA groups team does have an internal qualitative ranking, but you are not able to share it publicly? So different values could be assigned to the same resources, like a theoretical comparison of two people taking the same job for two different organisations?
I have heard similar sentiments as Linda from multiple sources, including some community builders, so I am wondering if there might be some miscommunication going on.
Could you give some concrete examples to help clarify this? For example, how does the CEA groups team value e.g. 1 person going to work for a GiveWell top charity vs 1 person going to work for a top AI charity?
Leaving all other pro or con arguments for this funding opportunity aside for the purpose of this comment, I think the opportunity cost argument here is really strong.
$3.6m is about the amount it would take to cover 100% of Charity Entrepreneurship and 100% of Probably Good’s yearly budget, as well as 50% of Giving What We Can’s yearly budget.
Comparing that to the effects of adding donor diversity to a 80-90% longtermist supported org, it seems really hard to make the case for this being the best investment if the main reason you are interested in this opportunity is to diminish EAs focus on longtermism.