I am Issa Rice. https://issarice.com/
riceissa(Issa Rice)
Karma: 1,017
Meetup : Challenges of Effective Altruism
Meetup : Animal Suffering Documentary Night
Meetup : Discussion with Jonathan Courtney from Giving What We Can
Meetup : Donation Decision Day
Meetup : Discussion Meetup: Volunteering
if I recall correctly, direct donations are not subject to income tax on the donee’s part, which makes it even cheaper for the donors.
At least on Patreon (which you seem to be suggesting that people use) you probably have to pay tax if you make over $600 per year. See their FAQ on taxes:
If you are a US creator, and you make over $600 a year, you’ll need to complete a W9 and we will send you a 1099.
[...]
In most jurisdictions, the money you receive from your patrons is taxable income.
If you are hired by an EA institution to do a particular set of tasks, you are being paid to do those tasks, and help that organization do well in its function. If you are directly being paid to be an EA however, this is much more ingrained in your identity. There are people paying you to do the most good you can do. If you see an opportunity for doing good, you will be more likely to take it, since you are never done with the obligation of being a great EA.
While I agree that funding individuals is promising, I don’t find this particular argument very convincing. If one is not being paid to do particular tasks, then “being paid to be an EA” is a lot like being paid to be cool, which probably only works if one has already demonstrated the ability to perform well under similar conditions. Saying that people are paying one to “do the most good one can do” sounds a lot like a rationalization where the whims of the donee are gratuitously tolerated.
Also I’d point out that constantly thinking of EA as an obligation and “never being done” may be suboptimal.
There is some relevant discussion on the Cause Prioritization Discussion Group.
looking at which work gets most views on our website
How many page views has GPP been getting (for various pages), and how do you factor page views into your thinking, specifically?
An overview of Y Combinator’s non-profit program
This is Issa Rice, one of the paid writers mentioned in this post. In addition to writing pages, I also provide feedback to some of the other paid writers on pages they are creating.
Working with Vipul has been a generally positive and enjoyable experience. He has deep knowledge of both the workings of Wikipedia as well as the topics on which he wants pages created (although this might be less true for some of the newer topics in this post). Prior to working for Vipul, I had virtually no experience editing Wikipedia pages. Vipul walked me through the basics (like making sure to create pages under one’s user space, having enough citations, certain other rules for Wikipedia editing, and so forth—things that are not obvious for a new Wikipedia editor) so that I was soon able to begin creating pages. For each new topic I worked on (taxation, immigration, global health), Vipul has been willing to guide me through the basics, help find useful sources, and review the page before publication.
As someone who cares about his altruistic output and impact on the world, I’m still uncertain about the overall impact of writing for Wikipedia relative to other things I could be working on, but I think of working for Vipul as a fairly unique opportunity to gain experience and expertise on topics while getting paid.
June 2016 GiveWell board meeting
Thanks for the feedback, Michael.
I worked on this post under a fairly tight time constraint, so I was not able to clean it up in all the ways I would have liked to (including using full sentences, as you mention). There was also the concern that the post would be mostly ignored, causing my extra efforts to be wasted. Since this type of post seems to have generated a fair amount of interest, I would be willing to push for doing a cleaner job in the future.
Also, the source Markdown file for this post is available on GitHub, and, with the fairly permissive license, it would be possible for someone else to come along and fix things (or fund someone to do so); I would be happy to update this post to incorporate any significant improvements.
Hi Ben, thanks for the suggestion. I would be fine with moving the active work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses MediaWiki markup instead of Markdown; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA instead of CC BY-NC-SA as its license, so GiveWell’s original license would need to explicitly be maintained.
I am fine with this plan. Feel free to reply here or message me directly if you run into difficulties or have any further questions.
I would find HTTPS support useful.
Essay contest: general considerations for evaluating small-scale giving opportunities ($300 for winning submission)
How does this compare to EA Ventures?
Re top MIRI donors, there is a 2013 in review post that talks about a survey of “(nearly) every donor who gave more than $3,000 in 2013” with four out of approximately 35 coming into contact via HPMoR. (Not to imply that this is the survey mentioned above, as several details differ.)
Do you happen to know why Stanford didn’t like the affiliation with external organizations?