HT

Henri Thunberg 🔸

Development Officer @ Rethink Priorities
353 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)

Participation
5

  • Received career coaching from 80,000 Hours
  • Attended more than three meetings with a local EA group
  • Attended an EAGx conference
  • Attended an EA Global conference
  • Completed the Precipice Reading Group

Comments
40

I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).

Other than that, I just think it's a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.

I was super surprised by this, but then discovered that indeed GW top recommended charities are all listed on the top of the page, in some kind of main set of recommendations. E.g. Humane League is absent in the same way from animal welfare. 

Maybe makes sense to list them in both groups (cause area, and top recs), @Sjir Hoeijmakers🔸 ?

That makes sense, and thank you for the suggestion :)

For what it's worth, I was also on a personal level quite excited about the smaller type of projects that could get funding through something like this and otherwise might not make the effort of going through a long application process.

Thank you for an interesting and useful post, the style of narration made it an enjoyable read.

I wanted to briefly address the below statement:

Rethink's requesting funding for specific projects says to me 'we basically think these are the least important things we'd spend money on, otherwise we'd spend it on them out of our primary budget

As I was part of the group at Rethink Priorities that chose what project to front on Manifund, I can honestly share that this is not how our thought process went. Rather, we focused mostly on ...
I) relatively small asks, that would be a better fit for the crowdfunding format of people giving hundreds of dollars
II) projects we thought were best suited for the "EA Community" framing of the funding round, i.e. meta efforts rather than broader .

Relative to our scale, we also don't have a large "primary budget" that we can use to fund projects we think are impactful. Some of our departments do not have grants for general team work, and have to fundraise for any specific next research project. Even the ones that do have department-level earmarking, are often somewhat restricted by funder(s) in what types of projects they can choose to work on by default. My experience is that it's more likely that a particular project that doesn't get funded gets put on hold in hope of another funder, than that we're able to use general unrestricted funds for it. 

With more unrestricted funds available to RP, I think our reality would look at least a bit more like what you described in your comment. I think we have some very astute thinkers internally when it comes to cause prio, so I think that would be a good thing.

If I have done this some previous year, and got charged membership this year as well, do I need to do anything else? :) 🇩🇰 🤝 🇸🇪

Will try to spread the word!

Thank you so much for what you have done for the effective giving community over the years, Luke! 
I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who has been as responsive, friendly, helpful, sharp, or inspiring as you have – let alone all these qualities combined into one awesome human being!

Enjoy the well-earned personal time, I sincerely look forward to what wonders you will do for the world in your next professional endeavors!

You can now find a recording of the webinar on this link.
Thank you to those that attended, and contributed with meaningful questions!

Thank you for the work that you do – the forum is one of the best products I use that just WORKS! :)

FWIW I think the Norwegian main talent pipeline is from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), e.g. see this post, rather than University of Oslo. The community there has been going strong there for 10 years.

Welcome to the forum simoj!

I think this might not be a great idea, due to uncertainties in what would happen with the allocated charity budget if it doesn't get donated right now. It's quite possible that the counterfactual is low, so we should probably not invest more into the ecosystem at this point — in particular when things are so up in the air about the future of the platform.

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