Yes, good point

Can I reserve two of these for me and my wife (not on the forum and so not under 'Going' above)? If not, I can book my own

Ah great! I'll dm you my email

Hey Lynn - so OFTW probably isn't best-placed for a national group, as our page would look something like this: https://donational.org/oftw-uk

However, Giving What We Can might be able to offer something a bit better.

What country are you based in?

Thanks for engaging so positively here.

A couple of quick reactions:

much more cost-effectively that GiveWell's top charities, whose sign of impact is unclear to me

This is a very bold claim, made quite casually! Especially in light of:

There is a sense in which feedback loops are short.

I would evaluate these options through the GiveWell criteria - evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and room for more funding.

For the GiveWell charities, they score very highly on each metric. For example, they are each supported by multiple randomised control trials. By contrast, the indicators you mention are weak proxy indicators (I think you should also have added 'counterfactual' to each one - a new arms control treaty isn't an achievement for a donor unless it would likely not have happened without extra funding). 

If I could challenge you, I think this looks like motivated reasoning, in that I think these are probably 'decent proxy indicators if you've already decided to donate solely within longtermism'. But I think it's very tough to maintain that longtermist giving opportunities stack up next to neartermist ones, if compared on the same metrics.

To summarise: global health giving opportunities - exceptionally strong evidence of effectiveness; rigorous cost-effectiveness analyses; room for more funding updated annually with high levels of transparency.

Longtermist giving opportunities (as mentioned here) - some (weak) proxy indicators show progress, some don't (e.g. I'm not aware of any counterfactual nuclear arms control treaties in the past 10 years); therefore speculative cost-effectiveness, because little evidence of effectiveness; individual projects likely to have room for more funding, but as a sector much less room for more funding (e.g. you could deploy billions via GiveDirectly, but Open Phil only managed to deploy <$1bn to longtermist causes last year).

As effective giving organisations should (at least in theory) be agnostic about cause area and focussed on 'effectiveness', I would be surprised if any raised the majority of their donations for longtermist causes, which have significant challenges around evidence of effectiveness/tractability.

Finally, I think you acknowledge but probably underweight the importance of giving more weight to recent performance. For many organisations, the 'revenue curve' of donations will start out low but then grow rapidly. So the relevant thing for me is the direction of travel of Ayuda Efectiva, not its performance as an average of its first three years. You can see the value of looking at the direction of travel if you look at the performance of Effektiv Spenden and, to some extent, Giving What We Can (although GWWC had significant 'unfair advantages' in its early years). In each case, their performance has improved substantially over time.

In contrast, 11 % and 15 % of GWWC’s pledge and non-pledge donations went towards the area of creating a better future, which I think is much more effective. I do not think this corresponds to an extreme position.

I don't think this position is "extreme" but it is certainly highly debatable. Longtermist giving has fewer donation opportunities; can absorb less extra funding and deploy it effectively; and has very long feedback loops, which are hard to measure and have untested theories of change. In the case of AI safety, it also seems to have become subject to the forces of mainstream capitalism in a way that makes it less funding constrained and considerably less tractable (e.g. can even Open Philanthropy, with >$10bn to spend, really slow the pace of capabilities research?).

I think a better way to think about this is to look at Open Philanthropy, a specialist giving org which maintains worldview diversity because there is really genuine debate about how to allocate funding between different cause areas. I find them a lot more authoritative than comments from individuals in EA who don't do grantmaking, even highly respected ones like Ben.

(You also note 80k's list of the most pressing problems, but you should note here that 80k has one of the most maximalist longtermist positions in EA.)

Thanks for this Vasco - always a useful exercise to look at cost-effectiveness, especially in an area like effective giving, where the money-moved is quite easily measured.

Some thoughts on this, which I'll split into different comments for ease of discussion:

"Nevertheless, the counterfactual marginal multipliers adjusted for cost-effectiveness and indirect impacts should ideally be equal. In other words, donating to any effective giving organisation should be similarly effective taking into account all effects."

This seems very unlikely to be true in practice, but also I'm not sure it should be true in an ideal world either. Effective giving organisations should vary according to many factors - target market, costs of operating in various jurisdictions, competition being higher in some jurisdictions than others, the effectiveness of the team and strategy etc.. 

For example, it would be naive to assume that an effective giving org targeting Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (e.g. LongView, Effective Giving, Founder's Pledge) would have the same ROI as one targeting grassroots givers (e.g. One for the World). Some types of outreach/donor will have much higher ROI than others. 

The reason I think it isn't even 'ideal' for all organisations to have the same ROI is that there is value to having a variety of approaches, because:

• Certain types of outreach are crowded (e.g. it seems silly repeatedly to set up a 'new Founder's Pledge', or a new '10% pledge' organisation)
• Certain types are too specialist or need special expertise that isn't available to every organisation (e.g. it's very hard to gain access to Ultra High Net Worth givers)
• If we all did one type of fundraising, it would decrease the diversity of our funding base and increase our risk

Thanks for publishing this Ollie - really interesting, and definitely great 'truth-seeking'.

I think I'd highlight some of your caveats (although this could be a case of me prioritising intuition over data and being misled by that).

My experience as a full-time ED within EA is that retreats are substantially more valuable than EAGs/EAGxs/EAGxVirtuals. For example, I would skip every conference to go to the Effective Giving Summit; and I felt that this summit was roughly 10x more valuable than what I would otherwise have spent the time on. I expect this relates to my specific circumstances, where making connections within EA is relatively easy outside a conference, but deepening connections is relatively hard. (Also that the Summit was especially excellent.)

I also agree with you that cost-effectiveness might not be the best way to assess retreats, as demonstrated by the apparent cost-effectiveness of EAGxVirtuals, because if you make the costs small enough, the benefit can be very low and still seem very cost-effective. OFTW was able to host a conference online for $200 for 75 people, and I don't think an in-person conference could ever compete with that on a cost-effectiveness basis because it would be at least two orders of magnitude more expensive; but I don't really know anyone who thinks the online format was any good!

All-in-all, though, great work on this retrospective.

I think the application process is spelt out in the application pack, which is still live here: https://1fortheworld.org/jobs-at-oftw

We did an initial screen on the application form, then 3 people reviewed the remaining candidates in more depth to form a longlist, and now 10 people are having three 30-min 'informal chats' with me and two Board members. Finally, our recommendations will go to the whole Board. In each round, we had three opinions and the other two were Board members.

Grayden and the EA Good Governance Project will advise you to keep the ED out of the process, as they answer to the Board, but I found this was impractical as I have so much more time I can dedicate to moving the process on as part of my job.

If you'd like details on questions asked etc., let me know