Joining another CE charity is pretty common, as is working at EA meta-orgs (AIM, GiveWell, etc.). I would guess that around 75% do something most people would regard as very high impact.

Agree regarding external marginal funding, but I would say, at least in AIM's case, this correlates with early-stage success.

Personally, I do not think we have swung too far on this. Even in the AIM/CE cohorts (from which both of the recent public shutdown posts came), I still think people err too much on the side of keeping projects running when they are not performing.

I think how to think about shutting down projects comes down a lot to counterfactuals. It's not that a project could not work or definitely will fail; it's about how good a marginal bet it is. Every dollar and high-talent hour going into the project could, in theory, be going somewhere else—often somewhere with pretty high impact. When I think about a cohort of 6 charities founded out of AIM, after 2 years, I would expect shutting down the bottom 2 and having the staff/funding join the top 2 would result in far more impact for the world. That would result in a ~33% shutdown rate, which is way above what happens in the charity world and about double what happens in AIM right now. 

My quick sense is that most are cause open and will end up similar to GWWC or effektiv-spenden. 

I do think localization has some effect but not a huge one. A quick Google search gave me a sum of $60,000 or £47,000 for the US in 2022 (if you only include full-time workers), so it's a bit higher, but not enough to radically change the picture. My soft sense is that US vs. UK EA organizations would not have large pay differences. Also, I do not think AIM historically has had fewer US employees than other organizations that are based in the UK.

I think this is partially correct. I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason. I would argue that more EA organizations should and could adopt this approach. The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays—see some numbers I looked up (although these figures are now somewhat higher as they are based on older data).

That number is across all cause areas; animal welfare, family planning, and global health funders have slightly higher EVs than other cause areas where we have recommended projects.

Yes both of the larger donations where part of this grant.

First a meta note less directly connected to the response:

Our funding circles fund a lot of different groups, and there is no joint pot, so it's closer to a moderated discussion about a given cause area than CE/AIM making granting calls. We are not looking for people to donate to us or our charities, and as far as I understand, OpenPhil and AWF do not have a participatory way to get involved other than just donating to their joint pot directly. This request is more aimed at people who want to put in significant personal time to making decisions independent from existing funding actors.
 

More connected response:

Thanks for the thoughts, and the support you have given our past charities. I can give a few quick comments on this. Our research team might also respond a bit more deeply.

1) Research quality: I think in general, our research is pretty unusual in that we are quite willing to publish research that has a fairly limited number of hours put into it. Partly, this is due to our research not being aimed at external actors (e.g., convincing funders, the broader animal movement, other orgs) as much as aimed at people already fairly convinced on founding a charity and aimed at a quite specific question of what would be the best org to found. We do take an approach that is more accepting of errors, particularly ones that do not affect endline decisions connected directly to founding a charity. E.g., For starting a charity on fish in a given country, we are not really concerned about the number of fish farmed unless that number is significant determining factor in terms of founding a charity in that space. We have gone back and forth as to how much transparency to have on research and how much time to spend per report and have not come to a fixed answer. We are more likely to get criticism/pushback on higher transparency + lower hours per report but typically think it will still lead to more charities that are promising in the end.
 

2) CE’s animal charity quality: I think both our ordering and assessment of charity quality would be different from what is described here. I also think animal welfare funds and Open Phil's (both of who have funded the majority of these projects) assessments would also not match your description. However, in some ways, these are small differences as our general estimate is that 2/5 charities in a given area are highly promising. It is quite a hits-based game, and that is the number we would expect (and would rank internally) about how many charities are performing really well.
 

2.5) Feedback on animal charities: I did a quick review of charities that got the most positive vs negative feedback at the time of idea recommendation from the broader animal community relative to your rank order and relative to our internal one and did not find a correlation. Generally, I think the space is pretty uncertain and thus the charity that got the most positive expectations were typically the charities that deviated the smallest amount from other actions already taken in the space. I think that putting more time into the research reports (including getting more feedback) is one way to improve charity quality (at the cost of quantity) but I'm pretty skeptical it's the best way. So far, the biggest predictive factor has not been idea strength but the founder team, so when thinking about where to spend marginal resources to improve charities, I would still lean that way (although it's far from clear if that will always be the case).
 

3) I would be interested in doing a survey on this to get better data. I get the impression that we are seen as pretty disconnected from the animal space (and I think that is fairly true). I think we are far more involved in e.g., the EA space both when it comes to more formal research and when it comes to softer social engagement. I think our charities tend to go deeper into whatever area they are focusing on than our team does, and I am pretty comfortable with that. I would not be surprised if we both were invited less and attended less coordination events and meetings connected to the animal space; we like to stay focused quite directly on the problems we are working on.
 

Thanks again for writing this up. I put some chance that these are issues that are correct and important enough to prioritize, and it's valuable to get pushback and flags even if we end up disagreeing about the actions to take.

Hey EA Sweden team, really interesting post. Quick question: is there a link to your full budget somewhere? I am a bit unsure if $65k is like 50% or 5% of your current spend, and it's pretty hard to get a sense of cost effectiveness without knowing what the total expected spend is.