Do they mention effective giving or collaborate with Doneer Effectief/the Tien Procent Club?

I mean the reasoning behind this seems very close to #2 no? The target audience they're looking at is probably more interested in neartermism than AI/longtermism and they don't think they can get much tractability working with the current EA ecosystem?

I think 2 and especially 3 are very likely, but I think it's also likely that Bregman was very impressed with AIM, and possibly found it more inspiring than 80k/CEA, and/or more pragmatic, or a better fit for the kind of people he wanted to reach regardless of their views on AI.

How many of them have made that choice recently though?

A lot!^[1]

80k seems to mostly care about x-risk, but (perhaps surprisingly) their messaging is not just "Holy Shit, X-Risk" or "CEOs are playing Russian roulette with you and your children".

They instead also cover a lot of cause-neutral EA arguments (e.g. scope sensitivity and the importance of effectiveness)

So I don't think it's surprising that Rutger doesn't recommend them if he doesn't share (or even actively disagrees with?) those priorities even if his current focus on persuading mid-career professionals to look into alternative proteins and tobacco prevention sounds very EA-ish in other respects.

Yeah agree with this, but I still think that 80k is more than useless for altruists who don't value the long-term future, or are skeptical of 80k's approach to trying to influence it.

I'm curious whether he mentioned ProbablyGood or if he's even aware of them?

My understanding is that the SMA team knows much more about the space than I do, so I'm sure they are aware of them if I'm aware of them.

1. ^{^}

   I don't have an exact number, but I would conservatively guess more than 100 people and more than $100k in total donations for 2024

I've noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma

Note that the number of karma votes is not accurate, I think it gives users the impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are.

I don't have any insider information, but my speculation would be that they just think that they counterfactually reach more people by having a very separate brand.

i.e. SMA closely related to the EA brand/flavor/way of communicating would counterfactually help X more people do more good than EA by itself, while SMA as a separate movement with its own ideas/style on how to do the most good would counterfactually help Y extra people, and Y > X.

I also think it's likely that SMA believes that for their target audience it would be more valuable to interact with AIM than with 80k or CEA, not necessarily for the 3 reasons you mention.

I used to think the same, but now I see that many GWWC pledgers and donors mention 80k as the reason why they're pledging or donating, often to neartermist causes.

I've also heard several stories like this one of people being able to do more good in a neartermist cause thanks to 80k.

I think we tend to overestimate how common it is to consider "consequentialist cosmopolitanism" when thinking about doing good in the world. The vast majority of people don't consider important things like counterfactuals, or that they can help many more people abroad.

See for example Part 2 and Part 3 of the 80k career guide: I think they can definitely be valuable for an introduction to neartermist EA.

You could maybe say that Probably Good's career guide is better, so it makes sense to omit 80k, but I don't know if they cover all the neartermist-valuable topics covered by 80k.

The 80k job board also has a lot of non-longtermist roles (but maybe it's a subset of the Probably Good job board, I'm not sure)

Thanks for all the work!

I found it a bit strange that this is the first thing you can filter on:
 

Was there a lot of user demand for this?

I also found some of the tags surprising: I think some orgs marked as "Part of the EA Community" might not consider themselves such, have you checked with them that they are ok with the categorization?

The EA Forum/LessWrong codebase is open source, you can see it just means that your karma change for 2024 was >= 500

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AForumMagnum%2FForumMagnum%20karma%20farmer&type=code

(And beloved means that the most common reaction was receiving hearts)

I liked the cute animation I got for karma farming https://res.cloudinary.com/cea/video/upload/v1734615259/wrapped-2024/Karma-farmer-green.mp4 

 

I agree that salaries in EA should be more in line with the rest of the non-profit sector^[1], that Open Philanthropy is the main funder of many projects, that funding diversification has tradeoffs, and that members of the EA community should donate (much) more.

But I think this post exaggerates the % of effectiveness-oriented funding that comes from OpenPhil, at least for projects outside of EA community building.

I think the main reason is that most effectiveness-minded donors (including billionaires and agencies like USAID) are not part of the EA community, but still fund "causes the EA community cares about".

Other/Individual EA donors 15mm (GWWC donors, etc. based on some rough math from (source). I’m very interested if someone has a better or more accurate figure.

Here are estimated appproximate amounts donated via the GWWC donation platform in the past year, by rough cause area. (Note, these have not been double-checked and should not be considered official numbers, and they don't include donations reported by pledgers made outside the GWWC platform)

For donors not using the GWWC platform, I think this hinges a lot on how you define "EA donors" (see below)

I’m not sure if Givewell and Open Phil is double counting here (since Open Phil gives to Givewell) but I’m going to ignore Givewell as EA funding since a lot of this comes from what many would consider outside of the EA community (many people and philanthropists who wouldn’t consider themselves to be EAs though I’m not sure this is completely fair).

I think most GWWC donors also don't consider themselves part of the EA community^[4], I don't think this matters much in terms of our willingness to fund the most impactful projects that help improve the lives of others.

Here are some other effectiveness-oriented sources of donations:

• The Life You Can Save recently announced $100M in donations since 2013.
• Via Effektiv Spenden "nearly 10,000 individuals in Germany and Switzerland donated 19 million euros to highly effective organizations in 2023."
• The Founders Pledge community also donates significant amounts to high-impact projects https://www.founderspledge.com/our-impact.
• All the partners of the new Lead Exposure Action Fund (and many other large philanthropists) donate very significant amounts to high-impact projects, but I think only Good Ventures ever claimed to be part of the EA community.

The problem, I think, is that most causes the EA community cares about don’t have a lot of outside support. Who outside of the EA community would fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare?

As you mention in a footnote, the Navigation Fund is funding the Shrimp Welfare Project, and many other high-impact projects in causes that the EA community cares about, even if (as far as I know) it's not explicitly part of the EA community, and you don't include it in the funding amounts in this post.

Crustacean Compassion was started in 2016 and only got funding from OpenPhil in 2021. I don't think that only people in the EA community donate significantly to crustacean welfare.

I think it's weird to mention "fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare" as causes in a post on how OpenPhil is the main funder of many EA projects, given that OpenPhil stopped funding those.

I think if you were to ask a well-calibrated Toby Ord/Will Macaskill back in 2009 the odds of the movement having billions of dollars committed to it in a few years, they would have put the odds incredibly low.

In his 2013 TED Talk, Peter Singer claims that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet were "the most effective altruists in history", and in 2023 MacAskill keeps defining EA not in terms of a specific movement/community but in terms of "using evidence and careful reasoning to try to do more good."
I think probably in their mind EA (as they define it) already had billions of dollars committed to it in 2009.

See also We need more nuance regarding funding gaps from 2022 with an estimate of the number of funding sources for different cause areas at different scales. I think for most cause areas the number of funding sources of more than ~$1M/year increased since 2022.

Besides the Shrimp Welfare Project mentioned above, other interesting examples of non-OpenPhil funding are that Lightcone stopped receiving funding from OpenPhil but managed to raise >$1.1M in a month and that EAIF isn’t *currently* funding constrained.

1. ^{^}

   I think currently EA salaries are higher for non-leadership roles and probably lower for leadership roles

2. ^{^}

   Mostly this $10M donation

3. ^{^}

   Note that this area might be over-represented in this table, as the main way to donate to GWWC and to Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund is via the GWWC platform, while donations to projects in other cause areas are usually made outside of it

4. ^{^}

   For what it's worth, I also don't consider myself part of the EA community.

5. ^{^}

   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:IanFoundersPledge#You_can't_write_about_Founders_Pledge 

Sorry for the very late reply, basically my understanding is that interest rates now are high, so this post implies that we should consider investing now and donating later.

Is that a correct interpretation? Are you following that strategy yourself?