Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

Software Developer
4295 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)20025 Legnano, Metropolitan City of Milan, Italy

Bio

Participation
1

Hi!

I'm currently (Aug 2023) a Software Developer at Giving What We Can, helping make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.

I'm also a forum mod, which, shamelessly stealing from Edo, "mostly means that I care about this forum and about you! So let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

Please have a very low bar for reaching out!

I won the 2022 donor lottery, happy to chat about that as well

Comments
561

Topic contributions
5

If I remember correctly, we decided not to list them in both groups because people already need to scroll a lot (especially on mobile) to see all the 15 programs, if we added the 6 recommended ones it would become 21

 

I agree that not seeing the top programs in the various categories is also confusing though, especially if you want to link to them directly

What kinds of open questions do you have in mind (perhaps some examples would help)? 


Random example: I just wanted to ask today if anyone knew of a good review of "The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does" written by a non-male, given that I think one of the key criticisms of EA in the feminist-vegetarian community is that its leaders are mostly white males, but I didn't know where to ask.

I haven't looked at this model, but in GWWC's 2020–2022 Impact evaluation, you can change the annual discount rate here or here (and other key parameters in cells nearby)

If I understand correctly, a ~10% yearly discount rate ~halves the expected value of a pledge and changes the best guess non-marginal multiplier from 30x to 23x

I think the equivalent in this model is here and a ~10% discount rate changes the marginal multiplier from 14x to 8x

Thank you for raising this!

After your email last week, we agreed to edit that section and copy EV's terms on Feedback. I've just changed the text on the website.

We only removed the part about "all Feedback we request from you will be collected on an anonymous basis", as we might want to collect non-anonymous feedback in the future.

If anyone else has any feedback, make sure to also send us an email (like Eevee did) as we might miss things on the EA Forum.

(Disclaimer: I work at Giving What We Can but I was not involved in this program, and this is just my personal take)

Hi Daniela, could you clarify what you mean by "most of the EA funds are being given to only 2 organizations? (At least for Animal welfare)"

There is no consensus on what counts as "EA funds", but people usually include Open Philanthropy, which is by far the largest funder and funds many organizations. Are you referring to the EA Animal Welfare Fund? They also support many organizations.

Many national effective giving orgs currently only show The Humane League and Good Food Institute on their website, but that does not imply "most of the EA funds" are being given to them. Also, Giving What We Can allows donors to support several other projects in animal welfare, I imagine that as other effective giving organizations grow, they might also add more projects if there's enough interest from donors (but I'm just speculating.)

On "evaluating the evaluators" you might be interested in this page from Giving What We Can and the evaluation of ACE and the EA Animal Welfare Fund

Note that I expect more recent numbers will be significantly different, if nothing else because of this $10,000,000 donation to the Giving Green Fund (which is more than the total for "Creating a better future" in the linked spreadsheet)

Thank you for doing this, and huge thanks to the anonymous donor!

Three quick questions on the implementation side of things:

  1. How will you verify the conditions for the bonuses? E.g. as far as I know anyone can claim to organize a local EA group, it's not clear what counts as an "EA org" or "EA grant", and I don't think lists of EAG(x) volunteers are public.
  2. Do you have plans to mitigate some of the main drawbacks of quadratic funding? E.g. Vulnerability to collusion
  3. How do you define "community member"? E.g. what prevents someone from making 100 accounts or sharing this on X and encouraging hundreds of random people to vote for their favourite project?

Apologies if these were already answered somewhere, I'm really curious to see the results of this experiment!

I'm surprised that the "top 10" doesn't include Denmark, Austria, Belgium, and Germany, since they all have more population-adjusted participants than Ireland, are not English-speaking, are more distant from London, and have lower GDP per capita[1]

Are we using different data?

In general, I'm a bit sceptical of these analyses, compared to looking at the countries/cities with the most participants in absolute terms. I also expect Claude to make lots of random mistakes.

  1. ^

    But of course, Ireland's GDP is very artificial

You can DM a moderator (e.g. me) or ask forum staff via these channels

Usernames can be changed here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/account but only once

Adding Teaching At the Right Level to the list of education interventions that might be interesting to support

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