Even though I have supported many EA organisations over the years (both meta, ex-risks and global poverty and some at quite early stages) and devote a great deal of time to try to do it well, I feel the EA funds could still be really useful.

There is a limit to how much high quality due diligence one could do. It takes time to build relationships, analyse opportunities and monitor them. This is also the reason I have not supported some of the EA Venture projects not necessarily because of the projects but because I did not have the bandwidth.

I am really impressed with some of the really high leverage, high impact work that Nick Beckstead supported through his donor group, I remember his catalysing the formation of CSER and early support to Founders Pledge. The possibility to participate in Elie's work not limited to top charities also sounds exciting. I have not had the time to analyse animal charities and and this will help too.

I think donating to EA funds alongside my existing donations will provide diversification and allow me to support projects that I do not have direct access to or I do not have time and/or resources to support on a standalone basis.

The EA funds could also have benchmarking and signalling values (especially on less well known projects) if they publish their donation decisions.

I strongly agree with- "One vision I have for the effective altruism community is that its members can function like a people’s foundation: any individual donor on their own might not have that much power, but if the community acts together they can have the sort of influence that major foundations like the Gates Foundation have. " Creating a structure which enables leaders of the EA community to heavily influence the manner in which non EA-charities and other organisations operate could be immensely beneficial. I believe some form of centralisation would help achieve this. I currently donate to AMF directly, but I think it would empower CEA more if all that money was funnelled through CEA itself. For example All EA members could be encouraged to pay into the EA trust (specifying their chosen charity or fund) and the trust then sends a monthly payment to each chosen charity. This way the community appears to act as one while still retaining freedom for individuals to choose the charities should they desire. EA Funds would in turn be a useful part of this structure.

Seems like a great idea!

Re Nick, I trust his analysis of charities, including meta-charities a lot. But the conflict does seem worth thinking a bit about. He is responsible for all 2-3 of the top EA-org grant-makers. From a point of view of redundancy, diverse criticism and incentives, this is not so good.

If I was CEA, I'm not sure I have very much incentive to identify new good strategies, since a lot of my expected funding in the next decade comes from Nick, and most of the other funders are less thoughtful, he is really the one that I need to work to convince. And then If I am Nick, I'm only one person, so there are limits to how much strategic thinking I can transmit, and to the degree to which I will force it to engage with other strategic thinkers. It's also hard to see how, if some of its projects failed, I would allow CEA to go unfunded?

How can we build these incentives and selection pressures, as well as on the object level, getting better ideas into EA orgs? Dviersifying funding would help, but mostly it seems like it would require CEA to care about this problem a lot and take a lot of effort.

I am on the whole positive about this idea. Obviously, specialization is good, and creating dedicated fund managers to make donation decisions can be very beneficial. And it makes sense that the boundaries between these funds arise from normative differences between donors, while putting fund managers in charge of sorting out empirical questions about efficiency. This is just the natural extension, of the original GiveWell concept, to account for normative differences, and also to utilize some of the extra trust that some EAs will have for other people in the community that isn't shared by a lot of GiveWell's audience.

That said, I'm worried about principle-agent problems and transparency, and about CEA becoming an organization receiving monthly direct debits from the bank accounts of ten thousand people. Even if we assume that current CEA employees are incorruptible superhuman angels, giving CEA direct control of a firehose of cash makes it an attractive target for usurpers (in a way that it is not when it's merely making recommendations and doing outreach). These sorts of worries apply much less to GiveWell when it's donating to developing-world health charities than to CEA when it's donating to EA start-ups who are good friends with the staff.

Will EA Fund managers be committed to producing the sorts of detailed explanations and justifications we see from GiveWell and Open Phil, at least after adjusting for donation size? How will the conflicts of interest be managed and documented with such a tightly interlinked community?

What sorts of additional precautions will be taken to manage these risks, especially for the long term?

Small donors have played a valuable role by providing seed funding to new projects in the past. They can often fund promising projects that larger donors like OpenPhil can't because they have special knowledge of them through their personal networks and the small projects aren't established enough to get through a large donor's selection process. These donors therefore act like angel investors. My concern with the EA fund is that:

• By pooling donations into a large fund, you increase the minimum grant that it's worth their time to make, thus making it unable to fund small opportunities
• By centralising decision-making in a handful of experts, you reduce the variety of projects that get funded because they have more limited networks, knowledge, and value variety than the population of small donors.

Also, what happened to EA Ventures? Wasn't that an attempt to pool funds to make investments in new projects?

Very interesting idea, and potentially really useful for the community (and me personally!).

What's the timeline for this?

I'm presuming that the Funds would be transparent about how much money is in them, how much has been given and why - is that the case? Also as a starter, has Nick written about how much is/was in his Fund and how its been spent?

Awesome!

Is there a difference between donating to the Global Health and Development fund and donating to GiveWell top charities (as Elie has done with his personal donation for each of the last four years)?

In the first instance, we’re just going to have four funds...If the initial experiment goes well...running the Donor Lottery fund...we could potentially use this platform to administer moral trades between donors

FWIW, I am lukewarm on the funds idea, but excited about the Donor Lottery and most excited about the moral trade platform. I hope that if the funds idea fails, the Donor Lottery and moral trade platform are not scrapped as a result. I've never donated to CEA, but I would donate to support these two projects.

It’s not a coincidence that all the fund managers work for GiveWell or Open Philanthropy.

Second, they have the best information available about what grants Open Philanthropy are planning to make, so have a good understanding of where the remaining funding gaps are, in case they feel they can use the money in the EA Fund to fill a gap that they feel is important, but isn’t currently addressed by Open Philanthropy.

It makes some sense that there could be gaps which Open Phil isn't able to fill, even if Open Phil thinks they're no less effective than the opportunities they're funding instead. Was that what was meant here, or am I missing something? If not, I wonder what such a funding gap for a cost-effective opportunity might look like (an example would help)?

There's a part of me that keeps insisting that it's counter-intuitive that Open Phil is having trouble making as many grants as it would like, while also employing people who will manage an EA fund. I'd naively think that there would be at least some sort of tradeoff between producing new suggestions for things the EA fund might fund, and new things that Open Phil might fund. I suspect you're already thinking closely about this, and I would be happy to hear everyone's thoughts.

Edit: I'd meant to express general confidence in those who had been selected as fund managers. Also, I have strong positive feelings about epistemic humility in general, which also seems highly relevant to this project.

What will be these funds' policy on rolling funds over from year to year, if the donations a fund gets exceed the funding gaps the managers are aware of?

(This seems particularly important for funds whose managers are also involved with OpenPhil, given that OpenPhil did not spend its entire budget last year.)

In principle, if there's unmet demand for these things, then it's a great idea to set up such funds. Overall this infrastructure seems plausibly helpful.

But I'm confused about why, if this is a good idea, Open Phil hasn't already funded it. I wouldn't make such a claim about any possible fund set up in this way - that way leads to playing the Defectbot strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. But in this particular case, I'd expect Open Phil to have much more reason than outside donors do to trust Elie's, Lewis's, and Nick's judgment and value-alignment. Though per Kerry's "minimum viable product" comment below, perhaps this info asymmetry argument will be less true in the future.

I suspect that Open Phil is actually making a mistake by not empowering individuals more to make unaccountable discretionary decisions, so this is seems good to try in its current form anyhow. I weakly expect it to outperform just giving the money to Open Phil or the GiveWell top charities. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

One thing to note, re diversification (which I do think is an important point in general) is that it's easy to think of Open Phil as a single agent, rather than a collection of agents; and because Open Phil is a collective entity, there are gains from diversification even with the funds.

For example, there might be a grant that a program officer wants to make, but there's internal disagreement about it, and the program officer doesn't have time (given opportunity cost) to convince others at Open Phil why it's a good idea. (This has been historically true for, say, the EA Giving Fund). Having a separate pool of money would allow them to fund things like that.

This is great!! Pretty sure I'd be giving more if it felt more like a coordinated effort and less like I have to guess who needs the money this time.

I guess my only concern is: how to keep donors engaged with what's going on? It's not that I wouldn't trust the fund managers, it's more that I wouldn't trust myself to bother researching and contributing to discussions if donating became as convenient as choosing one box out of 4.

I suggest the name of the "Animal Welfare" fund is too restrictive, and the name adopted instead be broader, such as "Non-Human Animal Issues," to encompass such efforts as personhood, abolition, cultured meat,for example, in additional to welfare concerns.

It seems strange to have the funds run by people who also direct money from on behalf of big grant-making organizations. Under what circumstances will the money end up going somewhere different? I can see the motivation for having EA funds if they were managed by someone independent - say Carl or Paul - but the current incarnation seems to be basically equivalent to just giving GiveWell or OPP money with a cause-based restriction.

I don't think EA funds will outperform the current situation. In prediction, what generally has the most predictive value is an ensemble of models. What EA funds does is take this ensemble of models on reality that people have, throw away all the information, and use only one model of reality, Elie, Lewis or Nick, to make a prediction about where the best use of money is.

I suppose the general argument is that Elie, Lewis or Nick have an information advantage. Which is plausibly true, however, why not just make this information public and let people decide with their own models what the best use of their money is? Given that we are in a cooperative environment here where we all want to maximize to total amount of impact, in contrast with general asset management, and one only wants to maximize the returns of the investors of the fund.

In conclusion, we lose out on the benefits of model averaging for seemingly no reason.

However, what I believe to be useful, would be a set up where EA funds makes all the information that they have public. Then people can decide for if they want to donate to EA funds, and save themselves valuable time, or make their own judgement on where the best place to donate is.

Have you thought about integrating the problem quiz? It could be a button like "help me set my allocation" instead of a pop-up in the beginning that could derail participation from being too complicated.

I think this will probably be useful to many EAs.

That said, I'm aware something like this has been tried elsewhere and considered unsuccessful (sorry for not mentioning where, I'm not sure whether I was told this in confidence or not, but if you message me privately I can tell you more - it was not an EA context)

The reason appears to be that donors want to have a sense of ownership of the success that they have made happen, whereas putting money into a fund makes the donor's impact even more indirect.

(This is also the reason why I personally would be unlikely to use this facility, despite the fact that I also find it hard, difficult work to find optimal giving opportunities)

This may work if EAs are less glory-seeking donors than non-EAs (and me, for that matter!) I suspect that this is probably the case.

Id be interested in long run future and things focused more directly on human wellbeing than generic health and income. Id also be more interested if these groups not only updated on orgs we all know about but also did / collated exploratory work on speculative opportunities.

I like the idea!

Kind of unrelated, but I've wondered about these first two considerations that people use to pick a charity, as listed above: 

1) which cause is most important
2) which interventions in the cause are most effective

Couldn't there be a cause that is extremely important but just that don't have any good interventions? Maybe there is a "most effective" intervention for this cause, but it's still not that good, and donating to that intervention doesn't really result in much. 

This paper by Butera and Houser (2016) seems relevant and interesting (emphasis mine):

Philanthropy, and particularly ensuring that one’s giving is effective, can require substantial time and effort. One way to reduce these costs, and thus encourage greater giving, could be to encourage delegation of giving decisions to better-informed others. At the same time, because it involves a loss of agency, delegating these decisions may produce less warm-glow and thus reduce one’s charitable impulse. Unfortunately, the importance of agency in charitable decisions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, using a laboratory experiment with real donations, we shed light on this issue. Our main finding is that agency, while it does correlate with self-reported warm-glow, nevertheless seems to play a small role in encouraging giving. In particular, people do not reduce donations when giving decisions are made by algorithms that guarantee efficient recipients but limit donors’ control over giving allocations. Moreover, we find participating in giving groups − a weaker form of delegation − is also effective in that they are appealing to donors who would not otherwise make informed donations, and thus improves overall effective giving. Our results suggest that one path to promoting effective giving may be to create institutions that facilitate delegated generosity.

What will it cost?