Comments
I would like for people who are giving away money to tell us where the money comes from.
- BluePerch "is a new animal welfare grantmaker" planning to give away several million dollars. Great! Where does that money come from? Who is the donor or group of donors? Their EA post does not say, and neither does their website.
- Tilt Collective supports "efforts that improve access to nutritious, affordable, sustainable food and build on local agricultural knowledge." Their hiring page says they are a "a philanthropic initiative that advances a balanced food system." Their twitter was last updated in 2024. Their homepage features a report, a TED talk, and nothing else. Every year, they put on a Climate Week event called Food Day, which they're currently promoting on LinkedIn. (The food was very good there last year and the whole thing had signs of being well-funded.) Other than that, there's no mention of programs supported, where the money comes from, or how they make decisions about whom to support.
- Renaissance Philanthropy, same story.
You might think, it's their money, they can do with it what they please, and very wealthy people have good reasons to want privacy. To which I say:
- A core lesson of FTX is to be cautious about whom you take money from and how you relate to them. Like Gus says on The Wire, "Maybe you win a Pulitzer behind this stuff. And maybe you gotta give it back.”
- Obscurity helps insiders navigate and keeps everyone else out. I prefer legibility and egalitarian systems, which I think are more consistent with EA values.
When conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis, there are many circumstances in which the honest, laudable answer is that the uncertainties are so large -- both what parameters matter and what values to assign them -- that we don't know what direction they point on net; thereof one must be silent.
David Friedman makes a similar point about the externalities of population growth:
I think when faced with such circumstances, many EAs say "well we're highly uncertain but my best guess is X." I am much more comfortable saying, like David, "I have no idea, sorry."
Others might think of this as something we can address using meta-level CEA: we can say how good or bad such speculation about the goodness or badness of an action is based on some past experiences or distribution or possible results or whatever. My view: this difference in habit is primarily aesthetic/cultural.