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Donation Election Discussion Thread — EA Forum

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28

I'm one of the minority who will put forward some GHD orgs this week ;). I think that marginal individual dollars often do the most value funding growing orgs that do one important thing well, so picked Fortify Health, FEM and Lafiya. Full disclosure I know and admire some their founders/workers a bit personally which makes a difference to me too.

I'm not yet convinced about cluster headaches as a cause area, mainly because I'm not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I've never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here. However their fundraising post was well written and compelling, and I like new cause areas getting attention so I added them to my vote list.

I've also voted for the Humane League due to their excellent track record and experience doing what I still consider to be the most important/effective animal welfare work - getting hens out of cages. I realise given the ranked choice voting system this will mean that my vote will not go to one of my top ranked GHD orgs, but if it counts at all might actually count towards an animal welfare org lol, which I'm all good with :).

Alfredo Parra 🔸

12

Thanks for the shoutout and for the vote! :)

I'm not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I've never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here.

This is indeed quite surprising! The relatively low prevalence and the lack of recognition of the disease / misdiagnosis may explain it to some extent, but zero patients in 13 years is still very surprising.

(Consider that even an average neurologist only ever sees a few dozen CH patients during their entire career. I asked Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 to estimate how many CH patients an average neurologist in the US sees per year, assuming an annual prevalence of 1/2000 adults, and their responses were 1–2/year and 1/year, respectively. They also think that the average neurologist sees 3–5x (5–10x resp.) more CH patients than the average primary care doctor, but the odds of not encountering a single patient in 13 years should still be very, very low. Will look into this!)

Also, there's almost no epidemiological data on the prevalence of CH in African countries, so the prevalence error bars are large. (In our paper, we included a sensitivity analysis of the most uncertain variables to add some nuance.)

5

Nice response - i wouldn't take my experience too seriously. i only work part time as a doctor (i run an org) and i could well just have encountered missed the one or two patients with cluster headache. if prevalence is one in 2000 and I've only seen a few thousand patients i probably just missed the guy lol.

I probably shouldn't index off my own experience so much either.

interestingly though there are a lot of conditions with wildly different preference around the world and we don't understand why.

22

My top three charities in this election are all animal charities. With Animal Charity Evaluators at the top. Sure, that's in part because I work there. And likely influenced by this donation election happening over a US holiday and during a season when even more animals are abused and slaughtered than usual. That's mentally quite taxing and this is a way for me to deal with that.

But I do not just vote this way, I donate this way. A significant part of my salary goes back to ACE.

ACE influenced at least $12.3 million in total donations in our last fiscal year. That includes $6.4 million in counterfactual gifts. That's a direct consequence of our efforts and vital to reduce the suffering of billions of individuals. I see this as evidence of ACE's potential; I think we can do much, much more to engage people who dislike animal abuse to help farmed and wild animals effectively. To do that, the organization needs to be able to invest a bit more in growth.

Last year, for every dollar ACE spent on our charity evaluations and recommendations, we generated $6.05 in donations for highly effective animal charities that wouldn’t have been donated to otherwise. (While a strong multiplier is encouraging, what ultimately matters for animals is the total amount of additional funding directed to effective work—$6.4 million in counterfactual donations. A hypothetical organization could have a multiplier of 100x but only influence $10,000; we’d rather have a lower multiplier and move millions more dollars to where they’ll help animals most. So, don't be too (un)impressed by that number.)

Because of ACE, there are animal lovers who now donate to more effective charities, people who now help more animals. Some of them would otherwise not have given to animal welfare at all. That means more piglets, squabs, chicks, calves, and shrimplets have a chance at a decent life.

You can read more about ACE's meta-fundraising impact and how it was calculated here:

Announcing our Latest Influenced-Giving Metrics - Animal Charity Evaluators

Vasco Grilo🔸

18

I ranked Arthropoda Foundation 1st. I think funding research on the welfare of soil animals would increase welfare more cost-effectively than research on the welfare of farmed invertebrates, but that this is the closest one can get, and that Arthropoda is the organisation best placed to do it.

9

i agree it's a great area for funding and I'm surprised there's not more research ongoing on this. My concern is that Anthropoda is operated by some of the same people

Who did the RP moral weights project
Who are doing RP's current cause prioritisation work
Running the WAW initiative.
involved with the Insect Welfare research society

And most/all of whom were not just welfare researchers, but at least to some extent animal welfare proponents/activists before this research started. As far as I can see there is no-one even moderately skeptical of animal welfare/sentience working on these things, although i get that might be too high a bar here because why would skeptical people want to devote their lives to this kind of research?

I think this personel overlap has the potential to cause conflicts of interests.

I don't know whether there are enough people in the field to be able to have less personel overlap between these orgs but it feels a bit icky at best and dangerous at worst.

I'm not recommending people don't donate to these orgs Im just pointing out the extreme personel overlap in this funding/research ecosystem and that i don't love the situation.

23

For what it’s worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), I’d very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and I’d prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.

I think it’s pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems like…. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?

And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skeptics - just not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticism - it sounds like you’re just advocating for there to be extreme skeptics - e.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say “global health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isn’t good thing to do”, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance.

7

it's good to hear that there are more skeptical people working in this space on your front. i take the point about life for all animal welfare people being harder if the consensus becomes we need to care a lot about insects

I don't understand the comparison to working with humans at all though, it seems a bit absurd. Basically 100 percent of people think humans matter, so it's not even possible to find people who don't care about them? whereas with insects getting people with 1% - 30% priors on sentience working on that seems reasonable? Orgs like GiveWell and Global health researchers are often skeptical about what they are researching. You're right though that bias is an issue in all research, in it's just about mitigating it.

There are skeptical scientists out there I've even seen them commenting on the forum - could they not be brought on board? I get that might be impossible if it's a volunteer organization, but i would hope some people involved were on good terms/friends with more skeptical people.

My main point isn't that i think people shouldn't work on what they care about, it's that we have purely highly motivated people funding/running a range of organizations that are researching a critically important question about animal welfare, which seems like potentially a strong source of bias.

Vasco Grilo🔸

3

Hi Abraham.

I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%.

Being sceptical about a high probability of sentience does not imply scepticism about work on increasing the welfare of arthropods being very cost-effective (I know you understand this). At least for people caring about expected welfare, I think endorsing a probability of sentience of 10 % leads to only slighly more scepticism about the cost-effectiveness of the work relative to one of 100 %.

2

Hey @Vasco Grilo🔸 Abraham and i aren't discussing the cost effectiveness of the work, we're discussing the merits of having all people who believe in high probabilities of insect sentience working on and funding the work. He was making the point that he was one of the founders of Arthropoda even while his personal percentage chance on moral relevance of insects isn't necessarily that high.

13

This is not an unreasonable take, but just in the interest of having an accurate public record, I'm actually the strategy director for WAI (although I was the executive director previously). Also, none of us at Arthropoda are technically animal welfare scientists. Our training is all in different things (for example, my PhD is in engineering mechanics and Bob's a philosopher who published a lot of skeptical pieces on insects).

Basically, I think we came to Arthropoda because the work we did before that changed our minds. More importantly, I don't think the majority of Arthropoda's work will be about checking for sentience? Rather, we're taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are. In this context our views on sentience seem less likely to cause a COI -- although I also expect all our research to be publicly available for people to red-team as needed :)

Finally, fully agree on the extreme personnel overlap. I would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs! But the resource constraints and unusualness of this space are unfortunately not particularly conducive to finding a ton of people willing to take on leadership roles.

6

"Rather, we're taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are".

If this is the case, i think this mission could have been made a bit more clear on @Bob Fischer 's funding post and on the website itself. Re-reading the post though that sentiment does come through if a bit unclearly. On a first read i really did think a big part of it was still researching insect sentience.

Also on a completely side/ personal note I'm a bit concerned that you "would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs!" I think we are generally more productive if we are happy doing what we love and the work is sustainable. I've tried at times dying on the altar of important work and it wasn't helpful for me or the work!

Vasco Grilo🔸

7

Thanks, Nick.

Personally I'm dubious whether negative findings if they occurred would be promoted/taken seriously given how motivated most people involved here to be recognized/funded etc.

I am not sure I understand this. People at Arthropoda have an incentive to promote and take seriously negative findings about ways to help farmed arthropods such that the scarce available resources to do this are not wasted. You may be referring to findinds which should update one towards prioritising humans over animals, but Arthropoda is not focussed on this. My concern is that they are not prioritising soil arthropods enough.

4

@Vasco Grilo🔸 I wasn't clear sorry, i meant negative findings in the scientific sense, in this case unremarkable findings that might provide evidence against insect sentience. Have edited above hope it's more clear now.

And my comment didn't address your soil arthropods concern, it was an unrelated point about Anthropoda. i think i failed on clarity here...

8

I thought quite some people who are doing insect sentience research were skeptical about it to start with. Yes, they mostly already cared about animals. Negative findings would help people to reorient toward animals that are more evidently sentient, and I do think people will be motivated to promote that conclusion.

david_reinstein

6

It's hard for me to glean what the consensus is in this thread/on this issue. But if there seems to be a strong case that some outside scrutiny is needed, this might be something The Unjournal (Unjournal.org) could help with. Bringing "outside the EA bubble" academic expertise to weigh in is one of our key things

We generally focus on economics and social science but we might be able to stretch to this. (Feel free to dm/suggest/ping me).

4

hey @david_reinstein appreciate that! Perhaps though given the apparent strong disagreement to my concerns about conflicts of interest / the same people managing a bunch of intertwined orgs I'm not sure many other think there's a big issue here.

15

I continue to think that animal welfare—in particular the fight against factory farming—is severely under-funded, even compared to other worthy options such as GiveWell top charities.

13

I gave some preference to smaller global health organizations this time around. The main value of my vote, I think, lies in signalling -- at least for most of the ballot. The big GHW players are great, but their room for more funding and established evidentiary bases can make it difficult for smaller or newer organizations.

You could make a similar argument about small animal-welfare orgs. But past voting results reflect more votes for those orgs, and so I adjudge the marginal value of adding to that signal to be lower.

3

I feel a bit confused by this strategy. The normal idea of voting is to express your preference, such that the outcome reflects what the majority prefers.

If people treat it rather as an opportunity to communicate to others, that seems likely to distort the outcome. In regular political elections I'm ok with that, but in this context where voters are voting altruistically, I'm less sure.

I'm also confused because the act of writing here is a signal, and probably a clearer one! Could you not have done that and voted for who you genuinely think should be 'elected'?

4

I see no perceptible risk of distortion here because the organizations at the top of my ballot are not going to win, and I know this. The absence of an effect on the outcome is why the main value of my ballot is signaling. But for that effect, spending the time to rank most orgs would have had no real purpose. (I'll know who the five or six orgs with an actual chance of winning are as voting progresses; it is the ranking between those organizations that has an actual effect on the outcome.)

As far as voting vs. posting, people may look at the election outcomes as a summary measure of preferences without taking the time to read every comment.

Also, my description may have made my votes look more tactical than they are. I do intend to donate to my top four choices; I genuinely think they should be elected!

12

List [not necessarily final!]

1. ClusterFree
2. Center for Reducing Suffering
3. Arthropoda Foundation
4. Shrimp Welfare Project
5. Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund
6. Forethought Foundation
7. Wild Animal Initiative
8. Center for Wild Animal Welfare
9. Animal Welfare Fund
10. Aquatic Life Institute
11. Longview Philanthropy's Emerging Challenges Fund
12. Legal Impact for Chickens
13. The Humane League
14. Rethink Priorities
15. Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research
16. MATS Research

Methodology

I used AI for advice (unlike last year) with Claude-Opus-4.5 and Gemini-3-Pro-Preview. I didn't take either of their suggested rankings of course, but they both gave me a pretty decent starting point to work with such that I'm pretty sure I'd endorse either's list as a marginal improvement to the vote distribution

Both were prompted with a list of my values and takes in addition to roughly 200k tokens scraped from the relevant posts list.

More substantially, my final list was probably based on a combination of not-really-all-that-amazing-but-better-than-nothing heuristics: what I feel like EA at large is under-funding, what I would be most excited to see, what tentatively aligns with my literally endorsed beliefs about the nature of suffering, what cause areas make theoretical sense to be near the Pareto frontier.

Take

Honestly I think I would (will?) almost certainly adjust my list if I look(ed) into it for just a few additional hours

At some level, implicitly ranking charities [eg by donating to one and not another] is kind of an insane thing for an individual to do - not in an anti-EA way (you can do way better than vibes/guessing randomly) but in a "there must be better mechanisms/institutions for outsourcing donation advice than GiveWell and ACE and ad hoc posts/tweets/etc and it's really hard and high stakes" way.

Like what I would love is a lineup of 10-100 very highly engaged and informed people (could create the list simply by number of endorsements/requests) who talk about their strategy and values in a couple pages and then I just defer to them (does this exist?)

12

At Giv Effektivt, where I work as managing director, we are currently exploring whether to expand into additional cause areas. Until now, we have focused “only” on global health and poverty.

As part of this process, it has become increasingly clear to me how neglected animal welfare is as a philanthropic cause and how likely it is that additional funding could reduce more suffering at a lower cost than many interventions within global health or poverty. The evidence for this is actually stronger than we expected when we began this investigation.

Toby Tremlett🔹

10

Thanks to an anonymous Forum user who notified me about a couple instances of vote brigading, some votes have been nullified. Those whose votes are nullified will be able to vote again. This does mean that the ranking on the banner has changed a bit (but not drastically).

I'm not publicising the name(s) of the vote brigader(s) because this is mostly my bad - I didn't send as many clear reminders of the rules of the competition to orgs who joined late. As far as I know, no one deserves a reputational hit for this one (well, yep apart from me, sorry all!).

9

I strongly believe animal advocacy is the most powerful way to save the most lives and better the world.

8

The main reason I voted for Forethought and MATS was because I believe AI governance/safety is both unusually important, with only Farmed/Wild animal welfare being competitive in terms of EV, and I believe that AI has a reasonable chance to be so powerful as to make other cause area assumptions irrelevant, meaning their impact is much, much less predictable without considering AI governance/safety.

Ariel Simnegar 🔸

7

Arthropoda remains my top pick out of those listed, but I chose Shrimp Welfare Project followed by the EA Animal Welfare Fund as my top two votes for strategic voting reasons.

I still think there are strong arguments for animal welfare dominating global health (at least on first-order effects), and that animal welfare is much more funding constrained and neglected than AI safety. (Invertebrates and wild animals still seem like the most impactful and neglected opportunities in animal welfare.) This year, I'm donating to Sentient Futures to try to improve coordination between advocates for neglected beings and the AI space.

6

I put Lafiya. I think they're doing amazing work, and their cost-effectiveness numbers for saving the life of an adult are possibly the most cost-effective I've seen.

(They also prevent a lot of newborn deaths, have substantial income benefits, and promote choice around children and women's empowerment, all generally good stuff on the side)

6

I currently believe the most impactful marginal funding opportunities focus on improving the welfare of highly numerous but neglected classes of animals (especially wild animals, shrimp, and invertebrates). As a longtermist, my work focuses on existential risk reduction, but my sense is that the key existential risk-related causes (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity) are relatively well-funded compared to the highest priority animal welfare causes, so I choose to donate there.

6

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at rangevoting.org/livessaved demonstrates, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

6

I didn't have a lot of time but I went through the list and selected a few charities that looked especially interesting or novel:

Alliance for Reducing Microbial Resistance (ARMoR)
Development Media International (DMI)
New Incentives
New Roots Institute
Sentinel
The Unjournal

This is purely based on my gut feeling, so I will probably come back to consider my selection more carefully at a later point.

Update: after looking at the current leaderboard, I added ACE and AMF to my votes from a strategic perspective.

6

First, my time is limited, so I only consider the options that are likely to win (I considered the top six). At time of voting, this is the Animal Welfare Fund, ACE, CWAW, Forethought, CEEALAR, and AMF.

Second, I prioritize non-fund/non-charity-eval orgs. I view the Donation Election as a way for the forum to serve as the fund managers or charity evaluators ourselves instead of deferring to experts. Otherwise, why not just do that instead of donating to the election fund? This means CWAW, Forethought, CEEALAR, and AMF are candidates.

Third, my initial ranking among these four: CWAW, AMF, CEEALAR, Forethought. In general, I'm skeptical that marginal $ towards AI safety will do much good. As such, Forethought ranks below the others. Then I pick CWAW over AMF and CEEALAR due to the donation matching opportunity as well as the fact that it is new and seems clearly funding constrained. I choose CEEALAR over AMF simply because I think buildiing the talent pipeline is particularly important. So, my choices are: CWAW, then CEEALAR, then AMF.

Fourth, I will revisit my vote in one week to see if the rankings have changed substantially and adjust accordingly for my final vote.

5

It's certainly worthwhile that this helps less-well-supported non-profits reach a larger audience, but I find the current ranked list somewhat disturbing and disappointing. As an "EA 1.0" person these are not my priorities and I think they would puzzle many outsiders.

2

From your perspective might be good at least that strategic voting from global health folks had got AMF up there lol.

5

When on the fence, I ranked smaller and newer charities higher

4

EA lurker, hi. I ranked first and second two that I've donated to this year so had already researched. First ALLFED which I've been a fan of and donated to for years. As far as I know truly a neglected area, don't know of a comparable effort. Hope the D never happens but cool learnings regardless. Second Center for Election Science which I'm highly uncertain has a big marginal impact (I'm not sure approval or score voting will obtain significantly more optimal outcomes given noise) but I feel like the established and usual alternative systems represent a kind of lack of ambition that is paralyzing. After that I skimmed the posts about every candidate (enjoyable) and mostly ranked in tiers starting with health, then animals, then meta EA, then AI, and within the tiers mostly concrete interventions over evaluative or resource-to-field causes. Though I appreciate the need for eval/meta I feel like there are so many no brainer inteventions that I'm less convinced field building/effectiveness are more beneficial. AI last because I think the most important AI prep is not about AI but rather good governance/inclusive institutions/disaster resilience that will pay off regardless of timelines (any of which I consider highly speculative), and it wasn't apparent to me that any of the causes mentioning AI took that non-AI path.

4

Hot take behind a semi-veil of ignorance on this year's results: I submit that next year, there should be a modest allocation (~10%) for the best finisher in certain categories if no org in that category makes the top three:

Last org standing in a major cause area grouping (i.e., GHW, AW, LT, meta/cross-cause/other)
Last small org standing (i.e., annual budget less than . . . 300K? 500K? 750K??)

If the main value of the election is eliciting / signaling community preferences, then I think it's helpful to have good information available for each major cause area and also to signal-boost a small (usually upstart) org or two. Guaranteeing a modest pot of money for each sub-winner should improve the quality of the signal.

If the main value of the election is driving engagement, then I think it's helpful to give (almost) everyone one race in which they are more invested in the outcome / feel like there's an option to meaningfully support one org in their preferred cause area.

Toby Tremlett🔹

4

The donation election 'I voted' flair (pictured below) was broken until last night. If you vote again it should be added to your account!

(This is also a reminder that you can change your vote as many times as you like, and the deadline is Sunday)

Dylan Richardson

3

I'm ranking the Animal Welfare Fund first - the Shrimp Welfare Project is already a grantee of the fund; and in general I don't think that it is clearly much more effective than others on the fund. Much of these are emerging interventions and causes which plausibly benefit considerably from the marginal dollar (at least until we have better evidence for tractability).

I'm ranking Forethought higher than I usually would for a research org, primarily because I've been impressed by their research agenda which seems particularly on-point, as well as effective public communication.

4

I have stayed at CEEALAR and the work they do is really impactful.

3

I considered what I've learnt while working in animal advocacy and AI safety. I think these are the 2 most urgent/important cause areas given actuality of/potential for harm/suffering. I ranked orgs based on who I think is doing good work and has sound epistemics, roughly.

3

I believe in focusing on long-term risks mostly.

3

On the margin, I've aimed to rank animal related and extreme suffering focused organizations higher due to my belief these causes are more neglected.

3

I like charities that facilitate the use of contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa because it's a good way to reduce child mortality. And also because I have an average-based utilitarian outlook and I think there will be many people with long lives and high quality of life in the future, so I think reducing population growth in the present will improve the average welfare of humans, past, present, and future.

3

I put a lot more value into charities for humans than I do into charities for animals, so I didn't rank any animal welfare groups.

I was glad that a family planning charity was available this year. Availability of family planning as a tool for lifting folks out of poverty is something I've been thinking about this year.

3

My priorities are AI safety and women’s health.

3

I put voting method reform first, because it has the greatest overall downstream impact, then charities that directly help people, then charities that help animals, then left things unranked that I don't support or think are actually harmful.

Dave Cortright 🔸

3

They all touch on mental health interventions in some way.

2

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at ScoreVoting.net/LivesSaved explains, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

1

(Duplicate comment)

2

We ran an event for WashU Impact Society where members could pitch a charity and then the group voted for which charities we thought would be most effective

2

Wow feels like strategic voting is getting real.

1

I enjoyed the Donation Election mechanism! It was good to get some exposure to charities I hadn't considered before, stack ranking things is always fun, and even more so when it's for a good (set of) causes!

1

What I consider to be the most pressing issues in terms of amount of suffering and scale

1

Focused on scale of suffering and cost-effectiveness across my votes. Particularly excited about Latin American organizations (ACTRA, Vida Plena) given the region's potential and underinvestment. Animal sentience weighs significantly in my cause prioritization.

Quietly extrovert

0

These sites are of most concern in my world view, and need immediate attention globally.

2

The published comment doesn't display your votes, so you might want to edit it if you want the public to know to which organizations you were referring.

Felix Sargent (Election Science)

-2

Nothing else matters reform because without putting reform any voting policy change won’t actually take effect