Quick takes

Here's an idea on how funders in AI safety and governance could help applicants improve their applications and projects: Share statistics! (What follows is a text I'm also sending directly to a funder.) I understand you aren't really able to give individualized feedback. Though, as applicants, it would be really helpful to have some more clarity. I think you'd like to give more feedback, if you were able. In thinking about this, here's an idea I had. You could create a score chart, where for every application you keep numerical or binary scores on the reasons it did well or not in the evaluation. Then you can release some statistics publicly. You could for example be able to say things like: * "30% of applications were filtered out because they were not pursuing our AI safety objectives" * "20% we would fund if we had more money" * "40% we'd investigate more deeply if we had more money" * "x% were too hard to understand" * "x% had some flaw in the theory of change" * "x% ..." (I picked more negative than positive slices in these examples, but the positive side is just as interesting.) In fact, some of these statistics would be helpful for donors to <funder>. The scores should track some pretty different kinds of dimensions. Would this be hard to do? I think there can be some pretty different levels of ambition here and some are pretty easy. Releasing just a few pieces of statistics for example might be possible to do based on your current tracking. Potentially, you could even let people request access to some subset of these scores for their application specifically. Something like, the email used to send the application can send an email to request an automated response with the scores you'd be prepared to divulge. Could this create more opportunities for gaming? Well yes, but assuming your criteria are actually good proxies for value, then you also achieve: (1) Better applications (so you get to grant valuable things you might filter otherwise), and

Earning to give is lonely and requires repeated decisions. This is bad. If you're earning to give, you are lucky if you have one EtG team-mate. The people you talk to every day do not have moral intuitions similar to yours, and your actions seem weird to them. If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own. If you earn to give, most days you do not give (you're probably paid bi-weekly, and transaction costs discourage even donating that frequently). These differences apply continual pressure for EtG folks to become less hard-core than we intended to be. I wish I had more counter-pressure. [None of these observations are novel]

EA Animal Welfare Fund almost as big as Coefficient Giving FAW now? This job ad says they raised >$10M in 2025 and are targeting $20M in 2026. CG's public Farmed Animal Welfare 2025 grants are ~$35M.   Is this right? Cool to see the fund grow so much either way.

I’ve donated about $150,000 over the past couple years. Here are some of the many (what I believe to be) mistakes in my past giving: 1. Donating to multiple cause areas. When I first started getting into philosophy more seriously, I adopted a vegan lifestyle and started identifying as EA within only a few weeks of each other. Deciding on my donation allocations across cause areas was painful, as I assign positive moral weights to both humans and animals and they might even be close in intrinsic value. I felt the urge to apologize to my vegan, non AI-worrier friends for increasing my ratio of AI safety donations to animal welfare donations, and my non-vegan, non-EA friends and family thought that donating to animals over humans was crazy. Now my view is something like: donations to AI safety are probably orders of magnitude more effective than to animal welfare or global health + development, so I should (and do) allocate 100% to AI safety. 2. Donating to multiple opportunities within the same cause area. Back in my early EA global health + development days, I found and still find the narrative of “some organizations are 100x more effective than others” pretty compelling, but I internally categorized orgs into two buckets: high EV and low EV. I viewed GiveWell-recommended organizations as broadly 'High EV,' assuming that even if their point estimates differed, their credence intervals overlapped sufficiently to render the choice between them negligible. This might even be true! However, I do not believe this to generalize to animal welfare and AI safety. Now I’ve come full circle in a way, and believe that actually, some things are multiple times (or even orders of magnitude) higher EV than other things, and have chosen to shut up and multiply. If you are a smaller donor, it is unlikely that your donation will sufficiently saturate a donation opportunity such that your nth dollar should go elsewhere. 3. Donating to opportunities that major organizations recommend

It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding.  Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion. As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.

Consider whether you're comparatively advantaged to give to non-tax-deductible things. (Not financial advice.) I think people -- especially donors who are giving >$100k/year -- often default to thinking that they should stick to tax-deductible giving, because they have an unusually high "501c3 multiplier" due to high marginal income tax rates or low cost basis for capital gains taxes. I claim this is a mistake for some donors, because what matters is whether your 501c3 multiplier is unusually high relative to the average dollar in the donor mix, which is usually coming from other people in very high tax brackets. People who do have unusually high "501c3 multipliers" include those with employer matches to 501c3 donations. For a 1:1 match for cash donations, I think the multiplier is something like 3.5x, and even higher if you're donating appreciated assets like equity.[1] I would guess that you need to have a multiplier at least that good to actually be comparatively advantaged [ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic].[2] The reason this matters is that if too many people think they're comparatively advantaged for tax-deductible giving, then non-tax-deductible opportunities (e.g. 501c4 advocacy, political giving, even future 501c3s awaiting their 501c3 determination) will unduly struggle to fundraise, so the best marginal opportunities are often going to be in that category. 1. ^ If your donation budget is $10,000 (of post-tax income) and you're, say, a single San Franciscan making $500k (and therefore paying a 42.53% marginal tax rate, per SmartAsset), I think this means you could donate ~$17,400 in cash (a 1.74x multiplier) and deduct that from your income, reducing your tax burden by $7,400 = $10,000 from your post-tax income. Then your 1:1 employer match means the charity gets double that, or $34,800 (a 3.48x multiplier). If

Gavi's investment opportunity for 2026-2030 says they expect to save 8 to 9 million lives, for which they would require a budget of at least $11.9 billion[1]. Unfortunately, Gavi only raised $9 billion, so they have to make some cuts to their plans[2]. And you really can't reduce spending by $3 billion without making some life-or-death decisions. Gavi's CEO has said that "for every $1.5 billion less, your ability to save 1.1 million lives is compromised"[3]. This would equal a marginal cost of $1,607 $1,363 per life saved, which seems a bit low to me. But I think there is a good chance Gavi's marginal cost per life saved is still cheap enough to clear GiveWell's cost-effectiveness bar. GiveWell hasn't made grants to Gavi, though. Why? ---------------------------------------- 1. https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/investing/funding/resource-mobilisation/Gavi-Investment-Opportunity-2026-2030.pdf, pp. 20 & 43 ↩︎ 2. https://www.devex.com/news/gavi-s-board-tasked-with-strategy-shift-in-light-of-3b-funding-gap-110595 ↩︎ 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02270-x ↩︎

As earn to giver, I found contributing to funding diversification challenging Jeff Kaufmann posted a different version of the same argument earlier than me. Some have argued that earning to give can contribute to funding diversification. Having a few dozen mid-sized donors, rather than one or two very large donors, would make the financial position of an organization more secure. It allows them to plan for the future and not worry about fundraising all the time. As earn to giver, I can be one of those mid-sized donors. I have tried. However, it is challenging. First of all, I don't have expertise, and don't have much time to build the expertise. I spend most of my time on my day job, which has nothing to do with any cause I care about. Any research must be done in my free time. This is fine, but it has some cost. This is time I could have spent on career development, talking to others about effective giving, or living more frugally. Motivation is not the issue, at least for me. I've found the research extremely rewarding and intellectually stimulating to do. Yet, fun doesn't necessarily translate to effectiveness. I've seen peer earn to givers just defer to GiveWell or other charity evaluators without putting much thought into it. This is great, but isn't there more? Others said that they talked to an individual organization, thought "sounds reasonable", and transferred the money. I fell for that trap too! There is a lot at stake. It's about hard-earned money that has the potential to help large numbers of people and animals in dire need. Unfortunately, I don't trust my own non-expert judgment to do this. So I find myself donating to funds, and then the funding is centralized again. If others do the same, charities will have to rely on one grantmaker again, rather than a diverse pool of donors. Ideas What would help to address this issue? Here are a few ideas, some of them are already happening. * funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know r