Quick takes

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

Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday. My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign. If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly about my normal longtermist c3 recommendations. Some friends and I have nonpublic recommendations less good than Bores but ~4x as good as the normal longtermist c3s above, according to me.

Another Philosophers Against Malaria Fundraiser has begun: https://www.againstmalaria.com/FundraiserGroup.aspx?FundraiserID=9418 In the last years, we got ca $65.000 in donations. Early donations are especially helpful, as they populate the page and give a sense of dynamism!  Any share with philosophers or university patriots that you know would be especially welcome. The fundraiser is a 'competition' between departments that aggregates donations; the winner is announced on the popular philosophy blog 'DailyNous'. Last year, the good folks at Delaware won. Before that, Michigan took the crown. Ohio State and Villanova lie in shambles.   Any help much appreciated! These are easy to run - if you are interested in starting one for your discipline, please reach out.  

The Double Up Drive is now live, with donation matching and the possibility of a tax receipt when donating from a variety of countries. https://doubleupdrive.org/2025-match-drive-preview/

It's mind-blowing to me that AMF's immediate funding gap is $462M for 2027-29. That's 56-154,000 lives (mostly under-5 children) at $3-8k per life saved, maybe fewer going forward due to evolving resistance to insecticides, but it wouldn't change the bottomline that this seems to be a gargantuan ball dropped. Last time AMF's immediate funding gap was over $300M for 2024-26, so it's grown 50%(!) this time round. Both times the main culprit was the same, the Global Fund's funding replenishment shortfall vs target, which affects programmatic planning in countries. I'd like to think we're collectively doing our part (e.g. last year GiveWell directed $150M to AMF, more than to any other charity, which by their reckoning is expected to save ~27k lives over the next 1-2 years), but it's still nuts to me that such a longstanding high-profile "shovel-ready" giving opportunity as AMF can still have such a big and growing gap!

Since the centralized donation swap isn't running anymore, I thought I'd create a quick take as a space in which people can ask for counterparties in ad hoc donation swaps.  These are usually set up when Person A wants to donate to an organization that isn't tax-advantaged in their country. They would like to find a counterparty who lives in a country where that organization is tax-advantaged. In exchange, Person A donates to an organization of the counterparty's choice which is tax-advantaged in their own country. US donors make particularly good counterparties as so many effective charities have 501(c)(3) status -- or can accept donations through another 501(c)(3) -- in the US. Some potential candidates can be found at the GWWC site here. AMF is tax-advantaged in lots of places. If someone has the charts from the old donation swap website, the vast majority of the listed organizations are probably still tax-advantaged in the listed countries. The end result is that more money gets moved to effective charity for the same out-of-pocket cost for the donors. Also, as others have expressed, small/medium donations serve important roles in the funding ecosystem, and swaps allow everyone to give them without putting themselves at a tax disadvantage. (Please don't propose swaps that have the effect of circumventing legal limitations on who can donate, frustrating public reporting obligations, and so on. Specifically, donation swapping to political campaigns is inappropriate in the US and probably in other countries as well.)[1] 1. ^ I'm not providing legal advice that swaps for tax purposes are okay, mind you. But I did just do one.

FYI: METR is actively fundraising!  METR is a non-profit research organization. We prioritise independence and trustworthiness, which shapes both our research process and our funding options. To date, we have not accepted payment from frontier AI labs for running evaluations. ^[1] Part of METR's role is to independently assess the arguments that frontier AI labs put forward about the safety of their models. These arguments are becoming increasingly complex and dependent on nuances of how models are trained and how mitigations were developed. For this reason, it's important that METR has its finger on the pulse of frontier AI safety research. This means hiring and paying for staff that might otherwise work at frontier AI labs, requiring us to compete with labs directly for talent. The central constraint to our publishing more and better research, and scaling up our work aimed at monitoring the AI industry for catastrophic risk, is growing our team with excellent new researchers and engineers. And our recruiting is, to some degree, constrained by our fundraising - especially given the skyrocketing comp that AI companies are offering. To donate to METR, click here: https://metr.org/donate If you’d like to discuss giving with us first, or receive more information about our work for the purpose of informing a donation, reach out to giving@metr.org   1. ^ However, we are definitely not immune from conflicting incentives. Some examples:    - We are open to taking donations from individual lab employees (subject to some constraints, e.g. excluding senior decision-makers, constituting <50% of our funding)  - Labs provide us with free model access for conducting our evaluations, and several labs also provide us ongoing free access for research even if we're not conducting a specific evaluation. 

Popstar Billie Eilish's question "If you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?" and her succinct advice "Give away your money" in a recent award show raises hope for Altruism in coming times is what I think!