Hey there, I'm Austin, currently running https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com!
Disclosure is a reasonable idea, but mandating it at the top is awful, because the first line of a essay generally should be a hook, or convey the most information about the essay (after the title, anyways; especially because EA Forum doesn't have a subtitle the way eg Substack does).
I would recommend allowing the author to put the disclosure anywhere in their essay. After the intro section might be a more natural place, or at the bottom similar to acknowledgements.
I don't think there's a settled consensus on the question of "should individual EAs split donations"; see Jeff Kaufman here and Eric Neyman/JP Addison here.
I used to be more on the side of "math out the impact EV and just give everything to one charity each year" but I'm now much closer to Nick's recommendation of splitting your donations. Some arguments in favor of splitting:
Welcome to the EA Forum and thank you for posting this! I enjoy both Change.org and now Givedirectly. I agree with most of your points (and every one of your hot takes, I think!)
I'd push back a bit against "4. Use the index funds of giving." One nitpick is that I'm not sure the analogy holds that well -- charitable funds like Givewell and CG's are more like mutual funds or hedge funds; you can't actually passively index because there's no simple metric of market cap to benchmark against. So implicitly, the choice of which fund to give to bakes in a bunch of worldview and effectiveness assumptions, and a lot of trust in the people running the charitable fund (unlike, say, VTI).
More broadly, I think that on the margin, there's too much deference to charitable funds and too little "do your own research" in the EA space. (Though I understand that your original post on LinkedIn is angled for a wider audience, and there, I think Givewell - or Givedirectly! - is a great default rec).
The problem with charities/DAFs accepting pre-IPO stocks though is that they still need some way of liquidiating those stocks at the end of the day.
There's also more exotic things that are possible, for a large enough donation size. A year ago before the Anthropic tenders were worked out, I had a proposal for lining up Anthropic employees & EA earn-to-give donors, and having them do a donation swap.
Some people (earn-to-give folks? banks?) may be willing to lend you money against your private/pre-IPO stock as well?
I think preparing for AI money is generally smart given Anthropic & OpenAI Foundation, though I don't expect Ineffable specifically to have liquidity for at least a couple years.
It's possible that there are some clever schemes that could allow David or others to start donating sooner (eg some liquidity at a raise, or borrowing against value of stock), but historically it's not until IPO (and sometimes much later) before founders donate significant amounts.
Yes, Marcus Abramovitch and I put out this piece analyzing cost-effectiveness for AI safety youtubers specifically.
Manifund doesn't have other pieces in the pipeline, but I would love for more work of this kind to exist, and I know other initiatives like https://grantmaking.ai/ are interested in finding qualified folks to do this kind of analysis at scale.
I agree disclosure is for the benefit of the reader - I'm saying that, as a reader, I disprefer having to skip through a sentence at the top of many new posts disclaming that they used LLMs for copy editing and feedback.
I think the main thing I care about is "were large sections of this written directly by LLM" which I would prefer as first sentence so I know when to not read (which is actually the policy as written here, though I only realized that as of writing this comment). But -- it appears that the default warning box has started scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm.