When people can get on this list for donating 1% or far less of their net worth, it ends up looking like a celebration of capitalism, rather than a celebration of altruism
I don't see just appearing on the list as inherently a celebration of the person. I think lots of people will judge people on the list negatively based on their % of wealth donated or their cost per life value, and that's part of the mechanism that would cause people on the list to donate more or donate more effectively.
I would suggest a more impressive list would be public, wealthy individuals who are ranked by % donated
I think if that was the default ranking the list would lose the main thing that distinguishes EA from other efforts to improve the world, which is an emphasis on effectiveness and actual impact. I agree that "spend nontrivial effort trying to do good" is also something that EA encourages. I just added a feature to be able to sort by % of one's current wealth donated.
I didn't have time to do my own analysis and I'm also trying to get ideas for automatic processing of feedback by LLMs, so I let GPT5.6 and Claude Fable analyze this, with some minimal prompting from me.
I'm curious if you have thoughts on how it'd be if you submitted feedback like you've done here into some sort of form, the LLMs went back and forth processing it like that, updated the site, and published a transcript like the above. I think if I make it fully automated right now it'd be fairly exploitable due to LLM sycophancy, unless I tried pretty hard to mitigate that.
> "there are many people on the MIRI list who are not on your list and you said you were open to adding people who were not well known"
I'm open to it but I'm thinking it's best to prioritize by some combo of: people who actively want to be on the list, people with at least a little bit of public reputation even if it's some niche, and lives saved.
I think adding ~10 'unknown' EAs/rationalists gets the point across to readers that even normal people can have huge impact and can outdo these billionaires, and I'll likely pick some from the MIRI list and the LessWrong donors list to add soon if I don't get enough requests from people. But I'm less sure about adding ~70 of them and immediately doubling the size of the list, as it might make the list less interesting for almost everyone to browse through, and there's a selection bias there. I don't have a principled policy on this yet, but this concern is why I haven't asked an LLM to just add everyone on the MIRI list yet.
Yeah I think the chance of widespread adoption is quite low (< 1%?), but worth a shot. Without adoption I don't think rich people will care much about the rankings themselves (if ~no one else cares about the rankings, then being higher on the list doesn't help their status). But even without much adoption there's a chance for a billionaire to see the list and realize that they weren't thinking about effectiveness enough or in the right way, and become another Moskovitz-like figure.
I've been surprised that three of the commenters so far have had this concern that someone like Musk being ranked 26th/73 will make people want to dismiss the list as a whole. One thing I mentioned in the post is wanting to eventually include all the effects of a person on the world rather than just donations. I'm not sure if this would help though, or just open up way more surface area for people to want to dismiss the list because some assumption went against a deeply held belief of theirs.
I agree that ALLFED should not inherit the default disaster relief numbers. Ideally it would have its own analysis, because even if the numbers do end up being similar to AI x-risk, the reasons why would be pretty different. I also think the estimates shouldn't be influenced by the motivations of donors.
If someone wants to add a custom effectiveness analysis of ALLFED (it looks like CEARCH's numbers are just for part of the portfolio), that'd be great. Otherwise I plan to eventually get to it.
The curated longtermist assumptions use a growth rate of 0.000002% over 10 billion years with a ceiling of a million times the current population, so the population reaches 8.3 quadrillion after 711 million years. Still probably on the low end if we start colonizing space.
Yeah the LLM driven donation research did find both of those sources and both are used as proof for at least some donations. This wouldn't have caused people to be added who weren't already on the list though.
I do count 'deaths caused' via donations (the AI capabilities cause area has a negative cost per life saved), but the root of the issue is that I look only at impact via donations and not overall impact via everything a person does. I eventually want to include those things too, but it seemed like too much work for the first version.
I do have a rule which keeps SBF off the list, that I exclude money donated if it was the proceeds of a crime. In that case there's a pretty clear line that can be drawn.
Do you have a suggestion for a simple policy you'd want me to adopt to deal with general harmful non-donation actions?
RE: the default assumptions, for value judgments I agree that I want the defaults to reflect what is common.
For AI existential risk, I think the crux is mostly not about values (at least for the default assumptions, which only consider the next 100 years) but about how the world works. In those cases I'd like the default rankings to present the best estimates possible without trying to skew towards popular beliefs. But there might be some way that I can make it more clear to people what's happening.
Fair point about the "lives saved" terminology. I could maybe call that column "life equivalents".
RE: whether creating a life is equivalent to saving a life, I agree this is something that lots of people will have objections to. Possibly I should make the user's stance on population ethics an explicit global parameter. I think the most typical view can be simulated with custom assumptions by disabling the Population cause area and possibly shortening the time limit. You can even simulate a longtermist with a person-affecting population ethics view by capping the population at close to the current level and setting the time limit very high (along with disabling the Population cause).
I agree that the motivation behind the rich country phrasing is unclear. I've added some clarification to the site. The estimate focuses on rich countries because the type of charity it's trying to compute a cost per life for tends to be a rich country thing. (There's currently only one recipient in that category.)
I'm working on something similar. See https://impactlist.xyz/ for a very early demo. Don't take the effectiveness ratings that seriously yet -- I've just done very shallow research using LLMs so far. The aim is not to measure how wealthy people would be if they never donated to charity, but how much good billionaires have done with their charitable donations.
Impact List is building up a database of philanthropic donations from wealthy individuals, as a step in ranking the top ~1000 people by positive impact via donations. We're also building a database of info on the effectiveness of various charities.
It would be great if a volunteer could build a website with the following properties:
-It contains pages for each donor, and for each organization that is the target of donations. -Pages for donors list every donation they've ever made, with the date, target organization, amount, and any evidence that this donation actually happened. -Pages for target organizations contain some estimate of each component of the ITN framework, as well as evidence for each of these components. -There is a web form that allows any Internet user to easily submit a new entry into either of these data sources, which can then be reviewed/approved by the operators of Impact List based on the evidence submitted.
I just added this feature.
Thanks for the additional thoughts. I'll feed in your suggestions when I get some time and make any updates that result from that.
RE: unknown EAs/rationalists, yeah I agree having some of them on the list is valuable. I plan to add some soon if I don't get enough volunteers.
I don't see just appearing on the list as inherently a celebration of the person. I think lots of people will judge people on the list negatively based on their % of wealth donated or their cost per life value, and that's part of the mechanism that would cause people on the list to donate more or donate more effectively.
I think if that was the default ranking the list would lose the main thing that distinguishes EA from other efforts to improve the world, which is an emphasis on effectiveness and actual impact. I agree that "spend nontrivial effort trying to do good" is also something that EA encourages. I just added a feature to be able to sort by % of one's current wealth donated.
I created a standalone page for ALLFED: https://impactlist.xyz/recipient/alliance-to-feed-the-earth-in-disasters
I didn't have time to do my own analysis and I'm also trying to get ideas for automatic processing of feedback by LLMs, so I let GPT5.6 and Claude Fable analyze this, with some minimal prompting from me.
Here's my transcript with GPT5.6: https://github.com/impactlist/impactlist/blob/master/docs/ALLFEDChatTranscript-2026-07-25.md
And my transcript with Fable: https://github.com/impactlist/impactlist/blob/master/docs/ALLFEDChatTranscript-ClaudeCode-2026-07-25.md
I'm curious if you have thoughts on how it'd be if you submitted feedback like you've done here into some sort of form, the LLMs went back and forth processing it like that, updated the site, and published a transcript like the above. I think if I make it fully automated right now it'd be fairly exploitable due to LLM sycophancy, unless I tried pretty hard to mitigate that.
> "there are many people on the MIRI list who are not on your list and you said you were open to adding people who were not well known"
I'm open to it but I'm thinking it's best to prioritize by some combo of: people who actively want to be on the list, people with at least a little bit of public reputation even if it's some niche, and lives saved.
I think adding ~10 'unknown' EAs/rationalists gets the point across to readers that even normal people can have huge impact and can outdo these billionaires, and I'll likely pick some from the MIRI list and the LessWrong donors list to add soon if I don't get enough requests from people. But I'm less sure about adding ~70 of them and immediately doubling the size of the list, as it might make the list less interesting for almost everyone to browse through, and there's a selection bias there. I don't have a principled policy on this yet, but this concern is why I haven't asked an LLM to just add everyone on the MIRI list yet.
Yeah I think the chance of widespread adoption is quite low (< 1%?), but worth a shot. Without adoption I don't think rich people will care much about the rankings themselves (if ~no one else cares about the rankings, then being higher on the list doesn't help their status). But even without much adoption there's a chance for a billionaire to see the list and realize that they weren't thinking about effectiveness enough or in the right way, and become another Moskovitz-like figure.
I've been surprised that three of the commenters so far have had this concern that someone like Musk being ranked 26th/73 will make people want to dismiss the list as a whole. One thing I mentioned in the post is wanting to eventually include all the effects of a person on the world rather than just donations. I'm not sure if this would help though, or just open up way more surface area for people to want to dismiss the list because some assumption went against a deeply held belief of theirs.
Thanks!
I agree that ALLFED should not inherit the default disaster relief numbers. Ideally it would have its own analysis, because even if the numbers do end up being similar to AI x-risk, the reasons why would be pretty different. I also think the estimates shouldn't be influenced by the motivations of donors.
If someone wants to add a custom effectiveness analysis of ALLFED (it looks like CEARCH's numbers are just for part of the portfolio), that'd be great. Otherwise I plan to eventually get to it.
The curated longtermist assumptions use a growth rate of 0.000002% over 10 billion years with a ceiling of a million times the current population, so the population reaches 8.3 quadrillion after 711 million years. Still probably on the low end if we start colonizing space.
Yeah the LLM driven donation research did find both of those sources and both are used as proof for at least some donations. This wouldn't have caused people to be added who weren't already on the list though.
I do count 'deaths caused' via donations (the AI capabilities cause area has a negative cost per life saved), but the root of the issue is that I look only at impact via donations and not overall impact via everything a person does. I eventually want to include those things too, but it seemed like too much work for the first version.
I do have a rule which keeps SBF off the list, that I exclude money donated if it was the proceeds of a crime. In that case there's a pretty clear line that can be drawn.
Do you have a suggestion for a simple policy you'd want me to adopt to deal with general harmful non-donation actions?
Hi Ellie -- thanks for the comments.
RE: the default assumptions, for value judgments I agree that I want the defaults to reflect what is common.
For AI existential risk, I think the crux is mostly not about values (at least for the default assumptions, which only consider the next 100 years) but about how the world works. In those cases I'd like the default rankings to present the best estimates possible without trying to skew towards popular beliefs. But there might be some way that I can make it more clear to people what's happening.
Fair point about the "lives saved" terminology. I could maybe call that column "life equivalents".
RE: whether creating a life is equivalent to saving a life, I agree this is something that lots of people will have objections to. Possibly I should make the user's stance on population ethics an explicit global parameter. I think the most typical view can be simulated with custom assumptions by disabling the Population cause area and possibly shortening the time limit. You can even simulate a longtermist with a person-affecting population ethics view by capping the population at close to the current level and setting the time limit very high (along with disabling the Population cause).
I agree that the motivation behind the rich country phrasing is unclear. I've added some clarification to the site. The estimate focuses on rich countries because the type of charity it's trying to compute a cost per life for tends to be a rich country thing. (There's currently only one recipient in that category.)
I'm working on something similar. See https://impactlist.xyz/ for a very early demo. Don't take the effectiveness ratings that seriously yet -- I've just done very shallow research using LLMs so far. The aim is not to measure how wealthy people would be if they never donated to charity, but how much good billionaires have done with their charitable donations.
I originally posted about it on this forum a couple years ago (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LCJa4AAi7YBcyro2H/proposal-impact-list-like-the-forbes-list-except-for-impact) but didn't start working on it seriously until this month.
Currently looking for volunteers (researchers and React devs). Here's the discord: https://discord.gg/6GNre8U2ta.
A website to crowdsource research for Impact List
Impact List is building up a database of philanthropic donations from wealthy individuals, as a step in ranking the top ~1000 people by positive impact via donations. We're also building a database of info on the effectiveness of various charities.
It would be great if a volunteer could build a website with the following properties:
-It contains pages for each donor, and for each organization that is the target of donations.
-Pages for donors list every donation they've ever made, with the date, target organization, amount, and any evidence that this donation actually happened.
-Pages for target organizations contain some estimate of each component of the ITN framework, as well as evidence for each of these components.
-There is a web form that allows any Internet user to easily submit a new entry into either of these data sources, which can then be reviewed/approved by the operators of Impact List based on the evidence submitted.