Hey Vasco,

Quick response below as I am limiting my time on the EA forum nowadays. I am far less convinced that life saving interventions are net population creating than I am that family planning decreases it. Written about 10 years ago, but still one of the better pieces on this IMO is David Roodman's report commissioned by GiveWell.
In addition, our welfare points are far less certain estimates when compared to our global health estimates. This matters a lot, e.g., I would regress weaker CEAs by over 1 order of magnitude even from the same organization using similar methods, and it could be 3+ orders of magnitude across different orgs and methods. AIM in general is pretty confident e.g. that our best animal charities are not 379x better than a top GiveWell charity even if a first pass CEA might suggest that.

I think for externalities you can get yourself pretty lost down a rabbit hole based on pretty speculative assumptions if you are not careful. We try to think of it a bit like the weight quantitative modeling described here and only include effects that we think are major (e.g. 10%+ effect after uncertainty adjustments on the total impact). We also try to take into account what effects we expect founders considering these ideas would most likely consider to be decision relevant for them.

In general I think we aim to be more modest about moral estimates (particularly when they are uncertain or hotly debated) and try to recommend the peak intervention across different cause areas without making a final verdict. I also think this call in our case does not reduce our impact as there are pretty natural caps to every cause area, e.g., I do not think the animal movement could effectively absorbed 10 new charities a year anyways.

I hope this is helpful!

Best,
Joey

Large scale animal funding is in a worse state compared to global health. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GFkzLx7uKSK8zaBE3/we-need-more-nuance-regarding-funding-gaps 

Joining another CE charity is pretty common, as is working at EA meta-orgs (AIM, GiveWell, etc.). I would guess that around 75% do something most people would regard as very high impact.

Agree regarding external marginal funding, but I would say, at least in AIM's case, this correlates with early-stage success.

Personally, I do not think we have swung too far on this. Even in the AIM/CE cohorts (from which both of the recent public shutdown posts came), I still think people err too much on the side of keeping projects running when they are not performing.

I think how to think about shutting down projects comes down a lot to counterfactuals. It's not that a project could not work or definitely will fail; it's about how good a marginal bet it is. Every dollar and high-talent hour going into the project could, in theory, be going somewhere else—often somewhere with pretty high impact. When I think about a cohort of 6 charities founded out of AIM, after 2 years, I would expect shutting down the bottom 2 and having the staff/funding join the top 2 would result in far more impact for the world. That would result in a ~33% shutdown rate, which is way above what happens in the charity world and about double what happens in AIM right now. 

My quick sense is that most are cause open and will end up similar to GWWC or effektiv-spenden. 

I do think localization has some effect but not a huge one. A quick Google search gave me a sum of $60,000 or £47,000 for the US in 2022 (if you only include full-time workers), so it's a bit higher, but not enough to radically change the picture. My soft sense is that US vs. UK EA organizations would not have large pay differences. Also, I do not think AIM historically has had fewer US employees than other organizations that are based in the UK.

I think this is partially correct. I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason. I would argue that more EA organizations should and could adopt this approach. The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays—see some numbers I looked up (although these figures are now somewhat higher as they are based on older data).

That number is across all cause areas; animal welfare, family planning, and global health funders have slightly higher EVs than other cause areas where we have recommended projects.

Yes both of the larger donations where part of this grant.