I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don't know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:
I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that's a public good - it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me.
Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we're perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don't think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent.
I'd love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!
Thanks for your work here! I can see that the data here is limited, and I think that makes projects like this much harder but still very valuable.
A couple of questions/suggestions:
At the risk of sounding naive: I'd like to point out you can go work for a frontier AI company and give lots of money to AI safety (or indeed any other cause area you believe in).
If nothing else, if you give at least the salary difference between a frontier job and a lower-pay non-frontier AI safety job, this prevents you from lying to yourself: thinking you are working at a frontier company because you believe its good, while actually doing it because of the benefits to you.
This is great! I think its extremely important and underrated (dare I say 'neglected'?) work to identify and shift resources towards more effective charities in smaller contexts, even if those charities are unlikely to be the most globally effective.
Are you able to share more of your analysis or data? I'm curious about the proportion of charities in the categories you identify above, and what, if any numerical/categorical values you assigned.
I suspect you would get a much wider applicant pool for EAGxSingapore if it were a week later.
The time requirements (<10 hours/week for most roles for most of the process, then full-time the week of the conference) is not really viable for most working professionals, and more suited to students who would be on winter break - but it looks like NUS (Singapore), Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University (Phillipines), and Fulbright University (Vietnam), ie. the (I think) majority of the EA university groups in South East Asia, have school terms going up to the week of the conference.
I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.
I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.
I'm kind of confused why I don't think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don't...