If you voted in the Donation Election, how long did it take you? (What did you spend the most time on?)

I'd be really grateful for quick notes. (You can also private message me if you prefer.) 

I think it's probably too late to set up, unfortunately, but if we do this again next year I think it's a thing to keep in mind. 

Relatedly, here are some Manifold Markets about whether the Donation Election Fund will reach: 

1. $40K
2. $50K
3. $75K
4. $100K

Here's a long excerpt (happy to take it down if asked, but I think people might be more likely to go read the whole thing if they see part of it): 

The only thing everyone agrees on is that the only two things EAs ever did were “endorse SBF” and “bungle the recent OpenAI corporate coup.”

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

And I do think the movement is worth fighting for. Here’s a short, very incomplete list of things effective altruism has accomplished in its ~10 years of existence. I’m counting it as an EA accomplishment if EA either provided the funding or did the work, further explanations in the footnotes. I’m also slightly conflating EA, rationalism, and AI doomerism rather than doing the hard work of teasing them apart:

Global Health And Development

• Saved about 200,000 lives total, mostly from malaria¹
• Treated 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection.²
• Given 5 million people access to clean drinking water.³
• Supported clinical trials for both the RTS.S malaria vaccine (currently approved!) and the R21/Matrix malaria vaccine (on track for approval)⁴
• Supported additional research into vaccines for syphilis, malaria, helminths, and hepatitis C and E.⁵
• Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.⁶

Animal Welfare:

• Convinced farms to switch 400 million chickens from caged to cage-free.⁷
• 
• Freed 500,000 pigs from tiny crates where they weren’t able to move around⁸
• Gotten 3,000 companies including Pepsi, Kelloggs, CVS, and Whole Foods to commit to selling low-cruelty meat.

AI:

• Developed RLHF, a technique for controlling AI output widely considered the key breakthrough behind ChatGPT.⁹
• …and other major AI safety advances, including RLAIF and the foundations of AI interpretability¹⁰.
• Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.¹¹
• Helped convince OpenAI to dedicate 20% of company resources to a team working on aligning future superintelligences.
• Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models for dangerous behavior before releasing them.
• Got two seats on the board of OpenAI, held majority control of OpenAI for one wild weekend, and still apparently might have some seats on the board of OpenAI, somehow?¹²
• [Skipped screenshot]
• Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.¹³
• [Skipped screenshot]
• Become so influential in AI-related legislation that Politico accuses effective altruists of having “[taken] over Washington” and “largely dominating the UK’s efforts to regulate advanced AI”.
• Helped (probably, I have no secret knowledge) the Biden administration pass what they called "the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.”
• Helped the British government create its Frontier AI Taskforce.
• Won the PR war: a recent poll shows that 70% of US voters believe that mitigating extinction risk from AI should be a “global priority”.

Other:

• Helped organize the SecureDNA consortium, which helps DNA synthesis companies figure out what their customers are requesting and avoid accidentally selling bioweapons to terrorists¹⁴.
• Provided a significant fraction of all funding for DC groups trying to lower the risk of nuclear war.¹⁵
• Donated a few hundred kidneys.¹⁶
• Sparked a renaissance in forecasting, including major roles in creating, funding, and/or staffing Metaculus, Manifold Markets, and the Forecasting Research Institute.
• Donated tens of millions of dollars to pandemic preparedness causes years before COVID, and positively influenced some countries’ COVID policies.
• Played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement - I’m as surprised by this one as you are, but see footnote for evidence¹⁷.

I think other people are probably thinking of this as par for the course - all of these seem like the sort of thing a big movement should be able to do. But I remember when EA was three philosophers and few weird Bay Area nerds with a blog. It clawed its way up into the kind of movement that could do these sorts of things by having all the virtues it claims to have: dedication, rationality, and (I think) genuine desire to make the world a better place.

II.

Still not impressed? Recently, in the US alone, effective altruists have:

• ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings
• cured AIDS and melanoma
• prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack

Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.

But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.

About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly¹⁸.

People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”

In a world where people thought saving 200,000 lives mattered as much as whether you caused boardroom drama, we wouldn’t need effective altruism. These skewed priorities are the exact problem that effective altruism exists to solve - or the exact inefficiency that effective altruism exists to exploit, if you prefer that framing.

+1 to The Emperor of all Maladies

(Replied via email.) 

Hi! Sorry for the delay in my response here: 

• Unfortunately, we could only list organizations from here as candidates in the Donation Election this year (largely due to vetting capacity and the current system we’re using for the election). I tried to make this clear in the announcement posts, but I think it ended up being confusing.
• However, we can add your project in the Giving Portal here if you send us a logo,^[1] a link to a fundraiser or your donation page (which ideally also shares some information about what you do and why people should consider donating), and a link to a description of your work (your website probably works). We might also add a page in the Election Portal (and elsewhere) that highlights projects we couldn’t feature but which people should consider donating to (and which have been active on the Forum this Giving Season), so we’d use the logo/links there, too.
  • @Bruno Sterenberg and @Joy Bittner - please let me know if you’re interested (feel free to email or DM me via the Forum), and apologies once again for the delay and confusion!

1. ^{^}

   PNG or JPEG, ideally somewhat square-ish (although we can just add extra white space around non-square logos)

FYI — lots of relevant links collected here: OpenAI: The Battle of the Board  and OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend