I agree that salaries in EA should be more in line with the rest of the non-profit sector^[1], that Open Philanthropy is the main funder of many projects, that funding diversification has tradeoffs, and that members of the EA community should donate (much) more.

But I think this post exaggerates the % of effectiveness-oriented funding that comes from OpenPhil, at least for projects outside of EA community building.

I think the main reason is that most effectiveness-minded donors (including billionaires and agencies like USAID) are not part of the EA community, but still fund "causes the EA community cares about".

Other/Individual EA donors 15mm (GWWC donors, etc. based on some rough math from (source). I’m very interested if someone has a better or more accurate figure.

Here are estimated appproximate amounts donated via the GWWC donation platform in the past year, by rough cause area. (Note, these have not been double-checked and should not be considered official numbers, and they don't include donations reported by pledgers made outside the GWWC platform)

For donors not using the GWWC platform, I think this hinges a lot on how you define "EA donors" (see below)

I’m not sure if Givewell and Open Phil is double counting here (since Open Phil gives to Givewell) but I’m going to ignore Givewell as EA funding since a lot of this comes from what many would consider outside of the EA community (many people and philanthropists who wouldn’t consider themselves to be EAs though I’m not sure this is completely fair).

I think most GWWC donors also don't consider themselves part of the EA community^[4], I don't think this matters much in terms of our willingness to fund the most impactful projects that help improve the lives of others.

Here are some other effectiveness-oriented sources of donations:

• The Life You Can Save recently announced $100M in donations since 2013.
• Via Effektiv Spenden "nearly 10,000 individuals in Germany and Switzerland donated 19 million euros to highly effective organizations in 2023."
• The Founders Pledge community also donates significant amounts to high-impact projects https://www.founderspledge.com/our-impact.
• All the partners of the new Lead Exposure Action Fund (and many other large philanthropists) donate very significant amounts to high-impact projects, but I think only Good Ventures ever claimed to be part of the EA community.

The problem, I think, is that most causes the EA community cares about don’t have a lot of outside support. Who outside of the EA community would fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare?

As you mention in a footnote, the Navigation Fund is funding the Shrimp Welfare Project, and many other high-impact projects in causes that the EA community cares about, even if (as far as I know) it's not explicitly part of the EA community, and you don't include it in the funding amounts in this post.

Crustacean Compassion was started in 2016 and only got funding from OpenPhil in 2021. I don't think that only people in the EA community donate significantly to crustacean welfare.

I think it's weird to mention "fund shrimp, wild animals, or insect welfare" as causes in a post on how OpenPhil is the main funder of many EA projects, given that OpenPhil stopped funding those.

I think if you were to ask a well-calibrated Toby Ord/Will Macaskill back in 2009 the odds of the movement having billions of dollars committed to it in a few years, they would have put the odds incredibly low.

In his 2013 TED Talk, Peter Singer claims that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet were "the most effective altruists in history", and in 2023 MacAskill keeps defining EA not in terms of a specific movement/community but in terms of "using evidence and careful reasoning to try to do more good."
I think probably in their mind EA (as they define it) already had billions of dollars committed to it in 2009.

See also We need more nuance regarding funding gaps from 2022 with an estimate of the number of funding sources for different cause areas at different scales. I think for most cause areas the number of funding sources of more than ~$1M/year increased since 2022.

Besides the Shrimp Welfare Project mentioned above, other interesting examples of non-OpenPhil funding are that Lightcone stopped receiving funding from OpenPhil but managed to raise >$1.1M in a month and that EAIF isn’t *currently* funding constrained.

1. ^{^}

   I think currently EA salaries are higher for non-leadership roles and probably lower for leadership roles

2. ^{^}

   Mostly this $10M donation

3. ^{^}

   Note that this area might be over-represented in this table, as the main way to donate to GWWC and to Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund is via the GWWC platform, while donations to projects in other cause areas are usually made outside of it

4. ^{^}

   For what it's worth, I also don't consider myself part of the EA community.

5. ^{^}

   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:IanFoundersPledge#You_can't_write_about_Founders_Pledge 

Sorry for the very late reply, basically my understanding is that interest rates now are high, so this post implies that we should consider investing now and donating later.

Is that a correct interpretation? Are you following that strategy yourself?

How do you decide the timing of your donations?

I initially felt a strong sense of urgency to donate as soon as I can:

• There are likely compounding positive returns to donations (e.g. LLINs could slightly increase the rate of growth of the local economy)
• I thought that the best funding opportunities get covered with time
• I might lose all the money
• I might stop wanting to donate it (e.g. if a family member gets ill)

I'm considering leaning a bit on the "investing to give later" side for 2025:

• Interest rates seem much higher^[1]
• Inequality seems to be increasing (which means that by investing now I might be able to pay more people in the future to work on impactful projects)
• I see many people like you haven't lost interest in donating after 11 years

But I don't know how to balance all those considerations, and if I do decide to give later I wouldn't know how to decide when.

1. ^{^}

   I found this post arguing that we should donate more when interest rates are lower interesting, but I'm not a finance professional so I don't know if it holds any water.

I think it's normal, and even good that the EA community doesn't have a clear prioritization of where to donate. People have different values and different beliefs, and so prioritize donations to different projects.

It is hard to know exactly how high impact animal welfare funding opportunities interact with x-risk ones

What do you mean? I don't understand how animal welfare campaigns interact with x-risks, except for reducing the risk of future pandemics, but I don't think that's what you had in mind (and even then, I don't think those are the kinds of pandemics that x-risk minded people worry about)

I don't know what the general consensus on the most impactful x-risk funding opportunities are

It seems clear to me that there is no general consensus, and some of the most vocal groups are actively fighting against each other.

I don't really know what orgs do all-considered work on this topic. I guess the LTFF?

You can see Giving What We Can recommendations for global catrastrophic risk reduction on this page^[1] (i.e. there's also Longview's Emerging Challenges Fund). Many other orgs and foundations work on x-risk reduction, e.g. Open Philanthropy.

I am more confused/inattentive and this community is covering a larger set of possible choices so it's harder to track what consensus is

I think that if there were consensus that a single project was obviously the best, we would all have funded it already, unless it was able to productively use very very high amounts of money (e.g., cash transfers)

1. ^{^}

   Disclaimer: I work at GWWC

20% of the global cost of growing chickens is probably in the order of at least ~$20B, which is much more than the global economy is willing to spend on animal welfare.

As mentioned in the other comment, I think it's extremely unlikely that there is a way to stop "most" of the chicken suffering while increasing costs by only ~20%.

Some estimate the better chicken commitment already increases costs by 20% (although there is no consensus on that, and factory farmers estimate 37.5%), and my understanding is that it doesn't stop most of the suffering, but "just" reduces it a lot.

You can also right-click → inspect element on the time indicator:
 

I think it is discussed every now and then, see e.g. comments here: New EA cause area: Breeding really dumb chickens and this comment

And note that the Better Chicken Commitment includes a policy of moving to higher welfare breeds.

Naively, I would expect that suffering is extremely evolutionarily advantageous for chickens in factory farm conditions, so chickens that feel less suffering will not grow as much meat (or require more space/resources). For example, based on my impression that broiler chickens are constantly hungry, I wouldn't be surprised if they would try to eat themselves unless they felt pain when doing so. But this is a very uninformed take based on a vague understanding of what broiler chickens are optimized for, which might not be true in practice.

I think this idea might be more interesting to explore in less price-sensitive contexts, where there's less evolutionary pressure and animals live in much better conditions, mostly animals used in scientific research. But of course it would help much fewer animals who usually suffer much less. 

Don't know if this is useful, but years ago HLI tried to estimate spillover effects from therapy in Happiness for the whole household: accounting for household spillovers when comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers, and already found that spillover effects were likely significantly higher for cash transfers compared to therapy.

In 2023 in Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded they estimated that the difference is even greater in favour of cash transfers. (after feedback like Why I don’t agree with HLI’s estimate of household spillovers from therapy and Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds)
 

I wouldn't update too strongly on this single comparison, and I don't know if there are better analyses of spillover effects for different kinds of interventions, but it seems that there are reasons to believe that spillover effects from cash transfers are relatively greater than for other interventions.

Here's a comment from the 80k interviewer 2 years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RPTPo8eHTnruoFyRH/some-important-questions-for-the-ea-leadership?commentId=Xr27yCbC72ZPh5Fzn
 

Hi Oli — I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.

I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.

It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam's reference to 'nice apartments' in the interview:

"I don’t know, I kind of like nice apartments. ... I’m not really that much of a consumer exactly. It’s never been what’s important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets."

Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.

In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the 'crypto' social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.

Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.

Two years later, after having read way too many posts, comments, podcasts and a book about SBF, my understanding is that the most likely interpretation is that SBF was actually frugal for a billionaire.

1. By far the main thing is the Bahamas luxury penthouse and properties, where he lived with at least 6 other coworkers. The person who bought the property recently did an interview claiming that the high cost was due to a lack of supply of real estate in the Bahamas, the need to incentivize employees to move there, and the fact that FTX believed it was very rich: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1844100642979099054?t=3585 . I think this not an absurd explanation even in hindsight. That person does not talk positively about SBF or the "effective altruism cult" at all in the interview, but describes SBF as obsessed with work and not caring about much else.
2. On cars: Caroline Ellison during her testimony against SBF testified that they were originally assigned luxury cars, but Bankman-Fried suggested they switch to a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic. I can't find any reliable source that Bankman owned a $110k "BMW X7". The source that Thorsdad uses is this website which doesn't look reliable. It seems that the Judge who sentenced Bankman drives a BMW X7, so maybe it was generated from that? In any case, $110k seems a cheap car for a billionaire, and the fact that it made the list of most luxurious expenditures seems telling.
3. On restaurants, the fact that they spent up to ~$40 per day per employee (if I'm doing the math right) doesn't seem crazy to me.
4. On the extravagant lifestyle article, most of the expenses seem to be buying favour with the local authorities, the most extravagant thing for employees seems to be this:

employees could request any groceries they wanted twice a week and frequently received comped meals. And there were parties at Albany, which “at some point I got tired of.”
The level of spoilage was such that once, she recalled an FTX employee requesting a pair of toenail clippers over Slack, which was quickly delivered.

Even Habryka, who (after the FTX collapse) claimed that SBF "was actually living a quite lavish lifestyle"^[1] also claimed that SBF was in many ways frugal. Two years later, as far as I know, zero of the people who were close to SBF at the time described him as lavish.

In general, I would encourage a lot of scepticism when reading Thorstad. I think that if he was writing similar articles on any topic besides "EA criticism", people would point out that they are extremely misleading and often straight-up false.

1. ^{^}

   But note that two independent sources told me in private that the post-FTX-collapse comments from Habryka are inconsistent with what he used to say about SBF/FTX as late as April 2022, so I don't know how reliable they are, and afaik there are no public claims from anyone before November 2022 that SBF himself was lavish.

There can be ties at any point during the iterative elimination process, not just during the final round (if anything they are more likely in earlier rounds).

From the link above:

For small IRV elections, there can be frequent last-place ties that prevent clear bottom elimination, so it's critically important to have a clear tie-breaking mechanism in jurisdictions with few voters.