I recently attended his book launch in London, where he was asked about EA. I was surprised by how positive his response was. His main criticism was that EA feels “nerdy,” and that these ideas deserve a much wider audience. I got the impression he sees SMA as at least somewhat aligned with EA, but aimed at a broader audience.
He mentioned Ambitious Impact twice during the talk and profiles them in a chapter in the book. He also shouted out Rob Mather (who was in attendance), and includes at least two chapters on founding and running the Against Malaria Foundation in the book. I haven’t seen other interviews, but it already seems to me like he’s promoting certain EA areas.
I find this post interesting, and probably largely agree with many of your points, but they don’t fully align with my experience or intuitions as a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I broadly agree with the Scalability and Capital Counterfactuals sections, though I think some of your concerns can be mitigated by the reality of planning and running a non-profit. Many funders at scale are not necessarily value-aligned (to EAs), and many non-profit founders (at least when going through the CE incubation program) start out with a clear view of possible endgames and payers at scale - these don´t assume that growing the organisation´s budget and staff as much as possible is the goal, and they don´t always assume that the charity will bear all costs for the entirety of the program forever.
I found the Learning Potential section so vague that my initial (defensive, sure) gut reaction was that it felt like motivated reasoning. While I don´t actually believe this was your intent, in my experience this applies to founding a non profit to a very large extent:
People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connections, and gaining legible experience, which opens up interesting opportunities to do high-impact work.
I don´t have any way to evaluate which side is
less fast-paced and interesting.
Lastly, I find it hard to disentangle what the average for-profit and what the average non-profit is. For example, while the Standards argument might apply to a majority of all non-profits, in my (biased) opinion it is not representative of the average CE-incubated charity. Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
Just wanted to say how much I appreciate you sharing this! This seems like a great way to ETG without highly specialised skills. If I had come across this a few years ago, I would have definitely considered it.
Leaving all other pro or con arguments for this funding opportunity aside for the purpose of this comment, I think the opportunity cost argument here is really strong. $3.6m is about the amount it would take to cover 100% of Charity Entrepreneurship and 100% of Probably Good's yearly budget, as well as 50% of Giving What We Can's yearly budget. Comparing that to the effects of adding donor diversity to a 80-90% longtermist supported org, it seems really hard to make the case for this being the best investment if the main reason you are interested in this opportunity is to diminish EAs focus on longtermism.
Thank you for flagging this! I updated the citation.
From what I can tell, the expenses published are the salaries, which are about $1m/year. I am sure that there must be other costs, but unsure how substantial they are.
This post is only comparing yearly budgets, so I have not included investments/donations raised, cash in the bank or other similar metrics for any of the orgs - not because I don´t find this important and interesting, but because it´s even harder to find this information than just the yearly budgets.
Thank you for pointing that out - I had also linked to an EV report for the UK. I removed that link as it could indeed be misleading, and only left the link referencing only the CEA budget.
I only linked to the information I could find publicly, I am unsure why organisations would share additional budgets for me to include in a forum post that they are not publishing themselves. I am sure I might have missed stuff though, so if you know of additional public information - or have insider information you can share - please let me know!
RP seems to have a somewhat unique view among research organisations in identifying a funding gap rather than a talent gap for research staff. I would be very curious why you think this is the case and how you have solved the talent constraints.
Very fair!
I recently attended his book launch in London, where he was asked about EA. I was surprised by how positive his response was. His main criticism was that EA feels “nerdy,” and that these ideas deserve a much wider audience. I got the impression he sees SMA as at least somewhat aligned with EA, but aimed at a broader audience.
He mentioned Ambitious Impact twice during the talk and profiles them in a chapter in the book. He also shouted out Rob Mather (who was in attendance), and includes at least two chapters on founding and running the Against Malaria Foundation in the book.
I haven’t seen other interviews, but it already seems to me like he’s promoting certain EA areas.
I find this post interesting, and probably largely agree with many of your points, but they don’t fully align with my experience or intuitions as a nonprofit entrepreneur.
I broadly agree with the Scalability and Capital Counterfactuals sections, though I think some of your concerns can be mitigated by the reality of planning and running a non-profit. Many funders at scale are not necessarily value-aligned (to EAs), and many non-profit founders (at least when going through the CE incubation program) start out with a clear view of possible endgames and payers at scale - these don´t assume that growing the organisation´s budget and staff as much as possible is the goal, and they don´t always assume that the charity will bear all costs for the entirety of the program forever.
I found the Learning Potential section so vague that my initial (defensive, sure) gut reaction was that it felt like motivated reasoning. While I don´t actually believe this was your intent, in my experience this applies to founding a non profit to a very large extent:
I don´t have any way to evaluate which side is
Lastly, I find it hard to disentangle what the average for-profit and what the average non-profit is. For example, while the Standards argument might apply to a majority of all non-profits, in my (biased) opinion it is not representative of the average CE-incubated charity. Similarly, I would expect a great deal of for-profits to make things no one wants and burn a lot of capital in the process of going out of business, though that may not be a majority of the for-profits started by your average EA.
Thank you so much for all your support, Alexis!
Just wanted to say how much I appreciate you sharing this!
This seems like a great way to ETG without highly specialised skills. If I had come across this a few years ago, I would have definitely considered it.
Leaving all other pro or con arguments for this funding opportunity aside for the purpose of this comment, I think the opportunity cost argument here is really strong.
$3.6m is about the amount it would take to cover 100% of Charity Entrepreneurship and 100% of Probably Good's yearly budget, as well as 50% of Giving What We Can's yearly budget.
Comparing that to the effects of adding donor diversity to a 80-90% longtermist supported org, it seems really hard to make the case for this being the best investment if the main reason you are interested in this opportunity is to diminish EAs focus on longtermism.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I updated the post.
Hi Saul,
Thank you for flagging this! I updated the citation.
From what I can tell, the expenses published are the salaries, which are about $1m/year. I am sure that there must be other costs, but unsure how substantial they are.
This post is only comparing yearly budgets, so I have not included investments/donations raised, cash in the bank or other similar metrics for any of the orgs - not because I don´t find this important and interesting, but because it´s even harder to find this information than just the yearly budgets.
Thank you for pointing that out - I had also linked to an EV report for the UK. I removed that link as it could indeed be misleading, and only left the link referencing only the CEA budget.
I only linked to the information I could find publicly, I am unsure why organisations would share additional budgets for me to include in a forum post that they are not publishing themselves.
I am sure I might have missed stuff though, so if you know of additional public information - or have insider information you can share - please let me know!
RP seems to have a somewhat unique view among research organisations in identifying a funding gap rather than a talent gap for research staff. I would be very curious why you think this is the case and how you have solved the talent constraints.