Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on "what's going on here?":

1. The simplest high-level explanation is that the surveys capture 'thought leaders', which is distinct from the set of people who control the money, and these groups disagree on allocation. I guess my prior expectation would not have been that these numbers match, but perhaps I'm in the minority there?
2. More specifically, as you mentioned, Coefficient Giving is responsible for ~2/3 of the grant dollars in this data set, so to a significant extent this reduces to comparing Dustin and Cari's preferred allocation to that of the surveyed EA population.
3. It's notable that Global Health is the only category to receive more funding than the survey mean (and more than double at that). Here it's both true that CG consistently gives a larger fraction, and that GiveWell top charities are the only 'EA orgs' to achieve any significant 'mainstream appeal' to date; e.g. the amount that GiveWell directs from non-CG sources per year is 3-4x the entire Animal Advocacy budget in this data set (and likely very little of that is coming from EA survey respondents).

Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.

Thanks for bringing this up Aidan. I raised this topic in both of my versions of the Historical Funding post, and I remain interested in doing this properly if and when I get sufficient time and data. What I have found so far is (a) accessing the bottom-up data for ~all relevant charities seems to be much more difficult than I would have imagined, and (b) I've floated this project to a few people and the interest seemed lukewarm (probably mostly due to their sense of intractibility).

FarmKind, Anima International, THL UK, SWP, FWI, ACE, RP, The Centre for Feed Innovation, Scale Welfare, Arthropoda, Indonesian Cage-Free Association, Across Species Project Indonesia

I continue to think that animal welfare—in particular the fight against factory farming—is severely under-funded, even compared to other worthy options such as GiveWell top charities.

Thanks! Small correction: Animal Welfare YTD is labeled as $53M, when it looks like the underlying data point is $17M (source and 2023 full-year projections here)

Both posts contain a more detailed breakdown of inputs, but in short:

1. 80k seems to include every entry in the Open Phil grants database, whereas my sheet filters out items such as criminal justice reform that don't map to the type of funding I'm attempting to track.
2. They also add a couple of 'best guess' terms to estimate unknown/undocumented funding sources; I do not.

If you expect to take in $3-6M by the end of this year, borrowing say $300k against that already seems totally reasonable.

Not sure if this is possible, but I for one would be happy to donate to LTFF today in exchange for a 120% regrant to the Animal Welfare Fund in December^[1]

1. ^{^}

   This would seem to be an abuse of the Open Phil matching, but perhaps that chunk can be exempt

the comparison-in-practice I'm imagining is (say) $100k real dollars that we're aware of now vs $140k hypothetical dollars

That is very different from the question that Caleb was answering—I can totally understand your preference for real vs hypothetical dollars.

So these are all reasons that funding upfront is strictly better than in chunks, and I certainly agree. I'm just saying that as a donor, I would have a strong preference for funding 14 researchers in this suboptimal manner vs 10 of similar value paid upfront, and I'm surprised that LTFF doesn't agree.

Perhaps there are some cases where funding in chunks would be untenable, but that doesn't seem to be true for most on the list. Again, I'm not saying there is no cost to doing this, but if the space is really funding-constrained as you say 40% of value is an awful lot to give up. Is there not every chance that your next batch of applicants will be just as good, and money will again be tight?

A quick scan of the marginal grants list tells me that many (most?)^[1] of these take the form of a salary or stipend over the course of 6-12 months. I don't understand how the time-value of money could be so out of whack in this case—surely you could grant say half of the requested amount, then do another round in three months once the large donors come around?^[2]

1. ^{^}

   As for the rest, I don't see anything on the list that wouldn't exist in three months.

2. ^{^}

   Daniel's comment says "there are a whole host of issues" with this approach. I'd be curious to know what those are, and how they aren't worth unlocking 40% additional value.