Quick takes

I'm concerned about the new terms of service for Giving What We Can, which will go into effect after August 31, 2024: This is a significant departure from the Effective Ventures' TOS (GWWC is spinning out of EV), which has users grant EV an unlimited but non-exclusive license to use feedback or suggestions they send, while retaining the right to do anything with it themselves. I've previously talked to GWWC staff about my ideas to help people give effectively, like a donation decision worksheet that I made. If this provision goes into effect, it would deter me from sharing my suggestions with GWWC in the future because I would risk losing the right to disseminate or continue developing those ideas or materials myself.

David Rubinstein recently interviewed Philippe Laffont, the founder of Coatue (probably worth $5-10b). When asked about his philanthropic activities, Laffont basically said he’s been too busy to think about it, but wanted to do something someday. I admit I was shocked. Laffont is a savant technology investor and entrepreneur (including in AI companies) and it sounded like he literally hadn’t put much thought into what to do with his fortune. Are there concerted efforts in the EA community to get these people on board? Like, is there a google doc with a six degrees of separation plan to get dinner with Laffont? The guy went to MIT and invests in AI companies. In just wouldn’t be hard to get in touch. It seems like increasing the probability he aims some of his fortune at effective charities would justify a significant effort here. And I imagine there are dozens or hundreds of people like this. Am I missing some obvious reason this isn’t worth pursuing or likely to fail? Have people tried? I’m a bit of an outsider here so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on what I’m sure seems like a pretty naive take! https://youtu.be/_nuSOMooReY?si=6582NoLPtSYRwdMe

For a different kind of FarmKind post:  FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I've seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).   I'm personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But -- although I haven't dug under the hood too much -- FarmKind's calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.  Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering). In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind's for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much "credit" to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I've put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind's work than my personal musings about offsets.     1. ^ In more detail: * Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that's fine! But in an offset situation, I don't think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that

Marcus Daniell appreciation note @Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

Effective giving quick take for giving season This is quite half-baked because I think my social circle contains not very many E2G folks, but I have a feeling that when EA suddenly came into a lot more funding and the word on the street was that we were “talent constrained, not funding constrained”, some people earning to give ended up pretty jerked around, or at least feeling that way. They may have picked jobs and life plans based on the earn to give model, where it would be years before the plans came to fruition, and in the middle, they lost status and attention from their community. There might have been an additional dynamic where people who took the advice the most seriously ended up deeply embedded in other professional communities, so heard about the switch later or found it harder to reconnect with the community and the new priorities. I really don’t have an overall view on how bad all of this was, or if anyone should have done anything differently, but I do have a sense that EA has a bit of a feature of jerking people around like this, where priorities and advice change faster than the advice can be fully acted on. The world and the right priorities really do change, though; I’m not sure what should be done except to be clearer about all this, but I suspect it’s hard to properly convey “this seems like the absolute best thing in the world to do, also next year my view could be that it’s basically useless” even if you use those exact words. And maybe people have done this, or maybe it’s worth trying harder. Another approach would be something like insurance. A frame I’ve been more interested in lately (definitely not original to me) is that earning to give is a kind of resilience / robustness-add for EA, where more donors just means better ability to withstand crazy events, even if in most worlds the small donors aren’t adding much in the way of impact. Not clear that that nets out, but “good in case of tail risk” seems like an important aspect. A more

Ray Dalio is giving out free $50 donation vouchers: tisbest.org/rg/ray-dalio/ Still worked just a few minutes ago

If you believe that: - ASI might come fairly soon - ASI will either fix most of the easy problems quickly, or wipe us out - You have no plausible way of robustly shaping the outcome of the arrival of ASI for the better does it follow that you should spend a lot more on near-term cause areas now? Are people doing this? I see some people argue for increasing consumption now, but surely this would apply even more so to donations to near-term cause areas?

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