This year I donated to the Arthropoda Foundation!

One reason to perhaps wait before offsetting your lifetime impact all at once could be to preserve your capital’s optionality. Cultivated meat could in the future become common and affordable, or your dietary preferences could otherwise change such that $10k was too much to spend.

Your moral views on offsetting could also change. For example, you might decide that the $10k would be better spent on longtermist causes, or that it’d be strictly better to donate the $10k to the most cost-effective animal charity rather than offsetting.

I basically never eat chicken

That’s awesome. That probably gets you 90% of the way there already, even if there were no offset!

I think that's a great point! Theoretically, we should count all of those foundations and more, since they're all parts of "the portfolio of everyone's actions". (Though this would simply further cement the takeaway that global health is overfunded.)

Some reasons for focusing our optimization on "EA's portfolio" specifically:

• Believing that non-EA-aligned actions have negligible effect compared to EA-aligned actions.
• Since we wouldn't have planned to donate to ineffective interventions/cause areas anyway, it's unclear what effect including those in the portfolio would have on our decisionmaking, which is one reason why they may be safely ignorable.
• It's far more tractable to derive EA's portfolio than the portfolio of everyone's actions, or even the portfolio of everyone's charitable giving.

But I agree that these reasons aren't necessarily decisive. I just think there are enough reasons to do so, and this assumption has enough simplifying power, that for me it's worth making.

Thanks for this research! Do you know whether any BOTECs have been done where an intervention can be said to create X vegan-years per dollar? I've been considering writing an essay pointing meat eaters to cost-effective charitable offsets for meat consumption. So far, I haven't found any rigorous estimates online.

(I think farmed animal welfare interventions are likely even more cost-effective and have a higher probability of being net positive. But it seems really difficult to know how to trade off the moral value of chickens taken out of cages / shrimp stunned versus averting some number of years of meat consumption.)

I don't think most people take as a given that maximizing expected value makes perfect sense for donations. In the theoretical limit, many people balk at conclusions like accepting a gamble with a 51% chance of doubling the universe's value and a 49% chance of destroying it. (Especially so at the implication of continuing to accept that gamble until the universe is almost surely destroyed.) In practice, people have all sorts of risk aversion, including difference-making risk aversion, avoiding worst case scenarios, and reducing ambiguity.

I argue here against the view that animal welfare's diminishing marginal returns would be sufficient for global health to win out against it at OP levels of funding, even if one is risk neutral.

So long as small orgs apply to large grantmakers like OP, so long as one is locally confident that OP is trying to maximize expected value, I'd actually expect that OP's full-time staff would generally be much better positioned to make these kinds of judgments than you or I. Under your value system, I'd echo Jeff's suggestion that you should "top up" OP's grants.

Does portfolio theory apply better at the individual level than the community level?

I think the individual level applies if you have risk aversion on a personal level. For example, I care about having personally made a difference, which biases me towards certain individually less risky ideas.

is this "k-level 2" aggregate portfolio a 'better' aggregation of everyone's information than the "k-level 1" of whatever portfolio emerges from everyone individually optimising their own portfolios?

I think it's a tough situation because k=2 includes these unsavory implications Jeff and I discuss. But as I wrote, I think k=2 is just what happens when people think about everyone's donations game-theoretically. If everyone else is thinking in k=2 mode but you're thinking in k=1 mode, you're going to get funged such that your value system's expression in the portfolio could end up being much less than what is "fair". It's a bit like how the Nash equilibrium in the Prisoner's Dilemma is "defect-defect".

At some point what matters is specific projects...?

I agree with this. My post frames the discussion in terms of cause areas for simplicity and since the lessons generalize to more people, but I think your point is correct.

I just wanted to say I really liked this post and consider it a model example of reasoning transparency!

I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).

With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropoda's project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWP's operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropoda's projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since they're more existential. But all of this is held loosely and I'm very open to counterarguments.

Anecdotally, most people I know who I’ve asked do that!

I think these unsavory implications you enumerate are just a consequence of applying game theory to donations, rather than following specifically from my post's arguments.

For example, if Bob is all-in on avoiding funging and doesn't care about norms like collaboration and transparency, his incentives are exactly as you describe: Give zero information about his value system, and make donations secretly after other funders have shown their hands.

I think you're completely right that those are awful norms, and we shouldn't go all-in on applying game theory to donations. This goes both for avoiding funging and for my post's argument about optimizing "EA's portfolio".

However, just as we can learn important lessons from the concept of funging while discouraging the bad, I still think this post is valuable and includes some nontrivial practical recommendations.