I think this is an interesting exercise, and it's good to see more analyses of policy. But I don't see this as an argument for the title 'EAs should do more rough policy modeling'.

A post really interacting with that title would be showing how rough policy modeling is useful (ie, showing how it gets picked up by governments in actual policy, or has other positive downstream effects). Ideally, we'd get into how whether 'rough policy modeling' is more useful than than other similarly difficult activities EAs might do.

Best of luck! As someone who doesn't eat eggs, I half-jokingly tell folks I can tell when cookies are vegan because they are bad. I look forward to not being able to use that heuristic!

GiveWell

For EA folks in tech, I'm still giving mock interviews. I'm bumping this into quick takes because my post is several years old, and I don't advertise it well.

There are a lot of 'lurkers', but less than 30 folks would be involved in the yearly holiday matching thread and sheet. Every self-professed EA I talked to at Google was involved in those campaigns, so I think that covers the most involved US Googlers.

Most people donated closer to 5-10% than Jeff or Oliver's much higher amounts, that is for sure true.

So I think both your explanations are true. There are not that many EAs at Google (although I don't think that's surprising), and most donate much less than they likely could. I put myself in that bucket, as I donated around 20%, but likely could have done close to twice that. Although it would be hard for me to do that in recent years, as I switched to Waymo where I can't sell my stock.

RE: why aren't there as many EAs giving this much money: I'm (obviously) not Jeff, but I was at Alphabet for many of the years Jeff was. Relevantly, I was also involved in the yearly donation matching campaigns. There were around 2-3 other folks who donated similar amounts to Jeff. Those four-ish people were the majority of EA matching funds at Alphabet.

It's hard to be sure how many people actually donated outside of giving campaigns, so this might undercount things. But to get to 1k EAs donating this much money, you'd need like 300 companies with similarly sized EA contingents. I don't think there are 300 companies with as large of a (wealthy) EA contingent as Alphabet, so the fact that Jeff was a strong outlier at Google explains most of this to me.

I think that there are only like 5k individuals as committed to EA as Jeff and his wife are. And making as much money as they did is fairly rare, especially when you consider the likelihood of super committed folks going into direct work.

Legal or constitutional infeasibility does not always prevent executive orders from being applied (or followed). I feel like the US president declaring a state of emergency related to AI catastrophic risk (and then forcing large AI companies to stop training large models) sounds at least as constitutionally viable as the attempted executive order for student loan forgiveness.

I agree that this seems fairly unlikely to happen in practice though.

At the time of me posting this there are 3 duplicate posts on this:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ycCXDofXr89DyxKqm/wealth-redistribution-are-we-on-the-same-page-1

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Gp3mKF4mg3aXqEKC/wealth-redistribution-are-we-on-the-same-page-5

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7iAkFkaj7cHJbMZWd/wealth-redistribution-are-we-on-the-same-page-6

While this is in some ways poetic about a post asking whether or not we are all on the same page, I'm guessing you want to delete the duplicates.

I deeply appreciate the degree to which this comment acknowledges issues and provides alternative organizations that may be better in specific respects. It has given me substantial respect for LTFF.

This feels like a "be the change you want to see in the world" moment. If you want such an event, it seems like you could basically just make a forum post (or quick take) offering 1:1s?