Don't know if this is useful, but years ago HLI tried to estimate spillover effects from therapy in Happiness for the whole household: accounting for household spillovers when comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers, and already found that spillover effects were likely significantly higher for cash transfers compared to therapy.

In 2023 in Talking through depression: The cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy in LMICs, revised and expanded they estimated that the difference is even greater in favour of cash transfers. (after feedback like Why I don’t agree with HLI’s estimate of household spillovers from therapy and Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds)
 

I wouldn't update too strongly on this single comparison, and I don't know if there are better analyses of spillover effects for different kinds of interventions, but it seems that there are reasons to believe that spillover effects from cash transfers are relatively greater than for other interventions.

Here's a comment from the 80k interviewer 2 years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RPTPo8eHTnruoFyRH/some-important-questions-for-the-ea-leadership?commentId=Xr27yCbC72ZPh5Fzn
 

Hi Oli — I was very saddened to hear that you thought the most likely explanation for the discussion of frugality in my interview with Sam was that I was deliberately seeking to mislead the audience.

I had no intention to mislead people into thinking Sam was more frugal than he was. I simply believed the reporting I had read about him and he didn’t contradict me.

It’s only in recent weeks that I learned that some folks such as you thought the impression about his lifestyle was misleading, notwithstanding Sam's reference to 'nice apartments' in the interview:

"I don’t know, I kind of like nice apartments. ... I’m not really that much of a consumer exactly. It’s never been what’s important to me. And so I think overall a nice place is just about as far as it gets."

Unfortunately as far as I can remember nobody else reached out to me after the podcast to correct the record either.

In recent years, in pursuit of better work-life balance, I’ve been spending less time socialising with people involved in the EA community, and when I do, I discuss work with them much less than in the past. I also last visited the SF Bay Area way back in 2019 and am certainly not part of the 'crypto' social scene. That may help to explain why this issue never came up in casual conversation.

Inasmuch as the interview gave listeners a false impression about Sam I am sorry about that, because we of course aim for the podcast to be as informative and accurate as possible.

Two years later, after having read way too many posts, comments, podcasts and a book about SBF, my understanding is that the most likely interpretation is that SBF was actually frugal for a billionaire.

1. By far the main thing is the Bahamas luxury penthouse and properties, where he lived with at least 6 other coworkers. The person who bought the property recently did an interview claiming that the high cost was due to a lack of supply of real estate in the Bahamas, the need to incentivize employees to move there, and the fact that FTX believed it was very rich: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1844100642979099054?t=3585 . I think this not an absurd explanation even in hindsight. That person does not talk positively about SBF or the "effective altruism cult" at all in the interview, but describes SBF as obsessed with work and not caring about much else.
2. On cars: Caroline Ellison during her testimony against SBF testified that they were originally assigned luxury cars, but Bankman-Fried suggested they switch to a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic. I can't find any reliable source that Bankman owned a $110k "BMW X7". The source that Thorsdad uses is this website which doesn't look reliable. It seems that the Judge who sentenced Bankman drives a BMW X7, so maybe it was generated from that? In any case, $110k seems a cheap car for a billionaire, and the fact that it made the list of most luxurious expenditures seems telling.
3. On restaurants, the fact that they spent up to ~$40 per day per employee (if I'm doing the math right) doesn't seem crazy to me.
4. On the extravagant lifestyle article, most of the expenses seem to be buying favour with the local authorities, the most extravagant thing for employees seems to be this:

employees could request any groceries they wanted twice a week and frequently received comped meals. And there were parties at Albany, which “at some point I got tired of.”
The level of spoilage was such that once, she recalled an FTX employee requesting a pair of toenail clippers over Slack, which was quickly delivered.

Even Habryka, who (after the FTX collapse) claimed that SBF "was actually living a quite lavish lifestyle"^[1] also claimed that SBF was in many ways frugal. Two years later, as far as I know, zero of the people who were close to SBF at the time described him as lavish.

In general, I would encourage a lot of scepticism when reading Thorstad. I think that if he was writing similar articles on any topic besides "EA criticism", people would point out that they are extremely misleading and often straight-up false.

1. ^{^}

   But note that two independent sources told me in private that the post-FTX-collapse comments from Habryka are inconsistent with what he used to say about SBF/FTX as late as April 2022, so I don't know how reliable they are, and afaik there are no public claims from anyone before November 2022 that SBF himself was lavish.

There can be ties at any point during the iterative elimination process, not just during the final round (if anything they are more likely in earlier rounds).

From the link above:

For small IRV elections, there can be frequent last-place ties that prevent clear bottom elimination, so it's critically important to have a clear tie-breaking mechanism in jurisdictions with few voters.

If there are more than 3 candidates with any votes, eliminate the least popular, and redistribute those votes according to the voters' next favourite choice.

What happens if there's a tie? E.g. if there are 4 candidates with 30, 20, 10, 10 votes each.

I guess it's unlikely to be determinant in practice but might be worth stating just in case.

ETA: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Handling_ties_in_IRV_elections 

Having read your reflections, I'm still curious as to why you don't think non-OpenPhil donors should give to farmed animal welfare, if you feel comfortable sharing it publicly. I guessed four options, ordered from most to least likely, but I might have misunderstood the post

1. We should donate to wild animal welfare instead, as it's more cost-effective
2. There are no donation opportunities that counterfactually help a significant amount of farmed animals
3. There is no strong moral obligation to improve future lives, and donations to farmed animal welfare necessarily improve future lives, as farmed animal lives are very short
4. Tomasik-style arguments on the impact of animal farming on the amount of wild animal suffering

Is it a combination of these? As a concrete example, I'm curious if you believe that the Shrimp Welfare Project shouldn't be funded, should be funded by "non-EA" donors, or will be funded anyway and donors shouldn't worry about it.

By the way, thank you for nudging towards sharing evaluations with the evaluated organization before posting, I think it's a really valuable norm.

Not sure who to alert to this

I think it's probably best to alert whoever sent you the survey, I wouldn't rely on them noticing quick takes on the EA Forum

Did you mean to link to "Impact Maximisation through Supported Regranting: a Funding Strategy Hack"?

Expanding acronyms for readers who might not know them:

EAA: Effective Animal Advocacy
 
ICAPs: Importance and Counterfactuals-Adjusted Placements, an Animal Advocacy Careers specific metric

Thanks for writing this! I would be curious to know what you think about this 4 years later, and now that interest rates are much higher.

I would find it valuable if you could share some public version of the spreadsheet, or if you quickly remember some specific examples. Hiring/contracting is very hard but almost always necessary.