Brainstorming thread: ideas for large EA funders

I suspect that funders in general, but especially altruists, and double-especially effective altruists, should be investing in prizes more on the margin. Briefly, some arguments in favor:

• It is much easier to evaluate interventions after the fact. In fact, that is what most EA donors are already doing, but in a way that forces an intervention to be very similar to something else that has already happened if it wants to be funded.
• The incentives created by prize funding tend to be much better.
• Standard mechanisms can overcome many of the costs of prizes (esp. the inability of prospective grantees / prize-recipients to fund their projects if they don't win a prize), and the development of such institutions would be a huge public good.
• The evaluation process for prizes tends to substantially reinforce EA values, as compared to the more typical grant-making process.

There are a number of ways in which an economically sound EA prize would differ from usual philanthropic prizes (which are typically engineered with the PR impact in mind, rather than as a sustainable funding source). I hope to write a post about this eventually (both w.r.t. the economic arguments, and particularly promising opportunities at the moment). But I'm always interested in thoughts.

The problem with most of these ideas is that they seem to require plenty of competent management, and until you can find the people to run them, they're going to be hard to pull off.

If we're going to be spending far more money in the next few years, we're going to need to significantly increase the number of capable EA entrepreneurs.

One way to spend a lot of money that would also help to develop more EA entrepreneurs would be to set up a fund to provide seed funding to new EA projects (plus connections, prestige etc.). A couple of hundred thousand dollars allocated with the promise of more to come, and with clear criteria for awards, sends a clear message: (i) there's money in this for competent entrepreneurs (ii) you can safely build your career here and commit to it for the long-term. This would help to attract talent to the community, which will allow us to spend much more in the coming years.

My suggestion is that you use the money for influence matching. Influence matching (A term I am borrowing from give well) is where you use the large amount of money you have as an opportunity to combine the boring option with some a donation matching scheme specifically targeted at a group of people who are not currently within the Effective Altruism community - attempting to draw them in and use the matching as a "hook" to educate and bring new people into the community - over time having a multiplying donation effect.

I would imagine a good group to do this with is an online or offline community with some commitment to charity - but not one where EA is well known (For example a University Club, a Church or local humanist group, a non-EA blog readership or message board) . A recent good example is that Bill Gates partnered with a prominent youtuber (John Green) to produce an educational video on African nutrition and then offered a $100,000 donation matching scheme for the community of that vlogger - drawing them into the ongoing work of his foundation in that area through an email newsletter.

Careful design would maximise the impact, and would require some thought but I suggest this as it is boring+++ - it will do at least as much good as the "boring" option as well as having a significant additional impact potential (though I don't like the name - the opportunity to donate a large amount to an EA cause would be pretty exciting to me). For other options you need a very compelling case as to how it does does actually beat the boring option, and for $20,000 to $200,000 it seems unlikely that you would have the time or the resources to actually show that case beyond a somewhat fuzzy argument.

Personally I'd give it to the best GiveWell-recommended charity that had room for more funding. You could make a pretty huge difference that way!

You could offer scholarships! As Jess Whittlestone remarked, as a community we're quite good at recognizing and putting down ineffective altruism, and not so good at recognizing when our own community members do awesome stuff. Awards or scholarships to EA community members could be a great way to balance that out.

You could fund people to go to the EA retreat/summit, Good Done Right, CEA's Weekend Away, etc. who wouldn't otherwise go. I know someone who did this and it seems to have turned out fairly well so far. I don't know if they want to be named publicly but I can probably refer people who are interested.

This isn't a concrete idea per se, but if you have a large enough income that the deduction cap on donations to registered charities might become an issue, you should consider "trading donations" with other folks to maximize tax deductibility.

For instance, if you want to donate 60% of your income to tax-deductible charities, and someone else wants to donate less than 40% deductibly and 20% non-deductibly, you should instead both donate 50% deductibly and 10% non-deductibly.

I assume its not something you'd want to devote much of a sum that large to, but small sums could support EA actions and projects via the EA funding network that Ozzie Gooen and Diego Caleiro and Bob Cordwell have started.

Fund a post for an EA to offer charity consultancy to charities to become more efficient in their particular mission.

The EA approach is quite transportable, and in demonstrating its effectiveness in tackling a wide variety of charity problems it allows real engagement with a broad mainstream charity population - charities are very set in their ways and new thinking is exactly what many charities need, as well as it would provide a receptive forum to the EA concepts and top charities - very powerful communication via tell, show and do

As Carl points out here, if big donors have better opportunities than small donors, the small donors can just purchase lotteries. In fact I think that you can get more than a 50% chance of doubling your money using typical risky investments, though this gets into a more complicated discussion about risk. $200,000 is small enough that you probably have access to the typical EA opportunities, so I suspect you shouldn't do anything differently than smaller EA donors.

That said, I suspect that smaller EA donors should behave quite differently than they currently do, and thinking about what you might do with more money can serve to make this more clear.

edited to add: I also think it's plausible that at the $100k level a donor should still be saving / trying to pool their money / being risk-loving / just giving it to existing EA orgs, because the amounts of time required to make a good decision even at the meta level--unless you've already found someone you trust who you can just hand the money to.

This isn't necessarily for large funders, and wasn't my idea (if I remember correctly it's Leah Price's.) If you know young people who are thinking of pledging 10%, but are scared about the first few years out of school when they will be harder up for money, sponsor their donations for the first year or two. It's unclear how this would work with actually taking something like the GWWC pledge, since it isn't exactly their money. And it would probably need to be someone you knew personally to know whether they actually intended to follow through with pledging after you helped them start.

NB: There's some discussion of this at the EA Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/749760868413606/

As someone who received a Large Sum of Money (as defined in this post) last year, here's what I actually did with it:

• spent some of it on my living expenses while I acquired skills to get a new job, then looked for a job
• invested it in Vanguard index funds
• donated a small portion of it
• spent more of it on living expenses when I decided to quit my job and look for a new one
• and most recently did a calculation regarding what I thought I could afford to lose, and invested that much money in individual stocks plus some in a startup founded by member of the rationalist community.

I want to emphasize that the last step here is something I cannot recommend anyone do with money they can't afford to lose. But if your reason for saving/investing is to give later, being willing to make riskier investments makes sense, just as riskier careers do.

P.S. Perhaps I should be explicit that I find this post a bit odd, because the definition of Large Sum of Money used in this post doesn't seem all that large to me. For Bay Area techies, it could easily mean "I am a Google employee and my RSUs just vested."

FQXi has had some success with essay contests in the past. The most recent one appears to have had a prize pool of $20,000 and generated 155 submissions. If you have some unsolved EA-related questions, this might be a good way to buy progress on them.

I think Max Tegmark was involved in the FQXi contests, so you could probably ask him how they went and if he had any advice for similar EA-related ones.

If you have a proposal to fund a new type of project, or research, donate it to an (effective altruist) organization for a specific purpose you want to bring about. So, you have somebody with prior relevant work experience trying out your proposal, for possibly less money, and is recording the results. You, meanwhile keep more of the resource of your own time.