Is there a good summary of EA's impact to date?

By Garrison @ 2022-03-31T17:06 (+51)

At EAG SF 2017, there was a bit at the end of Will's keynote about some of the impact of different EA projects/campaigns (e.g. number of cage free commitments). 

I think it would be extremely helpful to have a webpage or doc summarizing the impact that the EA community has had to date. You can kind of back into this by looking at GiveWell and Open Phil's impact (the two orgs that I think have moved the most money so far). But this both misses a lot (e.g. EAA) while probably overstating impact (e.g. GiveWell preceded EA and plenty of their donors don't know what EA is). 

I think we spend too much time talking about our ideas and not enough talking about what we've actually gotten done. In particular, projects that have had big impact that wouldn't have existed but for EA (probably) would likely be compelling to more "doers" than just the amount of money we've moved or the ideas that motivate us. I think we struggle to reach "doers" (we nail it with "thinkers") and this may be a contributor. 

Forgive me if this exists and I missed it, but a quick search of the Forum, 80k, and the main EA site didn't turn this up. 

Michael Huang @ 2022-03-31T21:57 (+12)

Here's a related question that may help: "What are the EA movement's most notable accomplishments?"

imben @ 2022-03-31T21:54 (+6)

Good to see this question Garrison! I'm working on effectivealtruism.org and planning to add a section like this to the website.

This is a decent existing page for this but very tricky to find: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/impact

 

Garrison @ 2022-04-04T17:12 (+3)

Great, thank you! This is definitely out of date, at least for GiveDirectly, where I used to work. GD has moved over $500M to people in poverty, though some substantial fraction of that (>$200M if my memory serves) was to people in the US. The Impact site says $100M. 

imben @ 2022-04-04T18:28 (+1)

Thanks - I'll correct that.