Donation Election Discussion Thread

I'm one of the minority who will put forward some GHD orgs this week ;). I think that marginal individual dollars often do the most value funding growing orgs that do one important thing well, so picked Fortify Health, FEM and Lafiya. Full disclosure I know and admire some their founders/workers a bit personally which makes a difference to me too.

I'm not yet convinced about cluster headaches as a cause area, mainly because I'm not convinced that the number of sufferers isas high as claimed. In 13 years as a doctor in Uganda and treating a few thousand patients, I've never seen a convincing case of cluster headache here. However their fundraising post was well written and compelling, and I like new cause areas getting attention so I added them to my vote list.

I've also voted for the Humane League due to their excellent track record and experience doing what I still consider to be the most important/effective animal welfare work - getting hens out of cages. I realise given the ranked choice voting system this will mean that my vote will not go to one of my top ranked GHD orgs, but if it counts at all might actually count towards an animal welfare org lol, which I'm all good with :).

I gave some preference to smaller global health organizations this time around. The main value of my vote, I think, lies in signalling -- at least for most of the ballot. The big GHW players are great, but their room for more funding and established evidentiary bases can make it difficult for smaller or newer organizations. 

You could make a similar argument about small animal-welfare orgs. But past voting results reflect more votes for those orgs, and so I adjudge the marginal value of adding to that signal to be lower.

I continue to think that animal welfare—in particular the fight against factory farming—is severely under-funded, even compared to other worthy options such as GiveWell top charities.

I ranked Arthropoda Foundation 1st. I think funding research on the welfare of soil animals would increase welfare more cost-effectively than research on the welfare of farmed invertebrates, but that this is the closest one can get, and that Arthropoda is the organisation best placed to do it.

The main reason I voted for Forethought and MATS was because I believe AI governance/safety is both unusually important, with only Farmed/Wild animal welfare being competitive in terms of EV, and I believe that AI has a reasonable chance to be so powerful as to make other cause area assumptions irrelevant, meaning their impact is much, much less predictable without considering AI governance/safety.

I strongly believe animal advocacy is the most powerful way to save the most lives and better the world. 

I put Lafiya. I think they're doing amazing work, and their cost-effectiveness numbers for saving the life of an adult are possibly the most cost-effective I've seen.

(They also prevent a lot of newborn deaths, have substantial income benefits, and promote choice around children and women's empowerment, all generally good stuff on the side)

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at rangevoting.org/livessaved demonstrates, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

I currently believe the most impactful marginal funding opportunities focus on improving the welfare of highly numerous but neglected classes of animals (especially wild animals, shrimp, and invertebrates). As a longtermist, my work focuses on existential risk reduction, but my sense is that the key existential risk-related causes (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity) are relatively well-funded compared to the highest priority animal welfare causes, so I choose to donate there.

I have stayed at CEEALAR and the work they do is really impactful.

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at ScoreVoting.net/LivesSaved explains, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

I put a lot more value into charities for humans than I do into charities for animals, so I didn't rank any animal welfare groups.

I was glad that a family planning charity was available this year. Availability of family planning as a tool for lifting folks out of poverty is something I've been thinking about this year.

I believe in focusing on long-term risks mostly.

My priorities are AI safety and women’s health. 

They all touch on mental health interventions in some way.

My top three charities in this election are all animal charities. With Animal Charity Evaluators at the top. Sure, that's in part because I work there. And likely influenced by this donation election happening over a US holiday and during a season when even more animals are abused and slaughtered than usual. That's mentally quite taxing and this is a way for me to deal with that.

But I do not just vote this way, I donate this way. A significant part of my salary goes back to ACE.

ACE influenced at least $12.3 million in total donations in our last fiscal year. That includes $6.4 million in counterfactual gifts. That's a direct consequence of our efforts and vital to reduce the suffering of billions of individuals. I see this as evidence of ACE's potential; I think we can do much, much more to engage people who dislike animal abuse to help farmed and wild animals effectively. To do that, the organization needs to be able to invest a bit more in growth.

Last year, for every dollar ACE spent on our charity evaluations and recommendations, we generated $6.05 in donations for highly effective animal charities that wouldn’t have been donated to otherwise. (While a strong multiplier is encouraging, what ultimately matters for animals is the total amount of additional funding directed to effective work—$6.4 million in counterfactual donations. A hypothetical organization could have a multiplier of 100x but only influence $10,000; we’d rather have a lower multiplier and move millions more dollars to where they’ll help animals most. So, don't be too (un)impressed by that number.)

Because of ACE, there are animal lovers who now donate to more effective charities, people who now help more animals. Some of them would otherwise not have given to animal welfare at all. That means more piglets, squabs, chicks, calves, and shrimplets have a chance at a decent life. 

You can read more about ACE's meta-fundraising impact and how it was calculated here: 

Announcing our Latest Influenced-Giving Metrics - Animal Charity Evaluators

First, my time is limited, so I only consider the options that are likely to win (I considered the top six). At time of voting, this is the Animal Welfare Fund, ACE, CWAW, Forethought, CEEALAR, and AMF.

Second, I prioritize non-fund/non-charity-eval orgs. I view the Donation Election as a way for the forum to serve as the fund managers or charity evaluators ourselves instead of deferring to experts. Otherwise, why not just do that instead of donating to the election fund? This means CWAW, Forethought, CEEALAR, and AMF are candidates.

Third, my initial ranking among these four: CWAW, AMF, CEEALAR, Forethought. In general, I'm skeptical that marginal $ towards AI safety will do much good. As such, Forethought ranks below the others. Then I pick CWAW over AMF and CEEALAR due to the donation matching opportunity as well as the fact that it is new and seems clearly funding constrained. I choose CEEALAR over AMF simply because I think buildiing the talent pipeline is particularly important. So, my choices are: CWAW, then CEEALAR, then AMF.

Fourth, I will revisit my vote in one week to see if the rankings have changed substantially and adjust accordingly for my final vote.

I like charities that facilitate the use of contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa because it's a good way to reduce child mortality.  And also because I have an average-based utilitarian outlook and I think there will be many people with long lives and high quality of life in the future, so I think reducing population growth in the present will improve the average welfare of humans, past, present, and future.

EA lurker, hi. I ranked first and second two that I've donated to this year so had already researched. First ALLFED which I've been a fan of and donated to for years. As far as I know truly a neglected area, don't know of a comparable effort. Hope the D never happens but cool learnings regardless. Second Center for Election Science which I'm highly uncertain has a big marginal impact (I'm not sure approval or score voting will obtain significantly more optimal outcomes given noise) but I feel like the established and usual alternative systems represent a kind of lack of ambition that is paralyzing. After that I skimmed the posts about every candidate (enjoyable) and mostly ranked in tiers starting with health, then animals, then meta EA, then AI, and within the tiers mostly concrete interventions over evaluative or resource-to-field causes. Though I appreciate the need for eval/meta I feel like there are so many no brainer inteventions that I'm less convinced field building/effectiveness are more beneficial. AI last because I think the most important AI prep is not about AI but rather good governance/inclusive institutions/disaster resilience that will pay off regardless of timelines (any of which I consider highly speculative), and it wasn't apparent to me that any of the causes mentioning AI took that non-AI path.

I put voting method reform first, because it has the greatest overall downstream impact, then charities that directly help people, then charities that help animals, then left things unranked that I don't support or think are actually harmful.

I considered what I've learnt while working in animal advocacy and AI safety. I think these are the 2 most urgent/important cause areas given actuality of/potential for harm/suffering. I ranked orgs based on who I think is doing good work and has sound epistemics, roughly.