Donation Election Discussion Thread

I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).

• All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
• I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
  • Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
  • Since founding and leaving WAI, I've just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
• Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can't do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
• SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
• In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.

I ranked the Shrimp Welfare Project 1st because I think their Humane Slaughter Initiative is the most cost-effective intervention around.

I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).

With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropoda's project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWP's operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropoda's projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since they're more existential. But all of this is held loosely and I'm very open to counterarguments.

Organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project or the Fish Welfare Initiative have high utilitarian returns, but are difficult to sell to people outside of EA, so it makes sense for dollars coming directly from the core of the community to go to these niche but highly effective cause areas. 

To what extent are people voting in a manner that is consistent / not consistent with their past or intended future personal donations? I notice that my current ranking doesn't really align with the last time I handed out donations of my own money (end of 2023, for tax reasons). Some of that may reflect changed priorities and development over the past year, but I doubt all of it does.

To the extent that some of us have different impulses when handing out my own money versus (largely) other people's money, how might we disentangle the extent to which each set of impulses is correct? (For a third data point, my votes in the Equal Hands pilot have been somewhere between these two.)

I think the difference may largely come down to psychological factors, such as:

• I am probably more conservative with my own donations than in voting for where to send pooled donations.
• I sometimes want to give most people at least half a loaf, and this tendency feels more realizable when spending other people's money because I am thinking more at a group level. In contrast, I don't have enough in the pot to give a meaningful amount of money to a dozen different orgs, and still have most of my money for those I think most important to fund.

Kind of a funny selection effect going on here here where if you pick sufficiently promising / legible / successful orgs (like Against Malaria Foundation), isn't that just funging against OpenPhil funding?  This leads me to want to upweight new and not-yet-proven orgs (like the several new AIM-incubated charities), plus things like PauseAI and Wild Animal Initiative that OpenPhil feels they can't fund for political reasons.  (Same argument would apply for invertebrate welfare, but I personally don't really believe in invertebrate welfare.  Sorry!)

I'm also somewhat saddened by the inevitable popularity-contest nature of the vote; I feel like people are picking orgs they've heard of and picking orgs that match their personal cause-prioritization "team" (global health vs x-risk vs animals).  I like the idea that EA should be experimental and exploratory, so (although I am a longtermist myself), I tried to further upweight some really interesting new cause areas that I just learned about while reading these various posts:
- Accion Transformadora's crime-reduction stuff seems like a promising new space to explore for potential effective interventions in medium-income countries.
- One Acre Fund is potentially neat, I'm into the idea of economic-growth-boosting interventions and this might be a good one.
- It's neat that Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos is doing a bunch of cool x-risk-related projects throughout latin america; their nuclear-winter-resilience-planning stuff in Argentina and Brazil seems like a particularly well-placed bit of local lobbying/activism.

But alas, there can only be three top-three winners, so I ultimately spent my top votes on Team Popular Longtermist Stuff (Nucleic Acid Observatory, PauseAI, MATS) in the hopes that one of them, probably PauseAI, would become a winner.

(longtermist stuff)
1. Nucleic Acid Observatory
2. Observatorio de Riesgos Catastroficos
3. PauseAI
4. MATS

(interesting stuff in more niche cause areas, which i sadly doubt can actually win)
5. Accion Transformadora
6. One Acre Fund
7. Unjournal

(if longtermism loses across the board, I prefer wild animal welfare to invertebrate welfare)
8. Wild Animal Inititative
9. Faunalytics

We've just resolved some launch issues with the voting portal. The portal was limited to 30 candidates, so a randomised group of organisations was missing for each voter. 
If you've already voted, consider re-voting with a full list of candidates. 
 

Given that OP is not funding WAW and invertebrate welfare, I’ve selected Wild Animal Initiative and the Arthropoda Foundation as my top votes. SWP was also a high vote but slightly less because I'm more bullish on the VOI of Wild Animal initiative and Arthropoda foundation  

That said, I'm guilty of "not enough time to research the orgs". There’s a reasonably high chance (~75%) that I would change these top votes with more reading, probably by prioritising less well-known orgs.

(Edited at 19:35 UTC-5 as I misunderstood how the voting system works)

My top 10 right now look something like:

1. The Midas Project
2. EA Animal Welfare Fund
3. Rethink Priorities
4. MATS Research
5. Shrimp Welfare Project
6. Apart Research
7. Legal Impact for Chickens
8. PauseAI
9. Wild Animal Initiative
10. High Impact Professionals

I ranked my organization, The Midas Project, first on my ballot. I don't think we have a stronger track record than many of the organizations in this election (and I expect the winners will be a few familiar top contenders like Rethink Priorities, who certainly deserve to be there), but I do think the election will undervalue our project due to general information asymmetries and most of our value being speculative/heavy-tailed. This seems in line with the tactical voting suggestion, but it does feel a bit icky/full of hubris.

Also, in making this list, I realized that I favored large orgs whose work I'm familiar with, and most skipped over small orgs who I know little about (including ones that made posts for marginal funding week that I just haven't read). This was a funny feeling because (as mentioned) I run a small org that I expect many people don't know about and will skip over. 

One way people can counteract this would be, in making your selection, choose 1-2 orgs you've never heard of at random, do a deep dive on them, and place them somewhere in your rankings (even at the bottom if you aren't excited about them). With enough people doing this, there should be enough coverage of small orgs for the results of the election to be a bit more informative, at least in terms of how smaller orgs compare to each other.

The current leaders, going into the final stretch... are the EA Animal Welfare Fund, The Shrimp Welfare Project, and Rethink Priorities. 

The Against Malaria Foundation, Pause AI US, Wild Animal Initiative and MATS are runners up, with AMF being particularly close to getting into the top three. 

You can expand the leaderboard at any time to see the runners up. 

Now is the time to make the case for the runners up you think should be more highly ranked...
 

Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2024-11-29T09:36 (+7)

This isn't an institutional take from CEA, but I'm personally a bit surprised that the Arthropoda Foundation isn't up there, since the Shrimp Welfare Project is. They seem to appeal to the same worldview to me. If you put SWP near the top of your list, but didn't vote for Arthropoda, why is that? 

Jason @ 2024-11-29T15:28 (+4)

I don't think that is surprising where only one's first-place vote among non-eliminated orgs counts. The screenshots below suggest that when Arthropoda is eliminated, about half of its votes go to SWP, with most of the rest going to WAI and RP. From public information, we don't know where SWP votes would go if it were eliminated, but it's plausible that many would go to Arthropoda if it were still in the race.

Moreover, at the time of Arthropoda's elimination, it was behind SWP 46-31, so while there's evidence of a clear rank ordering preference among the electorate I would not call it overwhelming.

 

 

Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2024-11-29T15:33 (+6)

Thanks Jason! I'm guessing a fairly large part of this is name recognition, so maybe there aren't unwritten takes to extract here. 

This also makes me think we can make the UI clearer next year- it'd have been easier to see this effect if I could also click a button to "eliminate one candidate". 

We did have some more fancy schemes where chunks of votes would be visually redistributed, but it would have taken too long. 

Jason @ 2024-11-29T15:50 (+4)

Time for the strategic voting to begin!

One observation is that RP has a strategic advantage here as a cross-cause org where voters may be unsure which cause area the marginal funding will benefit. This makes it a potentially attractive second-choice option when the top votegetter in a cause area is eliminated. Compare, for instance, its current significant lead in the top-3 with the top-5 results (with AMF and PauseAI present as the last orgs standing in global health and x-risk).

Rules are rules and should be followed, but I think the top-5 better represents the will of the electorate than the top-3. (There are also a non-trivial number of voters who did not indicate a preference in the top-3 but who did in the top-5 or at least top-8.)

 

Has anyone changed their minds because of the results/ for any other reason during this election so far? 

PS- I'm open to replies along the lines of "no I haven't changed my mind, and this sort of thing wouldn't because..."

I'd like to see far more of EA's budget be going towards animal welfare, in particular to the most numerous and neglected beings, invertebrates. This puts Arthropoda above SWP at the top since the former is more neglected and urgent. After that, the EA AWF has good insight to the EAA movement's needs and Rethink Priorities functions as a public good for the EA community and I think have shown themselves to be worthy of having more discretion in their budget given their incredibly impressive track record. 

Apart from that, I find the case for FWI and WAI and LIC to be convincing. I'm a bit unsure of LIC's impact and thus it ranks behind FWI and WAI.

I still need to do more research so my votes will probably change, but I'm generally focusing on what I think are ongoing, large scale moral catastrophes - ie. factory farming and wild animal suffering.

Here's my longtermist, AI focused list. I really haven't done my research, e.g. I read zero marginal funding posts. This is mostly a vote for MATS.

I would have ranked The Midas Project around 5 but it wasn't an option.

~All of the EV from the donation election probably comes from nudging OpenPhil toward the realization that they're pretty dramatically out of line with "consensus EA" in continuing to give most marginal dollars to global health. If this was explicitly thought through, brilliant.

(See this comment for sourcing and context on the table, which was my attempt to categorize all OP grants not too long ago)

I voted for promising early-stage orgs, as they seem often more funding-constrained and more cost-effective on the margin than established organizations (who have a much easier time fundraising). More speculative, but seemed worth the risk. I like this format, thanks for organizing this! 

I made a shortlist of around 15 from a quick scan and then read more in detail for those (and discussing my biggest concerns for any that seemed interesting with Claude). I want to say that the process of reading many funding requests next to each other was interesting and, dare I say, almost fun!

I'm voting for charities that have the biggest room for funding considering the impact the want to make. I am also prioritising meta charities, because they are less likely to receive votes due to most people supporting direct work, while meta charities are important for us to grow as a community. 

Pause AI has been neglected in funding from eg Open Philanthropy

I think work on animals is comparatively neglected, due to the high numbers of individuals of bad conditions. More specifically, the smaller the animals, the more numerous and neglected they tend to be, which leads to underfunding.

I voted for mainly animal welfare/rights charities first, particularly ones which focused on highly neglected, large-scale populations like insects, shrimps, and fishes. I also voted highly for PauseAI because I believe in creating greater public pressure to slow AI progress and shifting the Overton Window, even if I am agnostic about pausing AI progress itself. After these, I voted for some of the meta/mixed organizations which I thought were especially promising, including Rethink Priorities and the Unjournal. Then I voted for mental health/resilience interventions. Then I voted for GCR initiatives. I did not vote for any human welfare interventions which I expected to cause net harm to animals. I did not vote for any other AI organizations because I did not trust that they were sufficiently decelerationist.

Please consider using star score (or approval) voting next year instead of RCV

I'm not going to say who I voted for because I think a secret ballot is important. I will say I strongly agree with the idea of using more democracy in EA for making decisions so I applaud the forum and the organizers for having this event week and letting us vote.

AMF is very cost-effective.

I ultimately decided to vote for the animal welfare groups, because I believe that animal welfare, in both it's farmed and wild variants is probably one of the most robust and large problems in the world, and with the exception of groups that are the logistical/epistemic backbone of the movements (they are valuable for gathering data and making sure that the animal welfare groups can do their actions), I've become more skeptical that other causes were robustly net-positive, especially reducing existential risks.

I made a shortlist consisting mostly of animal-welfare organisations (because I've been led to believe that they are usually extremely funding-constrained, but very cost-effective in terms of QALYs per marginal dollar) then ranked that shortlist based on my best ITN-based guesses.

After going through the comments on this thread, I decided to upweight some of the 'weird' ones like the Shrimp Welfare Project that I initially ranked quite low, because most people won't fund them, and so most of their funding is going to come from sources like this donation election.

I voted for the animal welfare projects that seem to have more funding constraints, show more EV, and/or are more CE-aligned. Animal welfare is disproportionately underfunded within EA, so I did not vote for other groups in other  cause areas.

I'm confused why the comments aren't more about cause prioritization as that's the primary choice here. Maybe that's too big of a discussion for this comment section.

People > Animals > AI 

The donation election post (meet the candidates) and the actual voting platform need to be cross-checked. I saw that Animetrics was included in the vote but not in the post, while Giving Green was included in the post and not in the vote. There may be other errors which I missed.

I ranked the more neglected charities higher as they will benefit from funding more than others

I don't have a lot of confidence in this vote, and it's quite possible my ranking will change in important ways. Because only the top three organizations place in the money, we will all have the ability to narrow down which placements are likely to be outcome-relevant as the running counts start displaying. I'm quite sure I have not given all 36 organizations a fair shake in the 5-10 minutes I devoted to actually voted.

How do you feel about the current leaderboard? Would you like to see anything change? What's the best argument for a radically different leaderboard (given the current list of candidates)?

Largely but not entirely informed by https://manifold.markets/AaronBergman18/what-donationaccepting-entity-eg-ch#sU2ldPLZ0Edd 

Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn't be where I am now!

Cause prioritisation (global health and poverty first, then catastrophic risk and meta, then animal welfare (farmed above wild/marine, environmental included above welfare) and then AI last. Within causes, personal interest (eg antibiotics) and having heard of them before.

Like @Toby Tremlett🔹 I did a quick initial vote and will come back and edit my vote once I've read more marginal funding posts + see who's in the lead. 

(Another plug here for the Spotify playlist we created with the marginal funding posts in case you (like me) prefer listening to posts)

I voted for The Humane League UK (meat/broiler chicken welfare), Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation for cost-effective programs for animal welfare with low risk of backfire. I'm specifically concerned with backfire due to wild animal effects (also here), or increasing keel bone fractures for cage-free hens, so I avoid reducing animal product consumption/production and cage-free work.

I believe that making better decisions is the first order of priority, followed by catastrophic risks. I tried to incorporate issue neglectedness in my vote.

Going through the list of eligible organizations by cause area, I tried to identify less prominent organizations (that weren't the top-ranked and thus most famous organizations among EA previously recommenden by Effective Giving / Giving what you can in the past years) and looked for a) a possibly neglected but promising approach (according to my gut feeling) and b) that made their funding goals concrete, sizeable and transparent through concrete measures. The organizations I chose claimed to be in the intermediate phase of growth with operations already running effectively but that I assume to be at a crossroads regarding strategy consolidation and current (temporary) funding deficits. The three organizations of choice seem promising for leveraging impact since I feel they 1. set an example for appropriate farming conditions and act with publicity; 2. attract and persuade new early career donors; 3. serve as a platform for organized campaigns.  

I voted for more mental health funding: Vida Plena and Kaya. They increase WELLBYs with a very high ROI

I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.

I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.

I'm kind of confused why I don't think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don't...

I've put together a quick initial vote, but I'll vote again at least once before the deadline. I'll go more in depth and closely read the marginal funding posts of the top 5 or so candidates when there are clear front-runners. 

I used the comment field in the form to note that a field in the form was marked as optional when it was actually mandatory. That comment got automatically published here, and out of context it made no sense whatsoever. I think it would've been clearer to not automatically transfer this form feedback here (some people might've even assumed that it's private feedback).

I went for the organizations with those plans which will actually work. Their aims and goals aren't just on paper or hypothetical, they might actually make a difference. Moreover, it was also based on personal preferences. The country I live in, is an agricultural country and also suffers with countless cases of domestic violence and animal abuse. So those problems naturally got my attention. Nothing would make me happier than to alleviate such crimes in any part of the world.

I would really love to see the Good Food Institute (GFI) included on the list as well!

1. AI Safety seems to be the most urgent and is pretty neglected, while being tractable
2. In case humanity faces a GCR, there will be no focus on other topics, so putting focus on GCR prevention and mitigation seems legit to me
3. Animal welfare is pretty neglected, while IMHO being not so urgent
4. I don't know most of the organisations, so just picked all/some to represent the points above.

Sticking with choices I know a lot about and I'm confident have a big impact

PauseAI seem funding constraint - probably needs more runway for returns to be seen on their work

]

Animals are suffering and they deserve as much or more help than we give to other humans. They demonostrate no malice, hatred, jealousy, they only wish to survive. How we care for them reflects how we care for other humans. 

Hey @Toby Tremlett🔹 , when people leave their rationales with their votes and they end up as comments here, they often don't say what they voted for, and it doesn't show in this thread. So, I don't know what orgs they're talking about. Is that intended?

I strongly believe animal welfare should be prioritized above all other cause areas, due to effectiveness per dollar donated.

Aligning powerful AI is hard

Apart helped me start my career in AI safety, without them I wouldn't be where I am now!

To give more people basic agency over their own lives.

There are millions of cries and bleeding in every single minute across the world from the farmed animal. The collective efforts to rescue and help the suffering souls has been made through EA animal welfare funds as the EA hands of support reaches all corners of the world to support those who dedicates their life to advocates and support in ending the sufferings of animals. So they deserve this support as the impact they are bringing in globally is huge. 

Having a human-centric core in EA seems robustly good to me, so we're sure to make the world a better place even if our other ideas don't pan out.

My previous experience assessing the projects of the listed organizations (I did not vote for those I'm unfamiliar with), how neglected the work they're doing is, and the marginal impact I expect from funding them.

I believe these are the most effective organisations and will use the money wisely

Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.