Is EA prepared for an influx of new, medium-sized donors?

By Nathan Young @ 2025-12-09T13:26 (+46)

This is a linkpost to https://nathanpmyoung.substack.com/p/is-ea-prepared-for-an-influx-of-new

Let's imagine a story. 

Is EA prepared to deal with these people?

Notably, to the extent that such people are predictable, I feel like we should have solutions before they turn up, not after they turn up. 

What might some of these solutions look like, and which of them currently exist? 

Things the Currently exist

Coefficient Giving

It's good to have a large, trusted philanthropy that runs according to predictable processes. If people like those processes, they can just give to that one.[1] 

Manifund

It's good to have a system of re-granting and such that wealthy individuals can re-grant to people they trust to do the granting in a transparent and trackable way. 

The S-Process

The Survival and Flourishing Fund has something called the “S-process” which allocates money based on a set of trusted regranters and predictions about what things they’ll be glad they funded. I don’t understand it, but it feels like the kind of thing that a more advanced philanthropic ecosystem would use. Good job.

Longview Philanthropy

A donor advice service specifically caters to high net worth individuals. I haven't ever had their advice, but I assume they help wealthy people find options they endorse giving through.

Things that don’t exist fully

A repository or research (~EA forum)

The forum is quite good for this, though I imagine that many documents that are publicly available (Coefficient's research etc) are not available on the forum and then someone has to find them.

A philanthropic search/chatbot

It seems surprising to me that there isn't a winsome tool for engaging with research. I built one for 80k but they weren’t interested in implementing it (which is, to be clear, their prerogative). 

But let’s imagine that I am a newly minted hundred millionaire. If there were Qualy, a well trusted LLM that would link to pages in the EA corpus and answer questions, I might chat to it a bit? EA is still pretty respected in those circles.

A charity ranker

As Bergman notes, there isn’t some clear ranking of different charities that I know of.

Come on folks, what are we doing? How is our wannabe philanthropist meant to know whether they ought to donate to AI, shrimp welfare or GiveWell. Vibes? [2]

I am in the process of building such a thing, but this seems like an oversight. 

EA community notes

Why is there not a page with legitimate criticisms of EA projects, people and charities that only show if people from diverse viewpoints agree with them.

I think this one is more legitimately my fault, since I’m uniquely placed to built it, so sorry about that, but still, it should exist! It is mechanically appropriate, easy to build and the kind of liberal, self-reflective thing we support with appropriate guardrails. 

A way to navigate the ecosystem

There is probably room for something which is more basic than any of this that helps people decide whether or not they probably want to give to give well or probably to Coefficient Giving or something else. My model is that for a lot of people, the reason they don't give more money is because they see the money they're giving as a significant amount, don’t want to give it away badly but don’t want to put in a huge amount of effort to give it well. 

One can imagine a site with buzzfeed style questions (or an LLM) which guides people through this process. Consider Anthropics recent interviewing tool. It’s very low friction and elicits opinions. It wouldn't, I think, be that hard to build a tool which, at the end of some elicitation process, gives suggestions or a short set of things worth reading. 

This bullet was suggested by Raymond Douglas, though written by me.

A new approach

Billionaire Stripe Founder Patrick Collison wrote the following. I recommend reading and thinking about it. I think he’s right to say that EA is no longer the default for smart people. What does that world look like? Is EA intimidated or lacking in mojo? Or is there space for public debates with Progress Studies or whatever appears next? Should global poverty work be split off in order to allow it to be funded without the contrary AI safety vibes? 

I don’t know, but I am not sure EA knows either and this seems like a problem in a rapidly changing world.

There is a notable advantage for a liberal worldview that is no longer supreme in that we can ask questions we are scared of the answer or of tell people to return when they find stuff. EA not being the only game in town might be a good thing. 

Imagine that 10 new EA-adjacent 100 millionaires popped up overnight. What are we missing?

It seems pretty likely that this is the world we are in, so we don’t have to wait for it to happen. If you imagine, for 5 minutes that you are in this world, what would you like to see?

Can we built it before it happens, not after.

Should you wish to fund work on a ranking site or EA community notes, email me at nathanpmyoung[at]gmail.com or small donors can subscribe to my substack.

  1. ^

    Plausibly there are other large foundations that fit in this same space, feel free to suggest ones I've missed. 

  2. ^

    “papers? essays?”

    (this is a joke)

OscarD🔸 @ 2025-12-09T17:39 (+18)

Longview does advising for large donors like this. Some other orgs I know of are also planning for an influx of money from Anthropic employees, or thinking about how best to advise such donors on comparing cuase areas and charities and so forth. This is also relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qdJju3ntwNNtrtuXj/my-working-group-on-the-best-donation-opportunities But I agree more work on this seems good!

Chris Leong @ 2025-12-10T09:20 (+4)

There's also Founder's Pledge.

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-09T22:44 (+2)

Thanks, someone else mentioned them. Do you think there is anything else I'm missing?

jenn @ 2025-12-10T00:38 (+3)

the other nonprofit in this space is the Effective Institutions Project, which was linked in Zvi's 2025 nonprofits roundup:

They report that they are advising multiple major donors, and would welcome the opportunity to advise additional major donors. I haven’t had the opportunity to review their donation advisory work, but what I have seen in other areas gives me confidence. They specialize in advising donors who have brad interests across multiple areas, and they list AI safety, global health, democracy and (peace and security).

from the same post, re: SFF and the S-Process:

SFF does not accept donations but they are interested in partnerships with people or institutions who are interested in participating as a Funder in a future S-Process round. The minimum requirement for contributing as a Funder to a round is $250k. They are particularly interested in forming partnerships with American donors to help address funding gaps in 501(c)(4)’s and other political organizations.

This is a good choice if you’re looking to go large and not looking to ultimately funnel towards relatively small funding opportunities or individuals.

Craig Green @ 2025-12-09T21:57 (+7)

I do think some sort of moral-weights quizlet thing could be helpful for people to get to know their own values a bit better. GiveWell's models already do this but only for a narrow range of philanthropic endeavors relative to the OP (and they are actual weights for a model, not a pedagogical tool). To be clear, I do not think this would be very rigorous. As others have noted, the various areas are more-or-less speculative in their proposed effects and have more-or-less complete cost-evaluations. But it might help would-be donors to at least start thinking through their values and, based on their interests, it could then point them to the appropriate authorities.

As others have noted, I feel existing chatbots are pretty sufficient for simple search purposes (I found GiveWell through ChatGPT), and on the other hand, existing literature is probably better than any sort of fine-tuned LLM, IMO.

I have no idea what someone in this income-group would do. If I were in that class, being the respecter of expertise that I am, I would not be looking for a chatbot or a quizlet, and would seek out expert advice, so perhaps it is better to focus on getting these hypothetical expert-advisors more visibility?

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-12-10T02:16 (+2)

Welcome to the EA Forum!

NickLaing @ 2025-12-09T20:41 (+5)

I think giving circles like those that AIM run are a great option in this kind of case. They are a great way to build understanding around giving, while being well supported and also providing accountability

I also think lots of people will make statements along the lines of "EA is no longer the default option for smart people" as an excuse/copout for not giving at all, when really the issue is just value drift and greed catching up with them. If you don't want to give "EA style" that's great, as long as you've got another plan where to give it.

I think cross cause-area comparisons are great to consider, but cross cause-area rankings are a bit absurd given how big the error bars are around future stuff and animal welfare calculations. I don't mind someone making a ranking list as an interesting exercise that the odd person are going to defer to, but more realistically people are going to anchor on one cause area or another. At least have within-cause rankings before you start cross-cause ranking. 

People within the field say they don't even want to do cost-effectiveness analysis within AI safety charities (I feel they could make a bit more of an effort). How on earth then will you do it cross-cause?

GiveWell and HLI basically rank global health/Dev charities. If you're that keen on rankings, why not start by making an animal welfare and AI safety rank list first, then if people take that seriously perhaps you can start cross-cause ranking with non-absurdity

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-09T22:44 (+2)

Could you give a concise explanation of what giving circles are?

jenn @ 2025-12-10T00:41 (+3)

Lydia Laurenson has a non-concise article here.

I once spoke to a philanthropist who told me her earliest mistake was “sitting alone in a room, writing checks.” It was hard for her to trust people because everyone kept trying to get her money. Eventually, she realized isolation wasn’t serving her.

Battery Powered is intended to help with that type of mistake. It’s a philanthropy community where people who are new to philanthropy mix with people who are more familiar with it, so they cross-pollinate and mentor each other. The BP staff — including you, Colleen — has several experts who research issues chosen by the members, and then vet organizations working on those issues. This gives members a chance to learn about the issues before they vote on which organizations get the money.

ElliotTep @ 2025-12-10T02:57 (+4)

 I think the moment you try and compare charities across causes, especially for the ones that have harder-to-evaluate assumptions like global catastrophic risk and animal welfare, it very quickly becomes clear how impossibly crazy any solid numbers are, and how much they rest on uncertain philosophical assumptions, and how wide the error margins are. I think at that point you're either left with worldview diversification or some incredibly complex, as-yet-not-very-well-settled, cause prioritisation. 

My understanding is that all of the EA high net worth donor advisors like Longview, GiveWell, Coefficient Giving, (the org I work at) Senterra Funders, and many others are able to pitch their various offers to folks in Anthropic.

What has been missing is some recommended course prio split and/or resources, but that some orgs are starting to work on this now. 

I think that any way to systematise this, where you complete a quiz and it gives you an answer, is too superficial to be useful. High net worth funders need to decide for themselves whether or not they trust specific grant makers beyond whether or not those grant makers are aligned with their values on paper. 

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-10T08:56 (+2)

Naaaah, seems cheems. Seems worth trying. If we can't then fair enough. But it doesn't feel to me like we've tried.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-12-09T17:36 (+2)

(XKCD: Standards)

If someone wants to use a chatbot to research EA-endorsed charities they might be interested in donating to, they can just describe to ChatGPT or Claude what they want to know and ask the bot to search the EA Forum and other EA-related websites for info. 

titotal @ 2025-12-09T17:57 (+6)

they can just describe to ChatGPT or Claude what they want to know and ask the bot to search the EA Forum and other EA-related websites for info. 

I feel like you've written a dozen posts at this point explaining why this isn't a good idea. LLM's are still very unreliable, the best way to find out what people in EA believe is to ask. 

With regards to the ranking of charities, I think it would be totally fine if there were 15 different versions rankings out there. It would allow people to get a feel for what people with different worldviews value and agree or disagree on. I think this would be preferable to having just one "official" ranking, as there's no way to take into account massive worldview differences into that. 

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-12-09T18:42 (+2)

I was responding to this part:

But let’s imagine that I am a newly minted hundred millionaire. If there were Qualy, a well trusted LLM that would link to pages in the EA corpus and answer questions, I might chat to it a bit?

I agree chatbots are not to be trusted to do research or analysis, but I was imagining someone using a chatbot as a search engine, to just get a list of charities that they could then read about.

I think 15 different lists or rankings or aggregations would be fine too.

If a millionaire asked me right now for a big list of EA-related charities, I would give them the donation election list. And if they wanted to know the EA community’s ranking, I guess I would show them the results of the donation election. (Although I think those are hidden for the moment and we’re waiting on an announcement post.)

Maybe a bunch of people should write their own personal rankings.

Someone should make a Tier List template for EA charities. Something like this:

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-09T22:46 (+2)

Yeah I'm making something like that :)

Nathan Young @ 2025-12-09T22:46 (+2)

I do not see 14 charity ranking tools. I don't really think I see 2? What, other than asking claude/chatGPT/gemini are you suggesting? 

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2025-12-10T02:15 (+4)

You know what, I don’t mean to discourage you from your project. Go for it.

exopriors @ 2025-12-10T02:34 (+1)

I just built something that can help donors explore the EA/alignment ecosystem: alignment-explorer.exopriors.com.

It's a read-only SQL + vector search API over a continuously growing alignment-adjacent corpus, that Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 is exceptionally good at using. The compositional vibe search (vector mixing) functionality combined with long query time limits is quite something.