The Nonlinear Library EA - Winners in the Forum's Donation Election (2023) by Lizka
Dec 24, 2023
16:24
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Winners in the Forum's Donation Election (2023), published by Lizka on December 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
TL;DR: We ran a
Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]). The winners are:
Rethink Priorities - $12,847.75
Charity Entrepreneurship: Incubated Charities Fund - $11,351.11
Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) - $10,657.07
This post shares more information about the results:
Comments from voters about their votes: patterns include referencing organizations' marginal funding posts, updating towards the neglectedness of animal welfare, appreciating strong track records, etc.
Voting patterns: most people voted for 2-4 candidates (at least one of which was one of the three winners), usually in multiple cause areas
Cause area stats: similar numbers of points went to cross-cause, animal welfare, risk/future-oriented, and global health candidates (ranked in that order)
All candidate results, including raw point[3] totals: the Long-Term Future Fund initially placed second by raw point totals
Concluding thoughts & other charities
You can find some extra information in
this spreadsheet.
Highlights from the comments: why people voted the way they did
We asked voters if they wanted to share a note about why they voted the way they did. 74 people (~20%) wrote a comment. I'm sharing a few excerpts[4] below, and more in a comment on this post (separated for the sake of space) - consider reading the longer version if you have a moment.
There were some recurring patterns in different people's notes, some of which appear in these two comments explaining their authors' votes:
"[AWF], because I was convinced by the post about how animal welfare dominates in non-longtermist causes, [CE], so that there can be even more excellent ways of making the world a better place by donating, [GWWC], because I wish we had unlimited money to give to all the others"
"Realized I'm too partial to [global health] and biased against animal welfare, [so I decided to vote for the] most effective animal organization. Rethink's
post was very convincing.
CE has the most innovative ideas in GHD and it isn't close. GiveWell is GiveWell."
Rethink Priorities's
funding request post was mentioned a lot. People also noted specific aspects of RP's work that they appreciate, like the EA Survey, public benefits/publishing research on cause prioritization, moral weights work, and research into particularly neglected animals. There were also shoutouts to the staff:
"ALLFED and Rethink Priorities both consist of highly talented and motivated individuals that are working on high-potential, high-impact projects. Both organizations have left a strong impression on me in terms of their approach to reasoning and problem solving. [...] Both organizations have recently posted extremely well-detailed [updates on their financial situation and how additional funding would help]. [...]"
CE's Incubated Charities Fund (and Charity Entrepreneurship more broadly) got a lot of appreciation for their good and/or unusual ideas and track record. There were also comments like:
"...direct-action global health charities need more funding now, especially in light of reductions in future funding from Open Phil. [And] there's enough potential upside to charity incubation to put a good bit of money there."
A number of people wrote that they'd updated towards donating to animal welfare as a result of recent discussions (
often explicitly because of this post). Many gave a lot of their points to the Animal Welfare Fund, sometimes referencing
GWWC's evaluations of the evaluators. Some also said they wanted to vote for animal welfare to correct for what they saw as its relative neglectedness in EA or to emphasize that it has a central place in EA. One example:
"I vo...
TL;DR: We ran a
Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]). The winners are:
Rethink Priorities - $12,847.75
Charity Entrepreneurship: Incubated Charities Fund - $11,351.11
Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) - $10,657.07
This post shares more information about the results:
Comments from voters about their votes: patterns include referencing organizations' marginal funding posts, updating towards the neglectedness of animal welfare, appreciating strong track records, etc.
Voting patterns: most people voted for 2-4 candidates (at least one of which was one of the three winners), usually in multiple cause areas
Cause area stats: similar numbers of points went to cross-cause, animal welfare, risk/future-oriented, and global health candidates (ranked in that order)
All candidate results, including raw point[3] totals: the Long-Term Future Fund initially placed second by raw point totals
Concluding thoughts & other charities
You can find some extra information in
this spreadsheet.
Highlights from the comments: why people voted the way they did
We asked voters if they wanted to share a note about why they voted the way they did. 74 people (~20%) wrote a comment. I'm sharing a few excerpts[4] below, and more in a comment on this post (separated for the sake of space) - consider reading the longer version if you have a moment.
There were some recurring patterns in different people's notes, some of which appear in these two comments explaining their authors' votes:
"[AWF], because I was convinced by the post about how animal welfare dominates in non-longtermist causes, [CE], so that there can be even more excellent ways of making the world a better place by donating, [GWWC], because I wish we had unlimited money to give to all the others"
"Realized I'm too partial to [global health] and biased against animal welfare, [so I decided to vote for the] most effective animal organization. Rethink's
post was very convincing.
CE has the most innovative ideas in GHD and it isn't close. GiveWell is GiveWell."
Rethink Priorities's
funding request post was mentioned a lot. People also noted specific aspects of RP's work that they appreciate, like the EA Survey, public benefits/publishing research on cause prioritization, moral weights work, and research into particularly neglected animals. There were also shoutouts to the staff:
"ALLFED and Rethink Priorities both consist of highly talented and motivated individuals that are working on high-potential, high-impact projects. Both organizations have left a strong impression on me in terms of their approach to reasoning and problem solving. [...] Both organizations have recently posted extremely well-detailed [updates on their financial situation and how additional funding would help]. [...]"
CE's Incubated Charities Fund (and Charity Entrepreneurship more broadly) got a lot of appreciation for their good and/or unusual ideas and track record. There were also comments like:
"...direct-action global health charities need more funding now, especially in light of reductions in future funding from Open Phil. [And] there's enough potential upside to charity incubation to put a good bit of money there."
A number of people wrote that they'd updated towards donating to animal welfare as a result of recent discussions (
often explicitly because of this post). Many gave a lot of their points to the Animal Welfare Fund, sometimes referencing
GWWC's evaluations of the evaluators. Some also said they wanted to vote for animal welfare to correct for what they saw as its relative neglectedness in EA or to emphasize that it has a central place in EA. One example:
"I vo...