14 ms·

Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)

• a_w 10y ago
  Great idea and I wish you all the best. Assuming this becomes very successful, what effect will this have on new non-profits if most people adopt this approach? Will it make it difficult for them to raise funds?
  • colophonemes 10y ago
    Thanks! Ideally this makes it significantly easier for effective non-profits to raise money. We're not locking in the set of organizations we fund. Being flexible about which cause you support at any given time, given the available facts is a core part of effective altruism. We're especially excited about funding new nonprofits that seem like they're going to be able to have a big impact, because at the moment they can spend north of 30-40% of their time fundraising (which, especially when they're new, would be time better spent on validating their programs and scaling up).
• andy_ppp 10y ago
  This is really interesting and a great idea; however, I'd almost trust charities more if they listed how they had failed each year and where delivery and services went wrong and what mitigation has been put in place. It would be good to have a system where charities were allowed to fail like bad companies as well, but it's difficult to be this honest.
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    Thanks, we completely agree! Right now, the incentives in the charity sector are totally screwed. The charities which get the biggest are the ones with the best marketing, not the ones which have the most impact. That means that big charities often hide their mistakes and focus on maintaining a wholesome image. In contrast, many of the organizations we work with regularly publish their mistakes and lessons. By sharing this kind of information, the whole sector can learn and improve. In particular, GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes http://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes) has a great page listing their mistakes. We've been especially impressed with charities like New Incentives, who realised that the original target population they were trying to serve (pregnant women with HIV) wasn't big enough, so they pivoted to focus on incentivizing mothers to vaccinate their children so that they could gather more evidence and have an even bigger impact. With EA Funds, donors pick which problems they want their donation to solve, and we find the best giving opportunities. We will fund both new start-up style charities and larger more validated approaches. We will fund charities which have run failed programs in the past, provided that they have updated their approach.
    • ArneBab 10y ago
      So New Incentives changed what they wanted to do because they would get paid more that way? I know this sounds harsh. This is the incentive you create: Pushing people who initially wanted to help where they see need to instead focus on helping where they get more money for do so. And a sufficient amount of free money is mostly available to a very small group of people. This does not mean it’s necessarily bad. It just means that its incentives are skewed, too: The charities are pushed to become interest groups of the rich (to some degree this is also the case today, but stronger quality assurance also means more control to follow the largest donors' wishes).
• wcgortel 10y ago
  Congratulations on your launch! Well done. A great idea that needed to happen. Looking forward to kicking the tires on it.
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    Thanks, please do let us know if you spot any issues, want to suggest any new features or have any other feedback!
• SEMW 10y ago
  Congrats on the launch! > We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a QALY) for as little as $80 Which was that? IIRC GiveWell only claim $100/QALY for the AMF - have you found a charity you believe is 20% more efficient than that, or is this just a difference in how you measure cost per qaly? [Edit] another question -- there's recently been criticism[0] of the poor quality of data and effectiveness research in animal welfare EA, compared with human welfare EA. Would the animal welfare fund be doing things like actively commissioning new research into intervention effectiveness? Or would it be more hands-off, just limited to picking charities based on the data that's out there at the moment? [0] https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almost-surely-higher-92c908f36517#.jgeac5y3n https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almo...
  • colophonemes 10y ago
    It's just that it's an estimate that hinges on a few judgement calls (e.g. whether or not to cost services that AMF receive pro bono) — we're in agreement with Givewell's estimate. For comparison, the WHO think that LLINs work out to be around ~$30/DALY and AMF run a pretty tight ship. Given the tricky nature of cost-effectiveness estimates I don't think the numbers are hard enough that it'd be wise to talk about the difference implying anything as exact as an intervention being '20% more efficient'. It's more to get a reasonable ballpark for comparisons between other interventions. (Also, seems there was a typo in the OP, should be DALY not QALY).
    • MattHeard 10y ago
      QALY and DALY are different. http://www.qalibra.eu/tool/support/page8.cfm http://www.qalibra.eu/tool/support/page8.cfm
      • cjbprime 10y ago
        .. which doesn't preclude someone having typoed one for the other, right?
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
• DodgyEggplant 10y ago
  + 1000 For the animals welfare. The animals that can't blog, tweet, or complain. Wildlife preservation and care for animals is as important as other common non-profit and foundations goals, but often neglected
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    We agree, effective altruism attempts to focus on problems that are important, tractable and neglected. Animal welfare fits squarely into this bucket for all the reasons you mentioned. In particular, we often focus on farm animal welfare, as this is an area that is particularly neglected. I love this post from Animal Charity Evaluators[0] which explains that while farmed animals account for 99% of animals killed and used by humans in the US, the vast majority of donations go to animal shelters, with only 1% going to charities which help reduce the suffering of farmed animals. [0] https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/why-farmed-animals/ https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/why-farmed-animals/
  • deontologizt 10y ago
    Actually, most "effective altruists" support habitat destruction because it reduces the number of animals, and therefore also the amount of suffering. I find this very disturbing. If you want details, see my other comment on this item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13886954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13886954 Of course, EAs won't tell you this up front, as they know it would be bad PR. (cf. https://medium.com/@jacobfunnell/a-year-in-effective-altruism-observations-and-criticisms-and-tofu-d6af9f7ecb39 https://medium.com/@jacobfunnell/a-year-in-effective-altruis...: "Some effective altruists hold views that would be strongly controversial to most people outside of EA. EA does a pretty good job of either not mentioning (or actively avoiding) these conclusions in its public-facing literature. Examples include the moral imperative to destroy habitat in order to reduce wild animal suffering, the need to divert funds away from causes like poverty relief and towards artificial intelligence safety research, or the extreme triviality of aesthetic value.")
    • colophonemes 10y ago
      While there are people who identify as effective altruist who hold views that are controversial, I think it's important to not paint with such a broad brush. As your linked article notes, there is wide disagreement on a range of thorny philosophical issues across a range of cause areas, but the scare quotes/selective quoting makes it seem like these views are unquestioningly accepted by a plurality of people in the community. Effective altruism is a broad church. The unifying themes are trying to make the world a better place, using reason and evidence as tools for making decision, expanding our circle of compassion, and having epistemic humility (i.e. knowing that we could be wrong about things and being open to changing our minds in proportion to the strength of new evidence). The conclusions people draw can hinge on deep and ultimately irreducible value judgements — a strength of the community is that we can (in general) have these disagreements respectfully and work together productively where there is common ground.
• jrysocarras 10y ago
  Caveat: I know little about this area, so my question may be rooted in naivete. Q: Why are you operating as a nonprofit? I would be willing to pay a reasonable management fee to you in exchange for the assurance that my money will likely have a greater social impact. If you were able to charge management fees, wouldn't that give you a greater ability to grow and attract talent?
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    Haha, this is what the YC partners ask us as well! We see this service as a public good, we want anyone to be able to donate effectively, no matter whether they are donating $10 or $10 million. We prefer to offer our service completely free of charge, but let people optionally tip us, or donate to us directly, if they find the work we do valuable. Right now, we have sufficient funding for our operations to support us until the end of the year, this will let us grow and attract top talent. If this product really does take off, we might play around with different funding models, including asking for an optional 'tip'. As well as building EA Funds, we run local Effective Altruism community groups and conferences. Many of our members give back to us to support our activities because historically, we've been able to generate returns on their donation of between $10 and $100 for every dollar we spend on our operations. I should also note that there is some chance that donations to the EA Community Fund may be regranted to us if Nick Beckstead decides that we are a good giving opportunity. One way to support us it to allocate some of your donation to the EA Community Fund. We like this funding model because it incentivises us to focus on high impact activities. If the community evaluates the work we do positively, we'll get funding, and if not, we'll be forced to reassess our priorities.
• pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  when does the charity red tape pork projects end???? not for profit = for salary. a salary that could have gone to the charity you intended to support. you're all idiots.
• matthewmarkus 10y ago
  Oh boy! I'm going to say some unpopular things here, so please remember you asked for feedback. I immediately click on Funds->Animal Welfare since my company, Pembient, deals in wildlife and I've had a lot of (negative) interactions with the conservation industry. I see that the fund targets "farmed animals" and even then carries a warning: "Risk-averse donors might choose not to focus on animal welfare because the evidence base for the most effective interventions is not yet as strong as in areas like global health and development." Excellent! But then I look at the manager's background. It seems he has extensive dealings with The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Further, at least one of the grants from the fund goes towards a HSUS project on broiler chicken welfare. OK, that's fine; however, digging deeper I find that at least 5% of the grant covers administrative costs (i.e., $50k). Now, money being fungible, that means money has been freed up for other activities. From my perspective, that would include HSUS's interference in The Black Rhino Genome Project: https://experiment.com/u/yHldOQ https://experiment.com/u/yHldOQ And that's the problem with donating to large non-profits! They have so much going on that it is hard to track all the externalities. Let me add that this issue, to me, is the biggest problem with Effective Altruism (EA). It says, "You're 'smart,' go out and become a wealthy hedge fund manager. That's the best use of your time, and then donate the proceeds to things that matter." I would counter and say that if you're truly 'smart,' you should be directly working on problems that matter. Doing something ancillary and then giving to a group of people who might be viewed as less 'smart' because they didn't follow the EA path is internally inconsistent. I think it reveals what EA is: A moral salve to justify forgoing work on hard problems to accumulate wealth for selfish purposes. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, I just don't like the marketing on top of it. I said I would be harsh. Apologies, if I've been too harsh.
  • tempestn 10y ago
    Do you think that rather than considering smartness as a linear scale, it might make more sense to consider different people as having aptitudes in different areas? I could see one person being an excellent and effective animal welfare activist and another being a top performing hedge fund manager; it's unlikely the two could switch roles and perform equally well. Regarding HSUS, I'm not sufficiently well versed to have an opinion there, but it is theoretically possible for an organization to do things you don't like, but still be more of a net positive than the available alternatives, especially when the bulk of the donation will go toward a specific initiative. Maybe they believe that's the case here?
• tempestn 10y ago
  Since Givewell has come up a number of times here, the obvious question to me, as someone completely unversed in how these things work, is how does contributing to your fund compare to contributing to Givewell? It seems like your goals are similar. Is your claim that dollars contributed to your fund will ultimately be more effective? Or are you differentiating yourselves in a different way (different priorities, improved transparancy, something else)? I realize the model is somewhat different, but the comparison I would ultimately care about is in the end results - the effects that my contributions would ultimately have.
  • colophonemes 10y ago
    Our baseline for effectiveness (specifically with regard to the Global Health and Development Fund, which is managed by GiveWell founder Elie Hassenfeld) is Givewell's top charities. So, it's entirely possible that Elie will choose to grant to these, in which case your donation will be exactly as effective as donating to Givewell, but you'll get the advantage of using the EA Funds platform — e.g. single tax receipt (donating to one org instead of 3-4), easy recurring donations, the ability to change your donation preferences later, allocating to causes outside of global health, donation tracking etc. etc. However, we do think there's a good chance of getting higher returns. Givewell recommendations skew towards what makes sense for an average, individual donor with a particular risk profile. By having access to a larger pool of funds, you could seed new high-expected-value charities that wouldn't necessarily make it onto Givewell's recommendation list, but are nonetheless potentially high impact (examples of recent things in this space — New Incentives, Charity Science Health etc).
    • cbr 10y ago
      single tax receipt (donating to one org instead of 3-4) GiveWell offers this as well: https://secure.givewell.org/ https://secure.givewell.org/ You can donate to GiveWell for distribution to their to charities, and you can either choose the breakdown or ask them to allocate it as they think best.
      • tmacaulay 10y ago
• EGreg 10y ago
  I disagree with just maximizing QALYs as the main measure of effective altruism. See my post: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=216 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=216
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    Hi, thanks for your post. I think that many EAs would agree with you here. Effective Altruism is not just about maximizing QALYs. It's about figuring out what doing good even means, figuring out how to improve the world, and then actually doing it. We're not just about educating people on one narrow conception of what doing good means, we know that doing good is hard and complex, so we're trying to build a community of people focused on figuring that out. Our community debates what it means to do the most good endlessly, and there is a lot of nuance, that's what we love about it! You mentioned some interesting issues in population ethics in your post, it appears you take the person-affecting view. Many EAs who take this view prefer to support global health, or animal welfare charities, as they do not think it is beneficial to maximise the number of happy people in the world. Other people in our community think that a world with more people is better, provided that adding more people does not reduce the overall total happiness. In our summary of the Long-Term future Fund, you can read Nick's take on the person-affecting view[0] and see some more links to discussion of this issue. We love getting into these debates and seeing lots of different perspectives. [0] https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future
• deontologizt 10y ago
  Why does CEA openly support the Foundational Research Institute even though their fringe negative utilitarian value system is dangerous?
• EduardHL 10y ago
  Congrats on your venture! Will you give more detail on how you address the following four steps mentioned in your website: 1. Which problem areas are most important? Metrics used for each fund (DALYs, etc.)? Sources used? etc. 2. Which interventions are likely to make progress in solving the problem? Sources used? How do you evaluate interventions with less predictable outcomes (such as clean energy research)? etc. 3. Which charities executing those interventions are most effective? Indicators used? Type of due diligence? Do you rely only on reports or do you also regularly check on-the-ground reality? etc. 4. Which charities have a funding gap that is unlikely to be filled elsewhere? Methodology (funding inflow/outflow models and/or constant dialogue with organisations ...)? Again, really great initiative; would be interested to understand more in detail.
  • willmacaskill 10y ago
    Thanks for the enthusiasm! I think a lot of your questions can be answered here (including the other pages that these pages link to): http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-process http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-process and http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/process http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/process Because our fund managers are all GiveWell and Open Philanthropy staff, we inherit their methodology. If in the future we move beyond GiveWell and Open Philanthropy fund managers, we'll need to have pages on their process too (and how it potentially differs from GW / OP). A more accessible introduction to how to assess which problem area is most important is here: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/ https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/
    • colophonemes 10y ago
      I'd add that these things will differ between cause areas, so it's hard to give a neat, roll-up answer. DALY's and NPV income estimates are fairly good in the global health space, but other cause areas may need to make more speculative comparisons because they deal with things that are harder to measure. In all cases, when a Fund makes a grant, the fund manager will provide a write-up outlining their rationale. For now, each fund manager has a list of previous grants they've made, so you can get a sense of the organisations they are likely to grant to (though by no means does that imply that they necessarily /will/ grant to these specific orgs in future). One of the key advantages of the Funds model is not locking you in to a particular charity up front, which means that as more information about funding gaps, intervention effectiveness etc comes to light, fund managers can respond accordingly.
• beatpanda 10y ago
  Why is there a "long term future" fund addressing the theoretical risk of AI but not the very well understood and documented future risks of climate change?
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    The Long-Term future fund is designed to be fairly broad at some point, and it may well support some climate change initiatives in the future, as well as addressing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and any other potential global catastrophic risks. Nick Beckstead has previously expressed interest in funding more research to quantify the tail risks associated with runaway climate change in particular. Having said that, one of the reasons that EA has not focused as heavily on climate change historically is that climate change is not as neglected as potential risks from AI, or biotechnology. We are happy to see a lot of funding going into climate research and modelling, and a lot of grassroots activism. While climate change is far from solved, and remains one of the most important problems of our time, many EAs think that we should first focus on problems which receive less media attention but are plausibly just as serious.
    • richardbatty 10y ago
      To add some numbers to this, according to http://www.climatefinancelandscape.org/ http://www.climatefinancelandscape.org/ $392 billion was spent on various aspects of tackling climate change in 2014. In contrast, under $10 million per year is being spent on potential risks from AI (https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence-risk/ https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intellige...). That doesn't mean there's nothing neglected in climate change (e.g. negative emissions technology) and it would be good to see some more investigation into this.
    • rspeer 10y ago
      > many EAs think that we should first focus on problems which receive less media attention but are plausibly just as serious. How is that effective? How could you even measure the effectiveness of focusing on problems that don't currently exist but that you happen to consider "plausible"? (Global warming, in contrast, is quite measurable.) I'm looking at the list of recipients of that fund and it looks like self-dealing: people on the futurist side of EA would like to encourage people to donate to people on the futurist side of EA.
• mkempe 10y ago
  Would YC fund a centre for egoism, for-profit?
• 65827 10y ago
  What's the overhead? What are the management fees?
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    We don't charge any management fees, you can donate through EA funds, and we'll pass on 100% of the money we receive to the charities. We don't consider a charities' overhead when evaluating effectiveness, in the same way that you don't consider how much Tim Cook gets paid when you decide whether to buy an iPhone. Historically, groups like Charity Navigator have looked at overhead ratios for one simple reason - they're much easier to measure. Unfortunately, overhead ratios are simply not a useful measure for evaluating charity effectiveness, and they are easily gamed by unscrupulous charities trying to raise funding. Instead, we look at the total costs a charity incurs, and add in any costs that they don't include in their budget, but are necessary to deliver their program. Then we look at the outcomes the charity achieves for that funding as a whole. I'd check out Dan Pallotta's TED talk if you want to know more the overhead myth. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
• JoshTriplett 10y ago
  What's the process to propose a charitable organization for inclusion in one of your funds? Who would be the right person at CEA to talk to about that, and what information would you need?
  • tmacaulay 10y ago
    Hi, thanks for your interest! Our fund managers work at the Open Philanthropy project, where they work full-time, finding the very best donation opportunities. They look for charities working in their key focus areas, which have a good track record and a robust evidence base to support their chosen intervention. If the program you'd like to recommend is within one of their key focus areas, run some quick calculations to check if the charity you'd like to recommend is within the same range of cost-effectiveness as the previous grantees. If so - great! we'd love to hear about it, and I'd recommend you get in touch with the program officer in charge of the program area your non-profit targets. We recommend running this quick test because while many non-profit programs have a plausible story for impact, very few non-profits surpass our stringent bar for effectiveness. GiveWell is especially excited to see non-profits working on these intervention areas http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/15/charities-wed-like-to-see/ http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/15/charities-wed-like-to-se...
• stefek99 10y ago
  Congrats! My genuine feeling - I'm not helping children in Africa, because that would mean I'm not helping rebuild Nepal earthquake. Instead I'm focusing on healing the planet - global warming - leading to famine, migration to cities, civil warfare, refugee crisis etc... Oxford, UK - come to North Wales - https://astralship.org https://astralship.org - read more about our MISSION + FLOW + VOYAGES... Because our chapel is located in the secluded nature we plan intense voyages - total immersion, no distractions, peak performance, flow state. Looking forward to hearing from you. Namaste.
• abdabsi 10y ago
  Hi Tara, great work on the fund - and I'm a big fan of EA / GiveWell / Doing Good Better and all this "ecosystem". I'm curious about the scalability of EA funds. From what I know, some of the major areas that EA and GiveWell focus on are neglected causes. If enough people are giving to neglected causes, would the movement lose its essence? Also, individual donors in general are impact givers who make a donation because their friends told them about a non-profit, or they paid for a gala-dinner ticket for social reasons. How do you plan to transform the general public from being impulse givers into "effective altruists" ?