Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)

For sure, we want to represent a broad range of views within areas that are potentially high impact. We chose these as our initial funds partly because they seem like cause areas that reasonable people can disagree on (both on questions of values, and on empirical questions about relative risks and how to solve problems).

Thanks for pointing that out - AMF is indeed one of the charities that our fund will support. GiveWell staff cost-effectiveness estimates vary widely[0], you can play around with their model, put in your own parameters and then see what figures you end up with.

To answer your second point, the state of evidence in the effective animal activism community is indeed poor. Our fund is likely to support programs which have a good track record or seem like promising bets. We don't want to be limited to projects which have rigorous data to support their activities, but we will encourage new projects to test their approaches, and collect data in order to prove their impact. The Animal Welfare Fund is managed by Lewis Bollard, Farm Animal Welfare Program Officer at the Open Philanthropy Project, Lewis has made grants in the past to organizations working on corporate cage-free campaigns, and clean meat initiatives. Some of these initiatives are inherently more speculative but have high expected value. You can read more about Lewis' grant history and his reasoning behind the grants on the Animal Welfare Fund page[1]. In terms of new research, Animal Charity Evaluators has created an Animal Advocacy Research Fund[2] which funds research into social and behavioural intervention cost-effectiveness. They've made a few small grants, and are looking to scale up this year. We're excited to see the animal welfare community become more evidence-based, though we also want to make sure we fund the activities that are most likely to help animals, given what we know right now.

[0] http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effect... [1] https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare [2] http://researchfund.animalcharityevaluators.org/

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

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.

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/

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.