What's the overhead? What are the management fees?
Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#62What's the overhead? What are the management fees?
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_abou...
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#63What'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?
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#64What'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?
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-se...
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#65Why 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?
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 partic…
> 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.
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#66Why 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?
The Long-Term Future Fund is for ensuring the continued survival and flourishing of future generations. Climate change is one future risk, but there are many others — including ensuring that the risks posed by smarter-than-human artificial intelligence are understood and mitigated, but also e.g. mitigating pandemic risk from genetically engineered pathogens. As with all the Funds, choosing organisations to grant to w…
How would you tell when you are mitigating these far-future risks, instead of taking irrelevant actions or making them worse?
What makes you think that AI risk is a tractable problem, or even a well-defined one?
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#67Congrats!
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 - 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.
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the response and I'm sorry for the tone of my earlier comment. > 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. There is disagreement within the EA community on ethics. However, alm…
Just to add my $0.02, my impression is that while many EAs enjoy discussing the thorny philosophical issues like whether we should be concerned about insect-suffering, or wild-animal suffering, very few would advocate that we actually support habitat destruction or massive interventions in nature. Even groups like FRI, who are heavily focused on suffering, promote the idea of moral uncertainty. They believe that we s…
I'm not from the media and I am campaigning against "effective altruism" because it promotes eco-terrorism, habitat destruction, call it what you want. I am compelled to do this to protect public safety.
There's no point in denying that a large portion of self-identified EAs are for eco-terrorism, it's all over the internet. There is no gray area here, you are either with the terrorists (strong negative utilitarians) are against them.
Re: Launch HN: Effective Altruism Funds (YC W17 Nonprofit)
#69Hi 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" ?