EA experimentation is fantastic, but it’s really difficult to set up an official nonprofit for each experiment. Therefore if we want to help fund experimentation, it’s good to do so at earlier stages than official nonprofit registration.
A few of us at .impact have started experimenting with Gratipay to put money the hands of EAs. Gratipay works by providing a system for some people to make weekly donations to individuals or projects. The founders of Gratipay are themselves paid for on Gratipay, so there they take no financial cut (they do charge around 3% for credit card fees). So far it does not support charity deductions, but it’s not meant for that. It’s meant to share money with people.
We’ve started an ‘Effective Altruist’ community of 30 people with profiles and donations. While there haven’t been many donors yet, there have been several people who posted profiles of what they are up to and they intend to continue doing. There are larger groups such as Charity Science , new ones like Effective Altruism Berkeley, and many individuals like Diego Caleiro, Tom Ash, and Justin Shovelain. A few professionals are there who don’t request funding, but still appreciate tokens of appreciation.
If you’re interested in helping funding some EA groups or people, it’s super easy to get started. If you have a project and want funding, it’s super easy to make a page. If you’re just curious what’s going on, there are many profiles to look through.
There are some limitations. Gratipay is not great for one-time payments, group ‘Kickstarter’ payments, or incentivized ‘unlock’ payments, registered charity payments, and I’m sure a long list of other things. That said, Gratipay is a really simple way for us to get started.
I'll soon edit my profile with my EA plan.
My living costs are much closer to 25k a year than to 50k actually. Additional donations, far from my current funding, would go into other things that can be found described in my Patreon account. I believe my Patreon account maps better into what you think people should be doing on Gratipay. I posted recently about shifting to Patreon while costs are low on the EA facebook group, and some people agreed that was a good idea.
Regardless, there is a much more important issue from my point of view: donating to individuals is much cheaper than to institutions, or universities, because individuals don't have many of the fixed costs and bureocratic costs those institutions bear. Even if it were the case that a donee wanted to receive 50k for their living expenses, this is still less than the overal cost of employing an individual in most of the EA organizations to which most people make donations. Young EAs cost their institutions (and thus their donors) up to 90k per year, which is enough money to sustain three EAs even if they live in the most expensive areas of the planet. The math is simple and clear. People however are wary of donating to individuals at the moment. I suspect over time this will be much more common among EAs, since many of the donees already have, or will build, a track record of doing good work and and being accountable and reliable in a timely manner. I'm trying to spearhead this shift in part because I'm one of those who currently can, since I still have some funding for the next months, and I've been sponsoring myself as an EA for years. Most people can't afford to participate in this Beta test, which is why I invite everyone who wants to work as an EA and can still sustain themselves for a few months to join Patreon or Gratipay and help incrase the flow of EA to EA direct money on the receiving end, not just the donation end.
First, I'm fully in support of this kind of model, and I hope that maybe someday I am funded by it. But I don't think your core thesis is correct, because:
1.) Some organizations don't have high costs. The only organization I have knowledge of, Charity Science, does not have such costs.
2.) When you're fu... (read more)