Some observations:
- Most of GiveWell’s senior staff are moving over to the Open Philanthropy Project.
- This year, GiveWell had to set explicit funding targets for all of their charities and update their recommendations in April to make sure nobody ran out of room for more funding.
- My understanding is that Good Ventures (a) probably has more money than the current discounted cash flows from the rest of the EA movement combined and (b) still isn’t deploying nearly as much money as they eventually will be able to.
- Open Phil has recently posted about an org they wish existed but doesn’t and funder-initiated startups.
- I can’t remember any EA orgs failing to reach a fundraising target.
- Effective altruism is growing quickly; many EAers plan to earn to give but are currently students and will increase their giving substantially in the next few years.
These observations make me feel generally weird about earning to give: Good Ventures and other large foundations can fund a ton of stuff, and there are many individual EA donors who can fund the good ideas that aren't worth large funders engaging with for whatever reason (at least, many relative to the available opportunities). So it might be important to have more people trying to spot opportunities and start effective charities with support from large funders or current EtGers. For instance, the Gates Foundation has 1200 employees trying to help them deploy their money (and that’s presumably not counting the people who help them start new organizations); applying a similar ratio to Good Ventures would suggest they should have on the order of 100 people helping them, whereas today they have ~10.
Given that doing a normal job and making large donations is psychologically more attractive than trying to start nonprofits for a lot of people (including myself), this suggests that marginal EtGers (also potentially including myself?) might want to give more weight to trying to find opportunities to start new effective organizations, and leave the funding to people like Dustin Moskovitz.
One counterpoint might be that “large funders” are not actually that large; for instance, 72% of total giving is from individuals, but I don’t know if that ratio holds for global poverty or other causes EAs are interested in. And even if it does, it seems like you have to be a certain size of organization to raise grassroots funds effectively, and right now we don’t have enough orgs of that size.
I’d love to get other people’s thoughts on this.
Note that GiveWell / Good Ventures (unsurprisingly) like to research a charity or cause area themselves before they direct funding to it, and this is tightly constrained by the pace of GiveWell research staff growth, so in practice many high-leverage opportunities are still (in my opinion) available to marginal EtGers — at-least, if those EtGers are willing to be at least 1/5th as proactive about finding good opportunities as, say, Matt Wage is. Maybe that won't be true after 10 years of additional research conducted by GiveWell (incl. OpenPhil), but I think it'll be true for the foreseeable future.
There are probably additional reasons GiveWell / Good Ventures won't fund particular things, besides the fact that they haven't been researched in sufficient depth by GiveWell. E.g. GiveWell might think it's a good thing for there to be multiple meta-charities in the EA space that maintain independence, and so even if funding CEA projects is a clear win, they still might think it's a bad idea for GW/GV to direct any support to CEA projects.
And finally, it's also possible that individual EtGers might have different values or world-models than the public faces of GW/GV have, and for that reason those marginal EtGers could have good opportunities available to them that are not likely to be met by GW-directed funding anytime soon, if ever.
(I say all this as a random EA who thinks about these things, not as a soon-to-be GW staffer.)
That said, I also think people with the right collection of talents should seriously consider applying to do cause prioritization research at GW or elsewhere, and people with a different right collection of talents should consider starting new projects/organizations, especially when doing so in coordination with an already-interested funder like GV.
Yes, I think it's right that people can find opportunities beyond those that are researched by GW if they have different values, different epistemology, pro-actively investigate opportunities to fund, or even outsource this evaluation to Wage, EA Ventures, Beckstead or elsewhere.