Government decision-making underpins almost half the developed world's spending, and is often involved in the areas effective altruists care about the most. So learning how effective altruists should work with policy seems incredibly important.
That's what we're trying to achieve at the Global Priorities Project. One of our donors has decided to match all donations we get up to the amount we need to cover this year's budget until January 31st. We still need to raise another £21,000 over the next two weeks to fully fund our £217,000 budget for 2016. Your support could help us build on our tangible results so far including:
- The Department for International Development reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work. We had recommended this to policy-makers based on our primary and secondary research, and were one of several who made similar recommendations,
- Building existential risk policy and strategy recommendations that we shared at the State of AI Safety 2015 and receiving a grant from the Future of Life Institute to extend this work, and one from the Finnish government to lay the foundations for an international coalition on existential risk coordination,
- The UK government changing the way they evaluate risks in the National Risk Assessment framework partly in response to our advice on accounting for type of risk and distinguishing preparation from assessment.
If you've been on the fence about supporting us, or meant to give some day but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time!
If you want to donate - you can support us through the CEA website.
Visit our website here for more details including our detailed review of progress, work update, strategy overview, financial overview, and team and capabilities assessment.
If you have more questions, you can either ask them below or contact me here.
This is not especially egregious in a fundraising post, and I understand that in these you have to adopt the persona of a marketer and can't add too many qualifications and doubts. So I don't think it's necessarily bad that you said this. But, as an intellectual matter, I don't think it's quite fair to count "[DFID] reallocating £2.5bn to fund research into treating and responding to the diseases that cause the most suffering rather than direct work" as one of your "tangible results so far". This was discussed plenty on the Facebook group, and as several people pointed out there was no clear evidence that you rather than the very many other groups that commented on DFID's proposals were responsible for this particular spending decision.
Yes this is absolutely not a thing that just GPP did - which is why I tried to call out in this post that several other groups were important to recommending it! (And also something I emphasised in the facebook post you link to.)
I don't know how many groups fed into the overall process and I'm sure there were big parts of the process I have no knowledge about. I know of two other quite significant entities that have publicly made very similar recommendations (Angus Deaton and the Centre for Global Development) as well as about half a dozen other entities t... (read more)