[Analemma_]

The charities themselves rarely do that directly (unfortunately, as the OP said, the incentives are really messed-up so they would never do so), but GiveWell does it "by proxy" every year, so if you donate to GiveWell's "general fund" you can be sure that they're iterating and correcting for failures.

In terms of other feedback, I have to say I really like the clean separation of "ends" and how you can pick which one(s) you want. TBH, I've been getting increasingly annoyed at how the X-risk people are gradually taking over EA, but I don't want to just quit or blow up at them either (they mean well even if I think they're misguided). This looks like a way that everyone can be happy. Please don't let them needle you into adding that stuff into the Global Development or Animal Welfare funds.

[bradleyjg]

I agree with you about X-risk, but I'm not sure the separation is so clean. For example looking at the EA Community fund page it isn't at all clear to me whether or not some of the money will end up in the hands of the AI Safety people. To be fair this is openly disclosed as a risk, which is great transparency.

Second, donors may choose not to support the Movement Building Fund if they do not wish to indirectly support all of the problem areas that the EA community is likely to support. This includes areas like Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, Long-Term Future, and any future problem areas that the community deems effective to address. For example, Dylan Matthews criticized the EA community in 2015 for being overly self-promoting and overly concerned about risks from advanced artificial intelligence (one response to this criticism here). Those with strong views about which problem areas they do not wish to support might avoid movement building as a result.

However, admirable transparency or not, the only fund I'd really be interested in allocating money to would be the Global Health and Development Fund. Given that, for me personally, the paragraphs about differentiating vs GiveWell are critical.

[tmacaulay]

It's really great to hear this view. While lots of donors split their donation between our funds, many people choose to allocate 100% of their donation to a single fund. At a later date, we want to allow people to share their fund allocations, so donors can compare allocations and discuss differences in cause prioritization.

Right now, our Global Health and Development Fund has 61% of all donations by value, with the Long-Term future fund coming in at 22%. It will be exciting to see how this changes over time, and whether there are differences in fund allocation by geographic area or demographics.

[colophonemes]

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).