This post describes my thoughts, at the end of 2024, about using money to make the universe a better place. I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to do so, and am excited to do more than that when I have the opportunity.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of my first $4,000 donation to GiveWell's top charities! (That donation was 10% of my summer internship salary, plus some other campus jobs.)

A lot has changed since my last post in 2021, only some of which I'm able to recap here. (I have tried to publish these posts annually, but missed 2022 and 2023 for idiosyncratic reasons.) I'll break this post into (1) general discussion and personal outlook, [incomplete], and logistics, (2) donations by cause area for 2024, 2023, and 2022, and summary lists, (3) [incomplete: events of 2022 and 2023], and personal-policy updates, and (4) other people's writeups that I have found interesting.

(1a)

Shortly after my last donations post, I left a career in quantitative trading where I had been straightforwardly earning to give. I took up what I believed to be an opportunity to have much greater impact by helping to direct a substantial amount of funding more thoughtfully at a new effective-altruist grantmaker. Having walked on that side of the fence for a while, I now believe that the limiting factor to impact is less money than "executive agency", or the will to say "yes, we're doing this" or whatever else you'd like to call it.

The other interesting thing about leaving a career of five years is that within weeks of doing so, my thoughts about what it would be possible for me to do had broadened significantly. I now have so many ideas for things that I think will have (expected) impact greater than my earning to give.

So, while I expect to continue donating 10% of what I earn, and more when it feels good, I consider it likely that the largest part of my above-and-beyond contributions will come from choices about what I work on, rather than a greater percentage of donations above some earnings level.

(1b)

(1c)

I continue to recommend the use of a donor-advised fund (DAF) to anyone making more than two charitable (non-political) gifts a year, whether or not to EA causes. I don't have new recommendations on basic DAF providers; my existing provider (Vanguard Charitable) has given me no particular reason to switch away.

While I usually haven't kept substantial balances in my DAF, a few factors led to me unintentionally having nearly two years of donations backed up for much of 2024. At some point, I moved these to a DAF at Manifund (disclosure: I sit on Manifund's board of directors).

As a benefit of holding my DAF assets at Manifund, I was then able to advise Manifund to invest them in certain short-term private investment opportunities. These were successful and grew the balance by a meaningful fraction of one year's donation budget.

The private investments would not have been possible at Vanguard Charitable, so I was happy to work with Manifund on this and pay their general rates for transaction handling. (Their team is small and pre-scale and they aren't able to run the business as a loss-leader like Vanguard can.)

I understand that the Manifund team is very open to having conversations about other ways they can provide differentiated DAF services, as they search for unmet needs in the EA-financial-infrastructure space, so if you have weird needs I'd encourage you to reach out. I can introduce you if you have difficulty getting in touch on your own.

(2a)

The categories I discuss in this section are: global health and welfare (previously "global poverty"), biological risks, animal welfare, politics, community, and other.

I use qualitative sizes to describe my donations that match the terms I have used in 2019–2021. While I am more open to sharing explicit amounts than I had been until 2021, I still haven't made a final determination about my long-term strategy for disclosing donations. Since the information ratchet only goes one way, I'm holding off from explicit numbers for now.

I mention inline when I made donations to the same organizations in 2022 or 2023. As always, I associate donations with the year I committed to making them, rather than the year that I sent money or advised a grant from my DAF. An unusually high number of cases in these years were delayed for reasons I expect not to recur (which I mention here for transparency, as well as for any recipient organizations whose records don't match the writeups here).

(global health and welfare)

Medium donation to 1Day Sooner, ending infectious diseases by empowering movements in science, policy, and ethics. (2023: small)

Small donation to GiveWell (unrestricted funds), fighting global poverty and disease with evidence-backed interventions. (2023: medium; 2022: large)

I have donated to GiveWell every year since 2014, and I continue to believe that they do excellent work at finding the strongest evidence-backed interventions for improving global health and welfare. That said, I have come to believe that non-evidence-backed global health interventions -- chances to move the needle on unprecedented opportunities -- can have even greater expected impact.

There is no nonprofit organization that I am more excited to have working on these kinds of global health problems than 1Day Sooner, pound-for-pound and dollar-for-dollar. I've worked extensively with their indoor air quality research/policy team since 2022 and I particularly think that Gavriel Kleinwaks's work is great; I've followed more passively as their pharmaceutical-advocacy efforts have expanded from a focus on Human Challenge Trials to more opportunistic engagements across the global health landscape, and I am excited about those directions as well.

For a concrete example: their most recent direct work on global health and welfare was on policy work aiming to accelerate deployment of the R21 malaria vaccine. The vaccine has been estimated to have comparable QALY/$ to existing GiveWell interventions (1; 2; before the vaccine has had the chance to benefit from scale or learning effects) -- but rather than directly finding vaccine deployment, they focused on policy advocacy to convince other actors to move faster. In this context, as I understand it, "policy advocacy" might mean meeting with agency-level government officials, NGO staff, and similar stakeholders to understand where the true bottlenecks are, and seeing if they can be cleared by small, targeted pushes. This work, if done well, can multiply the impact of dollars spent on dollars moved.

For a longer-form (though less-cutrent) case for 1Day’s work, see their CEO’s 2021 post on the EA forum (and check the top comment, by Open Philanthropy global health and welfare program director Jacob Trefethen).

If I had to pick just one organization to support in global health, it would be 1Day. However, I'm tapering off my GiveWell donations over three years (2023-2025) as:

• I believe it's best practice to smooth changes to nonprofit funding where possible, and
• I continue to be reasonably happy with their work overall.

I think it's likely that my donations to GiveWell will actually stabilize at some nonzero level in the range I'm calling "small", but you'll have to tune in next year (and thereafter) to find out!

Note: More than any other organization I've donated to, I consider the folks at 1Day to be friends and it's of course possible that that colors my judgment.

(biological risks)

I believe that some of the most exciting marginal opportunities for preventing or mitigating biological risks (besides 1Day Sooner's incidental impacts in the cause area, which are nontrivial) are in accelerating commercially-viable anti-infective drugs (and drug platforms) to stock humanity's toolbox against future pandemics.

While there's a good deal of nonprofit work in the field of biosecurity that is clearly helpful, I honestly feel that accelerating the commercially-viable pharmaceuticals segment is particularly neglected and tractable. This is where the majority of my "EA labor" has gone in the past two years (as well as in my professional work the year before that).

In 2024 I was/am involved in raising funds for two startups developing antivirals (and in 2023 I made a personal investment in a third). While I don't consider my personal investments in these drug companies to be donations, the 2024 fundraises rise to the level of the other donations on this list if I value the time I spent on fundraising at my work-for-profit compensation rates.

If I were deploying dollars to nonprofits in the biorisk field, I would be considering:

• SecureBio, developing tech and policy to delay, detect, and defend against catastrophic pandemics.
• The JHU Center for Health Security, exploring policy, science, and tech can strengthen health security and save lives.

(animal welfare)

Small donation to the Good Food Institute (split between GFI Europe and GFI Asia–Pacific), supporting the science, technology, and public policy to replace industrial animal agriculture and all its harms. (2023: small; 2022: medium)

Since my push to familiarize myself with GFI's work on animal welfare in 2019, I've tried to keep abreast of their work but frankly I have less of an informed view than I used to. My donations have largely tapered off as a reflection of my overall donation budget; if I were giving a larger total amount I would want to spend more time deciding between giving a larger amount or tapering this off.

GFI's international operations continue to be my favorite donation opportunities in the animal welfare field, for reasons I've discussed in prior years.

(politics)

Medium donations (in total) to nondisclosed political opportunities. (2023: none; 2022: large)

I continue to not release the details of these donations (other than their annual size) by default.

(community)

Lightcone Infrastructure runs excellent events and a community space in Berkeley. I have attended something like half-a-dozen events of theirs in the past year and found them to be consistently excellent. The events and projects that they host and self-support tend to focus on supporting a Bay-Area community of people who care deeply about human flourishing now and in the future, and want to figure out the best way to have more of it.

I believe there is a strong case for considering a donation to Lightcone to be among the best opportunities in "close to home" effective-altruist community building. (I'll leave it to your judgment how that cause area segment compares to others.) In a world barely different from this one, I expect I would donate between $1,000 and $5,000 to their general fundraiser this year.

However, I've decided to make no donation instead, for the somewhat idiosyncratic reason that I'm organizing a personal event there next year and bringing them several times that in direct revenue. Given that, it seems odd to also be making a donation. Check back in for my thoughts in 2026.

(other)

EA Community Choice was a funding experiment by Manifund that airdropped a few hundred DAF dollars to each of several hundred people and then allocated additional funding to their donees according to a 'quadratic funding' mechanism.

I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on research on allocating my $600 (given the relatively small dollars involved), and most established orgs that I was familiar with were not participating, but for the record, I allocated my funds to:

• Qally’s Consulting, "Estimating annual burden of airborne disease": $200 [TK]
• Cambridge Infectious Diseases, "Preventing Worst-Case Pandemics" symposium: $100
• Elizabeth van Nostrand, retroactive funding forCovid-19 research: $100
• Lightcone Infrastructure: $100
• Sentinel: $100

(2022/2023 only)

(This section includes only donations that I did not repeat in 2024. See the sections above for the 2022 and/or 2023 components of organizations I did donate to this year.)

Large donations committed in each of 2023 and 2022 to [recipient witheld] contingent on [details witheld], logistics pending.

Small donation in 2022 to the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.

(2b)

In summary, for 2024:

• Medium donation to 1Day Sooner, ending infectious diseases by empowering movements in science, policy, and ethics.
• Medium donations (in total) to nondisclosed political opportunities.
• Small donation to GiveWell (unrestricted funds), fighting global poverty and disease with evidence-backed interventions.
• Small donation to the Good Food Institute (split between GFI Europe and GFI Asia–Pacific), supporting the science, technology, and public policy to replace industrial animal agriculture and all its harms.
• No direct donations (but a good deal of professional work) for biological risks; if I did then I would be considering SecureBio and the JHU Center for Health Security
• No donation to EA community-building (though if I did it would be to Lightcone Infrastructure)

For 2023, it was:

• Large donation to [recipient witheld] contingent on [details witheld], logistics pending.
• Medium donation to GiveWell (unrestricted funds), fighting global poverty and disease with evidence-backed interventions.
• Small donation to 1Day Sooner, ending infectious diseases by empowering movements in science, policy, and ethics.
• Small donation to the Good Food Institute (split between GFI Europe and GFI Asia–Pacific), supporting the science, technology, and public policy to replace industrial animal agriculture and all its harms.
• No donations to political opportunities.

and for 2022:

• Large donation to GiveWell (unrestricted funds), fighting global poverty and disease with evidence-backed interventions.
• Large donations (in total) to nondisclosed political opportunities.
• Large donation to [recipient witheld] contingent on [details witheld], logistics pending.
• Medium donation to the Good Food Institute, (split between GFI Europe and GFI Asia–Pacific), supporting the science, technology, and public policy to replace industrial animal agriculture and all its harms.
• Small donation to the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.

(3a)

(3b)

In 2023 and 2024 a great deal of my professional focus has been on private investments -- finding them, evaluating them, and fundraising for them. This has required me to rethink a bit what exactly "what I earn" means in the context of my 10% pledge. What portion of a given investment's profits is "earned" versus a simple return on (post-pledge) capital?

Here are a few personal policies I am trying on in 2024 and 2025 to get more information about whether they seem to work well (with both the practicalities of the world and the 10% donation pledge I took in 2016). I'm not considering them commitments so much as current practices.

(1: private investment returns) I've written more extensively in [incomplete: unpublished draft], but the short version is that I intend to make private investments and reinvestments using pre-pledge dollars and by default earmark 10% of the shares as pledged and 90% as post-pledge. This gives me the ability to liquidate portions of an investment for personal return/consumption at different times than I liquidate the portion for charity, while allocating a fair 10% of the available excess returns to charitable ends.

In my internal accounting, I credit myself for 10% of the value of the investment at the time of investment (pre-pledge dollars turning into donated assets plus post-pledge assets), and do not consider the returns on the corresponding 10% of the stake as a further donation (nor the profits on the 90% as additional income for the purposes of my 10% pledge).

(2: investment returns 100% within a DAF) When I make a private investment that is the result of effort and/or skill within a DAF or other post-donation vehicle (as I did within my Manifund DAF this year), I credit the realized profits as a donation of labor comparable to dollars for pledge purposes. (This puts it on equal footing with "make private investments with undonated funds, then donate all the proceeds", as 100% of the proceeds will have to stay in the DAF.) For fairness, I also intend to count any realized losses as a "negative donation" offsetting positive DAF contributions in my internal accounting of my 10% pledge obligations.

(3: stock/options compensation) When I receive stock or stock options as compensation for work, I earmark 10% of them as pledged and the remainder as post-pledge, regardless of when I choose to liquidate each portion. In my internal accounting, I credit myself for 10% of the taxable value at the time of vesting, (though this will often be zero for stock options with strike set to fair market value).

(4)

Writeups from other sources that I found it interesting to read this season:

• GiveWell: Staff Members’ Personal Donations for 2024
• Open Philanthropy: Suggestions for Individual Donors from Open Philanthropy Staff – 2024
• Survival and Flourishing Fund: Recommendations for Further Funding Opportunities Based on the SFF-2024 S-Process Round
• Zvi Mowshowitz: The Big Nonprofits Post
• Zvi Mowshowitz: Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund 2024 Round
• many individual comments on Lightcone Infrastructure by users of LessWrong