Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Donations 2022-2024

editorial note: This post is incomplete, but I'm publishing it in its current form in the hopes that it'll be helpful to other people thinking about their end-of-year donation decisions.

While I, as ever, recommend that every serious donor use a donor advised fund to allow them to set donation amounts in tax year 2024 and decide recipient organizations in early 2025, I do recognize that a post published on December 31 is worse than one published this week. So we're going with this experiment with an unfinished draft.

This notice will be removed when I consider this post final.


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

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Donations 2021

This post describes my thoughts, at the end of 2021, about donating money to make the universe a better place. I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to do so.

This year is the first time since 2017 that I'm substantially changing my approach to donations. In 2017, I shifted my focus from mainly global poverty/health to a mix of global poverty, animal welfare, long-term future, and meta EA. This year, I'm shifting to a mix of global poverty, animal welfare, and explicitly 'exploratory' categories.

note: This post is dated in some ways, but—like all my donation posts—I intend to leave it as-published as a snapshot in time instead of promising to keep it up-to-date with later info.


(1a)

Perhaps the most important long-term development in effective altruism in 2020 and 2021 has been the crypto boom, which has moved at least $30 billion of wealth to committed effective altruists. (The most widely visible of these is Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX.) I would roughly estimate that the top ~ten self-identifying EAs now have plans to move at least $45 billion of donations to EA causes in the next ~30 years -- even in the case that all of their various business investments mostly stagnate at current valuations.

That's a lot of money.

Given this landscape, my goals as an EA donor this year were (1) to move my personal focus to finding and supporting things that I expect existing large donors to have difficulty finding, evaluating, or supporting, and (2) to use my giving to 'set up' for having a larger impact later, by exploring things that I can

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Donations 2020

Weird year, right? Still, some things don't change -- I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to make the universe better.

Here's how I'm thinking about doing that at the end of 2020.


(0)

Back in February 2019, I was randomly (yes, randomly) selected to direct $500k of funds from a donor lottery, and have spent a fair amount of time since then thinking about how to direct those funds most efficiently.

So far, I have recommended grants of $165k to the Good Food Institute in the spring, and just over $200k to a number of Covid-19 interventions in May and June. You can read about those grants here and here.

The work that I did to research and decide on those grants was most of the thinking about effective giving that I did this year; it's been written up elsewhere, and so this post will mostly not cover the same ground. (If you're just looking for new ideas from these posts, see "Relative opinions" from my donor lottery writeup and section 1 below.)


Summary of the rest of this post:

  • I provide a new reflection on why I expect to continue supporting a mix of 'solid' and 'speculative' causes for the forseeable future. (1)
  • I still recommend using a DAF. (I use Vanguard.) (2a)
  • I'm supporting the same organizations that I did last year, in comparable amounts. (2b, summary)
  • I made substantial one-off donations relating to the US November elections, which I will not say as much about as you probably want. (2b:politics)
  • As my budget for donations grows, I'm sending most of the year-over-year growth into entering another
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2018-19 Donor Lottery Report, pt. 2

This post is cross-posted to the EA Forum, where I expect comments will be much more visible than they are here.

This is the second in a series of reports on my decision-making process and decisions in allocating the $500k funding pool from the January 2019 CEA donor lottery. This writeup on my phase-2 grant recommendations is released simultaneously with my writeup of phase 1, which also provides a broader introduction to my personal background, philosophical foundation, and initial process.

While the decision-making process for phase 1 was largely completed prior to the widespread understanding of the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic, phase-2 grantmaking began in March 2020 and specifically focused on neglected responses to the pandemic. This writeup outlines what I can reconstruct of my process and opinions at the time, and discusses my thoughts on room for further funding.

As with the previous report, this writeup represents independent work and is not coauthored or endorsed by CEA, the organizations or individuals mentioned, or my employer. Grantee organizations and individuals were given one week to review a draft of relevant segments (except for COVID-END, who I neglected to contact before publication through my own mistake), though final editorial decisions were mine.

Overall summary

In phase 2, CEA accepted my recommendations to grant (in decreasing order of grant size):

  • $100k to Fast Grants, for rapid regranting to academic research projects related to Covid-19.
  • $80k to COVID-END, to reduce duplication in Covid-19-related research and accelerate evidence-based policy responses worldwide.
  • $15k to the Bottleneck Fund, for regranting to global interventions in water and sanitation to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
  • $6.4k to Ian David Moss, for consulting work supporting
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2018-19 Donor Lottery Report, pt. 1

This post is cross-posted to the EA Forum, where I expect comments will be much more visible than they are here.

The results of the January 2019 CEA donor lottery meant that I was responsible for allocating the donor lottery's $500k funding pool. I entered the donor lottery anonymously, though I now intend to explain my grants and decision-making process publicly; I believe that transparency and open sharing of ideas is a good thing for effective altruism, and I'm glad to be able to contribute to that here.

I expect that my grant recommendations from this funding pool will ultimately be made in three or four phases; this writeup is a preliminary report on phase 1, and is released simultaneously with my writeup on phase 2.

The decision-making process for phase 1 was largely completed prior to February 2020, and phase-1 grants were not substantially affected by consideration of the Covid-19 pandemic (see "Adjusting for unexpected developments", below). Phase-2 decision-making began after February 2020, and phase-2 grants focused on neglected responses to the Covid-19 pandemic (see phase-2 writeup post). As of December 2020, phase-3 decision-making has not yet begun in earnest.

Overall summary

In phase 1, CEA accepted my recommendations for two earmarked grants to the Good Food Institute:

  • $120k to GFI's European affiliate to support policy advocacy enabling the development and mainstream deployment of food products that replace farmed-animal products.
  • $45k to GFI's Asia--Pacific affiliate to support market research and policy advocacy, likewise to support deployment of alternative protein products in Asia.

This post has top-level sections on:

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Donations 2019

For the sixth year, I remain committed to using at least 10% of what income I earn to support the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts at the end of 2019.

These specific organizations I'm supporting are, in relative terms, mostly unchanged from 2018. The biggest changes are:

  • Marginally more saving / investing for later donation opportunities (including the potential for political contributions in 2020).
  • Because of the above, marginally less donor lottery.
  • The Good Food Institute replacing The Humane League.

(0)

Compared to years past, I spent relatively more time thinking about donations this year. This reflects a few things:

  • I'll be giving more as my income grows and my personal savings reach more comfortable levels, so I expect to get more value from making an X% better decision.
  • I felt that some of the available opportunities were more difficult to think about but still worth considering (such as political donations), and spent some time considering them.
  • I got excited about certain organizations I was considering and spent a bit more time learning about them, specifically.

I certainly don't think that this process has left me with more expertise than people who take this very seriously, and I expect that my heavy reliance on my local network has biased my outlook in ways I don't completely understand. I'm not claiming that my thoughts here are authoritative or finished in any sense; I'm mostly trying to support a culture of sharing and building on each others' opinions, however complete or incomplete they are.

The rest of this post covers logistics and personal tax

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Donations 2018

Well, it's been a crazy calendar year in any number of ways...and here at the end of it, I have a few commitments to uphold. I remain committed to donating at least 10% of my income to the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts at the end of 2018.


(0)

While I've recently been conducting some independent research into investment strategies for effective altruists (results forthcoming), I haven't been particularly active in producing my own independent opinions on the effectiveness or value of organizations. So, as in 2017, my perspective here is primarily a synthesis of a raft of conversations I've had with a (uncredited) gaggle of friends and friends-of-friends.

disclaimers: I've made no particular attempt to be discriminating or fair in these conversations. Some of the friends who have helped me form my opinions here are involved in some capacity in the areas or organizations I'll mention. Some have their own positions on advisory or evaluator boards, or publish their own opinions separately.

Rather than get into the weeds of these conflicts, I'll just advise you to keep your brain engaged throughout. Not all of my reasoning that shapes these opinions was appropriate for this post, and not all of it will be covered here. I've erred towards providing more unexplained information, rather than restricting myself to what I can explain fully here.

I cover logistics (1a), donor lotteries (1b), my general approach to non-lottery donations (1c), the specific charities I’m supporting this year (2a, summary), and further reading in the form of evaluators’ reports and personal writeups (3

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