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I met Max Chiswick in June of 2024 because I wrote something wrong on the internet. He tracked me down at Manifest to tell me so—I had written about the shortcomings of poker as a teaching tool, but I had made several wrong assumptions about how one would play poker differently with the goal of learning instead of recreation.

First, you'd play with two players instead of eight. We nearly always play with eight-ish players because we want a relaxing game, where large gaps in the action are considered a feature. With two players, though, not only is it your turn four times as often, but more of your decisions are "live" because it's correct to play more (initial) hands and there are fewer that you should fold on sight.

Second, you'd play a game with fewer chips—meaning that you'd make bets in coarser increments and with a smaller ratio of largest-possible bet to smallest-possible bet. This makes the decision tree shallower and more amenable to explicit case-by-case reasoning, and it also has the nice effect of making the highest-stakes decisions less terrifying (while keeping the stakes of bread-and-butter decisions suitably meaningful).

But most importantly, if you're playing poker as an exercise for training your mind, you should focus less on becoming a theoretically-optimal robot. You can read books and blogs about "game theory optimal" play (e.g., Nash equilibrium) and drill yourself to get arbitrarily accurate at executing it, but that's simply not the useful part.

The part of poker that makes you smarter—Max explained to me—is observing the non-optimal patterns in your opponents' play, and

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

This January, I left my job as a trader at Jane Street (most recently in Hong Kong) to take a role leading a project at the FTX Foundation. I have positive things to say about Jane Street as an excellent place for many of my friends to work, and my open offer of thoughts and advice to anyone hoping to work there remains, well, open.

Looking forward, I'm thrilled to be working with the Foundation because I want to help build a better future. I've been interested in thoughtful, rigorous, altruistic attempts to improve the world since 2013, and pledged in 2016 to donate at least a tenth of my income to the most effective organizations I can find. I am beyond excited to find an opportunity where I estimate I'll do even more good than I could by earning and donating a quant trader's salary (which I still think was really, really good for the world, on any objective scale).

It's still early days here, and we don't yet know all that the things the Foundation's work will cover. To start, colleagues of mine just launched the Future Fund, a grantmaking initiative with the goal of improving the lives of future generations in highly levered ways. The launch blog post, Areas of Interest, and Project Ideas pages give a taste of where the Future Fund has set their sights, and I'm extremely excited about the possible ways their work can go from here.

For my own work, I'm not working on grantmaking or the Future Fund directly. Rather, I'm currently heads-down on an in-house skunkworks moonshot to make the world safer against catastrophic pandemics. (More on that later.

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.

(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

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.

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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

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

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:

• my personal and philosophical background,
• my current high-level thoughts on different EA cause areas,
• some considerations for medium-size