Where I Donated In 2024

All Grants Fund, Rethink, EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund

In 2024, I split my donations¹ between one charity and two funds: Rethink Priorities; the GiveWell All Grants Fund (but you should give to GiveWell unrestricted instead); and the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund.

The most important fact, for an independent effective altruist donor, is “what is Open Philanthropy doing?” If you don’t count GiveWell, Open Philanthropy provides about 90% of the funding for effective altruist charities; even if you count GiveWell, Open Philanthropy makes up 75% of effective altruist funding.

To me, the most important things that Open Philanthropy is doing are:

1. Substantially reducing funding to GiveWell-recommended charities.

   1. This is not because GiveWell’s charities are worse, but because Open Philanthropy has less money and is reallocating money to interventions that target global catastrophic risks.

2. Withdrawing funding from “weird” effective altruist causes, including work intended to help shrimps, insects, wild animals, and digital minds (as well as Republican think tanks, the rationality community, and high school outreach about AI).

These facts shaped my donations.

GiveWell Unrestricted Funding

I chose to donate to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund because of Open Philanthropy Behavior #1. I was also concerned that GiveWell’s top charities face large non-Open-Philanthropy-related funding gaps. For example, GAVI failed to raise as much money as it expected this year, so the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) faces a $250 million funding gap to cover bednet distributions that GAVI had planned to cover.

GiveWell is the single most credible source on how to donate to alleviate global poverty. If you doubt me, I don’t think there’s a substitute for reading their research yourself.

I think most people should donate to GiveWell unrestricted funds. This funding goes first to operational costs (i.e. paying the staff and keeping the lights on at the offices). If they have money left over, it goes to the All Grants Fund, of which more later. I am a huge fan of GiveWell’s staff having paychecks and lights, so I think GiveWell unrestricted is the way to go.

If you choose to give to GiveWell’s recommended charities, you have three options: the All Grants Fund, the Top Charities Fund, and individual charities. The All Grants Fund directs money to any charity which passes GiveWell’s funding bar, while the Top Charities Fund exclusively give to GiveWell’s recommended charities. The All Grants Fund can make one-off grants to a specific high-value program; give exploratory grants to charities GiveWell is considering for top charity status; and give to charities with a more uncertain evidence base than top charities. If you basically trust GiveWell, you should give to the All Grants Fund; if you don’t, you should give to the Top Charities Fund, where you can check their reasoning independently.

Most people should donate to the Top Charities Fund, because GiveWell is tracking things like “the Against Malaria Foundation has $250 million in room for more funding” and you probably aren’t. However, some people have values different from the values of GiveWell’s typical staffer. In particular, people who care a lot about respecting recipients’ autonomy should give to GiveDirectly. Pro-life people should give to the Against Malaria Foundation, because malaria causes miscarriages; if you care about fetuses, AMF is substantially more cost-effective than other charities.²

Sharp-eyed individuals may observe that I said I gave to the All Grants Fund, even though here I’m recommending giving to GiveWell unrestricted. I kept saying “give to the All Grants Fund” when I was talking about it with my husband, so he got confused and gave to the wrong thing. Don’t be me. Use precise language when talking to your husband about charity donations.

EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund

I also chose to give to the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund. As I said above, Open Philanthropy is withdrawing money from “weird” animal advocacy causes, such as shrimps, insects, and wild animals. The Animal Welfare Fund has expressed the intention to scale up its funding in these areas as a response to Open Philanthropy’s decision-making.

In general, I have found myself impressed by the Animal Welfare Fund’s decision-making. They have historically made the most grants to welfare campaigns and policy advocacy, which I consider to be the most promising ways to improve animals’ lives. They generally seem to have avoided the ineffective interventions which are popular among animal advocates (convincing people to be vegan) and effective altruists (cultivated meat development). Their global movement-building work is strategic, focusing on priority areas like Southeast Asia instead of throwing random grants at every country that doesn’t have a native animal advocacy movement.

Why a fund and not directly donating to Wild Animal Initiative or the Shrimp Welfare Project? Animal advocates face a hard tradeoff between the unambiguously effective welfare campaigns for farmed birds and more speculative areas like wild animals and shrimps. Like my argument for donating to the Top Charities Fund, I expect the Animal Welfare Fund to be better than I am at knowing which charities are most in need of money at any given time. I also expect the Animal Welfare Fund to know about opportunities that I wouldn’t learn about (because a nonprofit isn’t fundraising publicly, etc.).

Rethink Priorities

In general, the cause area that I think is most important is global priorities research: the study of which problems are most important and what the best strategies are for tackling them. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year on making the world better; even under generous assumptions,³ only a few tens of millions are spent on figuring out how.

However, I’m also a grumpy empiricist. The vast majority of global priorities research strikes me as ivory-tower philosophy, nearly completely disconnected from the concerns of the charity evaluator on the street. Global priorities research, in general, needs to touch grass.

Except for Rethink Priorities. Rethink Priorities’s research consistently impresses me with its depth, rigor, and commitment to empiricism. Other global priorities research comes up with contrived thought experiments about the nature of consciousness; Rethink Priorities digs deep into comparative neuroscience to ask whether octopuses have nine minds. I read a good fraction of its output (probably 10%-25%) and usually find myself convinced.

While I think the Worldview Investigations Team (which does philosophical work) is particularly valuable, I also appreciate Rethink Priorities’s work in global health and development and (especially) animal advocacy. I think having global priorities research housed in the same organization as more practical work probably improves the researchers’ epistemics and culture.

I’m particularly excited by the Worldview Investigations Team’s new project on digital minds. In 2024, I started to become concerned about whether large language models are moral patients (I plan to write more about this subject in 2025). I am looking forward to the Worldview Investigations Team providing its characteristic clarity to this thorny area.

Honorable Mentions: Existential Risk

My household decided against donating to existential risk causes this year. We were concerned that Open Philanthropy had already plucked most of the low-hanging fruit in the space. And one of my household members believes in the person-affecting view of population ethics, so anti-existential-risk work is usually a hard sell for us.

Nevertheless, we considered the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund, both of which I think are excellent donation targets. In general, I support the Emerging Challenges Fund’s approach to existential risk. It makes grants regarding artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and biological risks. The Emerging Challenges Fund tries to make low-risk, easily explicable grants, which I think is a promising approach to the notoriously confusing and speculative field of existential risk prevention. The Emerging Challenges Fund prioritizes small donors’ comparative advantages, such as interventions that benefit from being funded by a large number of small donors; that explains why Open Philanthropy hasn’t already snapped up the grant opportunities Emerging Challenges Fund is targeting. The Emerging Challenges Fund also primarily makes grants outside of effective altruist charities, which I like; existential risk prevention shouldn’t be tied to a single social movement.

The Long-Term Future Fund has said that one of its purposes is to provide a source of funding for AI safety research that is independent from large corporations. (Open Philanthropy typically takes a more conciliatory approach to large corporations.) I am very concerned about AI companies cutting corners on safety and shutting down common-sense regulation in order to make more money.⁴ I think the Long-Term Future Fund is an excellent donation option for people who are worried about AI and share my suspicion about the high-mindedness and altruism of billionaires.

1. Donation splitting is controversial among effective altruists: many people argue that, if you know what the best charity is, you exclusively should give to that one. I split my donations partially because of the coordination concerns Eric Neyman brings up here and partially because I have to compromise with the other two members of my household.

2. I intend to publish a post soon with a full cost-benefit analysis.

3. But excluding intervention evaluations like “does this water chlorination project prevent diarrhea?”

4. I’ve written a book review here talking about the perils of corporate science.