Related: this quote from the FAQ on their website

We encourage people to do both: support charities now AND support their futures. When you support charities directly, they will spend your money directly. The difference with Give For Good is that with us, your one-time donation results in a stable income for the charity year in, year out.

"They will spend your money directly" - seems like a strong statement, makes it sounds like charities usually do not invest any of the money they receive. Is that true? I don't know, just flagging this for further discussion.

Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.

Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?

Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform - potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?

Or alternatively, looking at the opposite: Have you got evidence that this will attract new donations to highly effective charities that wouldn't otherwise have happened - for example, by introducing these charities to people that have never heard about them before? (but even then, the same question applies - why your scheme instead of direct donations?)

Related: There is EA the actual movement, and EA the philosophy. I wonder how much we are losing out on by not having a clear line between the two. Maybe internally this distinction can be carefully navigated, but to an outsider it is one and the same. I wonder if that might be one of the things that could be improved about EA.

I imagine it feels challenging to share that and I applaud you for that.

While my EA experiences have been much more positive than yours, I do not doubt your account. For many of the points you mention, I can see milder versions in my own experience. I believe your post points towards something important.

Not if this just destroys momentum towards sustainable funding for AI safety and other longtermist causes.

Strongly disagree-voted because "I wish they had sat down" doesn't address the publicly stated reason why Binance pulled out. It makes it seem like they had no good reason, and a good conversation would have fixed the issues. Without knowing much, this seems implausible to me.

Also, I consider "I don't think he did anything in bad faith" to be somewhat irresponsible. If SBF actually did something wrong, then EAs going around and supporting him by saying "I don't think he did anything wrong" will hurt the optics of this further.

Curious why this is getting downvoted. It seems like another initiative in the Applied Rationality space, which sounds quite useful to me.

While I'm personally not interested in the bootcamp, I am curious if the people who downvoted have specific criticism or reservations about the program.

Location: Graz, Austria

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

Skills:

• Startup Founder & Software Developer with 12 years of experience
• Basic knowledge of most aspects of running a business
• Strong Technical Skills
  • Computer Graphics and Game Development
  • Web Scraping and Automation
  • Performance Optimization
  • Algorithmic Problems
  • General backend development
  • Microsoft .NET
  • Desktop Development
• Some experience in
  • Data Pipelines
  • Network Engineering
  • Computer Vision
  • Applied Math
  • Software Testing
  • UI Design & Usability
• Other non-technical
  • Workshop Facilitation (trained circling facilitator)
  • Filmmaking
  • Photography
• Previous Research I've done:
  • Why EAs are skeptical about AI Safety
  • Cost-Effectiveness of Air Purifiers against Pollution

Résumé/CV/LinkedIn: https://lukastr.me/about

Email: [email protected]

Available from and until: To be discussed

I frequently catch myself, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, being more likely to upvote posts of users that I know. I also find myself anchoring my vote to the existing vote count (if a post has a lot of upvotes then I am less likely to downvote it). Pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Furthermore, I observe how vote count influences my reading of each post more than it should. Groupthink at its best.

I suspect if the forum hid the vote count for a month, there would be significant changes in voting patterns. That being said, I'm not sure these changes would actually influence the votesorted order of the postings - but they might. I suspect it would also change the nature of certain discussions.