EA - List of donation opportunities (focus: non-US longtermist policy work) by weeatquince

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: List of donation opportunities (focus: non-US longtermist policy work), published by weeatquince on September 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introduction In the past I have written on the EA Forum about where I am donating (2019, 2021). This year I have a dilemma. I have too many places I am excited to investigate and potentially donate too. I have a document where I have been listing opportunities I am excited by and thought why not share my list with others in the run up to the giving season. In my opinion there are a lot of EA projects lacking funding. I believe donors (especially medium-size non-US donors) who could evaluate and fund some of these would have an outsized impact, more impact than just giving to various EA Funds (in fact this post is a follow up of a red team post on the LTFF). Also I am also interested in feedback and criticism of my donation list as I plan to donate to at least some of the places listed below (to be decided). The primary focus is on longtermist/ EA policy work. By policy work I am considering organisations that directly influence current policy so it is better for the long run future (not just indirectly doing policy-adjacent academic research or supporting individuals policy careers, etc). I list a few ideas on other cause areas at the end. Note that not every org/person listed considers themselves to be EA affiliated. This list has about 25-30 funding ideas, ranging $15,000 to $4m, of which I estimate perhaps 66% are worth funding if investigated. I want to caveat this with some warnings: Expect inaccuracies: Not every org has had a chance to input. Also some details might be out of date – this list has been growing for a while now and some orgs may now have funding (or have run out of funding). Expect conflicts of interest: I have worked with and/or helped and/or am friends with the staff at and/or am an adviser/affiliate at a lot of the organisations I list. The only organisations listed that have paid me for work are the APPG for Future Generations and Charity Entrepreneurship. As a rule of thumb, assume I have some bias towards funding this kind of work. Background reasoning – why policy? Why fund policy work? Influencing policy is an effective way to drive change in the world. It is the key focus of advocacy groups and campaigns around the globe and seen as one of the most high impact ways to affect society for the better. This applies to existential risks. 80000 Hours research suggests there are two ways to protect the future from anthropogenic risks: technical work and governance/policy work (e.g. see here on AI). There are many things to advocate for that would protect the future. See here for a list of 250 longtermist policy ideas and see (mostly UK focused) collections of policy ideas on long-term institutions and biosecurity and ensuring AI regulation goes well and malevolent actors. Furthermore EA policy change work which is targeted and impact focused and carefully measured can be extremely effective. Analysis of 100s of historical policy change campaigns (look across various reports here) suggests a new EA charity spending around $1-1.5m, has a 10-50% chance driving a major policy change. And existing EA charities seem even more effective than that. The APPG for Future Generations seemed to consistently drive a policy change for every ~$50k. LEEP seems to have driven their first policy change for under ~$50k and seems on track to keep driving changes at that level. Why might policy work be underfunded? In short there is a lack of funders with the motivation and capability to fund this work. Some funders are avoiding funding policy work. The Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) does not fund any new policy work and is sceptical of policy work (see here). As far as I can tell OpenPhil’s longtermist teams appear to...