EA - Some data on the stock of EAâ„¢ funding by NunoSempere

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: Some data on the stock of EA™ funding, published by NunoSempere on November 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Overall Open Philanthropy fundingOpen Philanthropy’s allocation of funding through time looks as follows:Dustin Moskovitz’s wealth looks, per Bloomberg, like this:If we plot the two together, we don’t see that much of a correlation:Holden Karnofsky, head of Open Philanthropy, writes that the Blomberg estimates might not be all that accurate:Our available capital has fallen over the last year for these reasons. That said, as of now, public reports of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna’s net worth give a substantially understated picture of our available resources. That’s because, among other issues, they don’t include resources that are already in foundations. (I also note that META stock is not as large a part of their portfolio as some seem to assume)In mid 2022, Forbes put Sam Bankman-Fried’s wealth at $24B. So in some sense, the amount of money allocated to or according to Effective Altruism™ peaked somewhere close to $50B.Funding flow restricted to longtermism & global catatrophic risks (GCRs)The analysis becomes a bit more interesting if we look only at longtermism and GCRs:In contrast, per Forbes,[^1] the FTX Foundation had given out $160M by September 2022. My sense is that most (say, maybe 50% to 80%) of those grants went to “longtermist” cause areas, broadly defined. In addition, SBF and other FTX employees led a $580M funding round for AnthropicFurther analysisIt’s unclear what would have to happen for Open Philanthropy to pick up the slack here. In practical terms, I’m not sure whether their team has enough evaluation capacity for an additional $100M/year, or whether they will choose to expand that.Two somewhat informative posts from Open Philanthropy on this are here and hereI’d be curious about both interpretative analysis and forecasting on these numbers. I am up for supporting the later by e.g., committing to rerunning this analysis in a year.Appendix: CodeThe code to produce these plots can be found here; lines 42 to 48 make the division into categories fairly apparent. To execute this code you will need a working R installation and a document named grants.csv, which can be downloaded from Open Philanthropy’s website.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.