I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I've interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
I’d be very surprised if you can’t get a job that pays much more than the sub teacher role- the gap between that and ~any EA org job is massive and inability to get the latter is only very weak evidence of inability to earn more.
Sorry if I missed this but this does depend a lot on location/willingness to move. The above assumes If you’re in the US and willing to move cities.
Also, living frugally to donate more is of course very virtuous if you take your salary to be a given, but from an altruistic perspective, insofar as they trade off, it’s probably much better to spend effort on finding a way to earn more.
This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine but this could look like “found a startup with a 5% chance of earning $10M” in addition to or instead of searching for higher salaried roles
Random sorta gimmicky AI safety community building idea: tabling at universities but with a couple laptop signed into Claude Pro with different accounts. Encourage students (and profs) to try giving it some hard question from eg a problem set and see how it performs. Ideally have a big monitor for onlookers to easily see.
Most college students are probably still using ChatGPT-3.5, if they use LLMs at all. There’s a big delta now between that and the frontier.
I made a custom GPT that is just normal, fully functional ChatGPT-4, but I will donate any revenue this generates[1] to effective charities.
Presenting: Donation Printer
OpenAI is rolling out monetization for custom GPTs:
Builders can earn based on GPT usage
In Q1 we will launch a GPT builder revenue program. As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. We'll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer.
Yeah but my (implicit, should have made explicit lol) question is “why this is the case?”
Like at a high level it’s not obvious that animal welfare as a cause/field should make less use of smaller projects than the others. I can imagine structural explanations (eg older field -> organizations are better developed) but they’d all be post hoc.
Interesting that the Animal Welfare Fund gives out so few small grants relative to the Infrastructure and Long Term Future funds (Global Health and Development has only given out 20 grants, all very large, so seems to be a more fundamentally different type of thing(?)). Data here.
A few stats:
Proportions under $threshold
fund | prop_under_1k | prop_under_2500 | prop_under_5k | prop_under_10k |
---|---|---|---|---|
Animal Welfare Fund | 0.000 | 0.004 | 0.012 | 0.036 |
EA Infrastructure Fund | 0.020 | 0.086 | 0.194 | 0.359 |
Global Health and Development Fund | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Long-Term Future Fund | 0.007 | 0.068 | 0.163 | 0.308 |
Grants under $threshold
fund | n | under_2500 | under_5k | under_10k | under_25k | under_50k |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Animal Welfare Fund | 250 | 1 | 3 | 9 | 243 | 248 |
EA Infrastructure Fund | 454 | 39 | 88 | 163 | 440 | 453 |
Global Health and Development Fund | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 7 |
Long-Term Future Fund | 429 | 29 | 70 | 132 | 419 | 429 |
Summary stats (rounded)
fund | n | median | mean | q1 | q3 | total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Animal Welfare Fund | 250 | $50,000 | $62,188 | $24,250 | $76,000 | $15,546,957 |
EA Infrastructure Fund | 454 | $15,319 | $41,331 | $5,802 | $45,000 | $18,764,097 |
Global Health and Development Fund | 20 | $900,000 | $1,257,005 | $297,925 | $1,481,630 | $25,140,099 |
Long-Term Future Fund | 429 | $23,544 | $44,624 | $7,700 | $52,000 | $19,143,527 |
Automated interface between Twitter and the Forum (eg a bot that, when tagged on twitter, posts the text and image of a tweet on Quick Takes and vice versa)