Effective Altruism Funds: Long-Term Future Fund donations made (filtered to cause areas matching Cause prioritization)

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United Kingdom
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)Centre for Effective Altruism
Websitehttps://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future
Donations URLhttps://app.effectivealtruism.org/
Regularity with which donor updates donations datairregular
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)irregular
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)

Brief history: This is one of four Effective Altruism Funds that are a program of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). The creation of the funds was inspired by the success of the EA Giving Group donor-advised fund run by Nick Beckstead, and also by the donor lottery run in December 2016 by Paul Christiano and Carl Shulman (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvPEitTCM8ueYPeeH/donor-lotteries-demonstration-and-faq (GW, IR) for more). EA Funds were introduced on 2017-02-09 in the post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/a8eng4PbME85vdoep/introducing-the-ea-funds (GW, IR) and launched in the post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iYoSAXhodpxJFwdQz/ea-funds-beta-launch (GW, IR) on 2017-02-28. The first round of allocations was announced at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MsaS8JKrR8nnxyPkK/update-on-effective-altruism-funds (GW, IR) on 2017-04-20. The funds allocation information appears to have next been updated in November 2017; see https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/1606722932717391/ for more. This particular fund was previously called the Far Future Fund; it was renamed to the Long-Term Future Fund to more accurately reflect the meaning.

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: As the name suggests, the Fund's focus area is activities that could significantly affect the long term future. Historically, the fund has focused on areas such as AI safety and epistemic institutions, though it has also made grants related to biosecurity and other global catastrophic risks. At inception, the Fund had Nick Beckstead of Open Philanthropy its sole manager. Beckstead stepped down in August 2018, and October 2018, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yYHKRgLk9ufjJZn23/announcing-new-ea-funds-management-teams (GW, IR) announces a new management team for the Fund, comprising chair Matt Fallshaw, and team Helen Toner, Oliver Habryka, Matt Wage, and Alex Zhu, with advisors Nick Beckstead and Jonas Vollmer.

Notes on grant decision logistics: Money from the fund is supposed to be granted about thrice a year, with the target months being November, February, and June. Actual grant months may differ from the target months. The amount of money granted with each decision cycle depends on the amount of money available in the Fund as well as on the available donation opportunities. Grant applications can be submitted any time; any submitted applications will be considered prior to the next grant round (each grant round has a deadline by which applications must be submitted to be considered).

Notes on grant publication logistics: Grant details are published on the EA Funds website, and linked to from the Fund page. Each grant is accompanied by a brief description of the grantee's work (and hence, the intended use of funds) as well as reasons the grantee was considered impressive. In April 2019, the write-up for each grant at https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future/payouts/6vDsjtUyDdvBa3sNeoNVvl had just one author (rather than group authorship), likely the management team member who did the most work on that particular grant. Grant write-ups vary greatly in length; in April 2019, the write-ups by Oliver Habryka were the most thorough.

Notes on grant financing: Money in the Long-Term Future Fund only includes funds explicitly donated for that Fund. In each grant round, the amount of money that can be allocated is limited by the balance available in the fund at that time.

This entity is also a donee.

Donor donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537
Cause prioritization 1 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537 162,537

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Number of donees Total 2018
Cause prioritization (filter this donor) 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00
Total 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Donation amounts by subcause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given subcause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

For the meaning of “classified” and “unclassified”, see the page clarifying this.

Subcause area Number of donations Number of donees Total 2018
Cause prioritization 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00
Classified total 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00
Unclassified total 0 0 0.00 0.00
Total 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Donation amounts by donee and year

Donee Cause area Metadata Total 2018
Centre for Effective Altruism (filter this donor) Effective altruism/movement growth FB Site 162,537.00 162,537.00
Total -- -- 162,537.00 162,537.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Donation amounts by influencer and year

If you hover over a cell for a given influencer and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

For the meaning of “classified” and “unclassified”, see the page clarifying this.

Influencer Number of donations Number of donees Total 2018
Nick Beckstead 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00
Classified total 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00
Unclassified total 0 0 0.00 0.00
Total 1 1 162,537.00 162,537.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Donation amounts by disclosures and year

Sorry, we couldn't find any disclosures information.

Donation amounts by country and year

Sorry, we couldn't find any country information.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this donor.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of top 10 donees (for donations with known year of donation) by amount, showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
DoneeAmount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
Centre for Effective Altruism162,537.0012018-08-14Cause prioritizationhttps://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/payouts/july-2018-long-term-future-fund-grantsNick Beckstead Donation process: The grant from the EA Long-Term Future Fund is part of a final set of grant decisions being made by Nick Beckstead (granting $526,000 from the EA Meta Fund and $917,000 from the EA Long-Term Future Fund) as he transitions out of managing both funds. Due to time constraints, Beckstead primarily relies on investigation of the organization done by the Open Philanthropy Project when making its 2018 grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/centre-effective-altruism-general-support-2018

Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Beckstead writes "CEA will use the LTF funding to support a new project whose objective is to expand global priorities research in academia, especially related to issues around longtermism."

Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page references https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/centre-effective-altruism-general-support-2018 for Beckstead's opinion of the donee. This grant page is short, and in turn links to https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/centre-effective-altruism-general-support for a more in-depth review of CEA

Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): Beckstead is also recommending funding from the EA Meta Fund of $56,061 for CEA, which is for organizational general support (whereas the LTF grant is to support a new project on longtermism). Beckstead writes: "The amounts I’m granting out to different organizations are roughly proportional to the number of staff they have, with some skew towards MIRI that reflects greater EA Funds donor interest in the Long-term Future Fund."
Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 17.72%

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by the timing of this round of grants, which is in turn determined by the need for Beckstead to grant out the money before handing over management of the fund

Donor retrospective of the donation: After transition to the new management team, the EA Long-Term Future Fund would make no further grants to CEA. This suggests that the selection of the grantee as a Long-Term Future Fund grantee would not continue to be endorsed by the new management team

Similarity to other donors

Sorry, we couldn't find any similar donors.