Ajeya Cotra donations made to GiveWell

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 States
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)Open Philanthropy
Facebook username https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1638572396
LinkedIn username ajeya-cotra-90942b8b
Websitehttps://ajeyac.wordpress.com
Donations URLno single location; https://eahub.org/user/ajeya-cotra, https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/09/staff-members-personal-donations-giving-season-2016/, http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14d/donor_lotteries_a_stepbystep_guide_for_mall/
Effective Altruism Hub usernameajeya-cotra
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?person=Ajeya+Cotra

Full donor page for donor Ajeya Cotra

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country United States
Facebook page GiveWell.org
Websitehttps://www.givewell.org
Donate pagehttps://secure.givewell.org/support-givewell
Transparency and financials pagehttps://www.givewell.org/about/official-records
Donation case pagehttps://blog.givewell.org/2015/12/25/december-2015-update-on-givewells-funding-needs/
Twitter usernamegivewell
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell
Timelines wiki pagehttps://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_GiveWell
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=GiveWell
Key peopleHolden Karnofsky|Elie Hassenfeld
Launch date2007

This entity has also influenced donations by others.

Full donee page for donee GiveWell

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Charity evaluator 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

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 Total
Charity evaluator (filter this donor) 1 0.00
Total 1 0.00

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

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (3 documents)

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Staff Members’ Personal Donations for Giving Season 20172017-12-18Holden Karnofsky Open PhilanthropyHolden Karnofsky Alexander Berger Nick Beckstead Helen Toner Claire Zabel Lewis Bollard Ajeya Cotra Morgan Davis Michael Levine GiveWell top charities GiveWell GiveDirectly EA Giving Group Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative Effective Altruism Funds Sentience Institute Encompass The Humane League The Good Food Institute Mercy For Animals Compassion in World Farming USA Animal Equality Donor lottery Against Malaria Foundation GiveDirectly Periodic donation list documentationOpen Philanthropy Project staff members describe where they are donating this year, and the considerations that went into the donation decision. By policy, amounts are not disclosed. This is the first standalone blog post of this sort by the Open Philanthropy Project; in previous years, the corresponding donations were documented in the GiveWell staff members donation post.
AMF and Population Ethics2016-12-12Ajeya Cotra GiveWell Against Malaria Foundation GiveWell Reasoning supplementGlobal health/malariaAjeya Cotra of GiveWell responds to a blog post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4WWXNKWHXQNFk3afc/are-you-sure-you-want-to-donate-to-the-against-malaria (GW, IR) by Michael Plant arguing that, under various possible population ethics stances, the Against Malaria Foundation is not the best use of donations. Cotra's post first summarizes Plant's argument, then explains why in GiveWell's views, its recommendation of AMF is compatible with most population ethics stances
Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 20162016-12-09Natalie Crispin GiveWellElie Hassenfeld Holden Karnofsky Natalie Crispin Alexander Berger Timothy Telleen-Lawton Josh Rosenberg Rebecca Raible Helen Toner Sophie Monahan Laura Muñoz Catherine Hollander Andrew Martin Lewis Bollard Chelsea Tabart Sarah Ward Chris Somerville Ajeya Cotra Chris Smith Isabel Arjmand A political campaign GiveWell top charities International Genetically Engineered Machine Foundation UPMC Center for Health Security Donor lottery EA Giving Group GiveDirectly Center for Applied Rationality Malaria Consortium Animal Charity Evaluators Northwest Health Law Advocates StrongMinds Against Malaria Foundation Schistosomiasis Control Initiative The Humane Society of the United States The Humane League Mercy For Animals Humane Society International Compassion in World Farming USA The Good Food Institute Citizens for Farm Animal Protection The END Fund Causa Justa Planned Parenthood International Refugee Assistance Project Periodic donation list documentationGiveWell and Open Philanthropy Project staff describe their annual donation plans for 2016. Some of these are tentative and get superseded by further events. Also, not all employees are present in the document (participation is optional). Amounts donated are not included, per a decision by GiveWell

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

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
----2013Charity evaluatorhttps://eahub.org/user/ajeya-cotra-- Old entry in EA Hub profile. No amount or other details specified. The donor would later join the Open Philanthropy Project (then still a part of GiveWell) as an employee, but as of the time of this donation was a student.