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.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions) | Centre for Effective Altruism |
| Website | https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future |
| Donations URL | https://app.effectivealtruism.org/ |
| Regularity with which donor updates donations data | irregular |
| Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | irregular |
| Lag with which donor updates donations data | months |
| Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | days |
| Data entry method on Donations List Website | Manual (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.
Full donor page for donor Effective Altruism Funds: Long-Term Future Fund
We do not have any donee information for the donee Stag Lynn in our system.
Full donee page for donee Stag Lynn
| Item | Value |
|---|
| Cause area | Count | Median | Mean | Minimum | 10th percentile | 20th percentile | 30th percentile | 40th percentile | 50th percentile | 60th percentile | 70th percentile | 80th percentile | 90th percentile | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 |
| AI safety | 1 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 | 23,000 |
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 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI safety (filter this donor) | 1 | 23,000.00 | 23,000.00 |
| Total | 1 | 23,000.00 | 23,000.00 |
Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.
There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.
Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations
| Amount (current USD) | Amount rank (out of 1) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23,000.00 | 1 | AI safety/upskilling | https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/payouts/august-2019-long-term-future-fund-grants-and-recommendations | Alex Zhu Helen Toner Matt Wage Oliver Habryka | Donation process: Grantee applied through the online application process, and was selected based on review by the fund managers. Alex Zhu was the fund manager most excited about the grant, and responsible for the public write-up. Alex Zhu's write-up disclosed a potential conflict of interest because Stag was living with him and helping him with odd jobs. So, comments from Oliver Habryka, another fund manager, are also included Intended use of funds (category): Living expenses during project Intended use of funds: Grantee's "current intention is to spend the next year improving his skills in a variety of areas (e.g. programming, theoretical neuroscience, and game theory) with the goal of contributing to AI safety research, meeting relevant people in the x-risk community, and helping out in EA/rationality related contexts wherever he can (eg, at rationality summer camps like SPARC and ESPR)." Two projects he may pursue include (1) working to implement certificates of impact in the EA/X-risk community, (2) working as an unpaid personal assistant to someone in EA who is sufficiently busy for this form of assistance to be useful, and sufficiently productive for the assistance to be valuable Donor reason for selecting the donee: Alex Zhu, the fund manager most excited about the grant, writes: "I recommended funding Stag because I think he is smart, productive, and altruistic, has a track record of doing useful work, and will contribute more usefully to reducing existential risk by directly developing his capabilities and embedding himself in the EA community than he would by finishing his undergraduate degree or working a full-time job." Oliver Habryka, another fund manager, writes: "I’ve interacted with Stag in the past and have broadly positive impressions of him, in particular his capacity for independent strategic thinking." He cites Stag's success in Latvian and Galois Mathematics Olympiads, and Stag's contributions to improving ESPR and SPARC, as well as Stag's decision to contribute to those projects, taking this as "another signal of Stag’s talent at selecting and/or improving projects." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): No amount-specific reason given, but the amount is likely selected to cover a reasonable fraction of living costs for a year Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 5.24% Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by timing of grant round Intended funding timeframe in months: 12 |