Jed McCaleb donations made to Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative

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

We do not have any donor information for the donor Jed McCaleb in our system.

Full donor page for donor Jed McCaleb

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country United States
Websitehttp://existence.org/
Donate pagehttp://existence.org/donating/
Timelines wiki pagehttps://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Berkeley_Existential_Risk_Initiative
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Berkeley+Existential+Risk+Initiative
Key peopleAndrew Critch|Gina Stuessy|Michael Keenan
Launch date2017-02
NotesLaunched to provide fast-moving support to existing existential risk organizations. Works closely with Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Center for Human-Compatible AI, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and Future of Humanity Institute. People working at it are closely involved with MIRI and the Center for Applied Rationality

This entity is also a donor.

Full donee page for donee Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative

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 3 17,000 93,667 14,000 14,000 14,000 14,000 17,000 17,000 17,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000
Global catastrophic risks 2 14,000 15,500 14,000 14,000 14,000 14,000 14,000 14,000 17,000 17,000 17,000 17,000 17,000
AI safety 1 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000 250,000

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 2021
AI safety (filter this donor) 1 250,000.00 250,000.00
Global catastrophic risks (filter this donor) 2 31,000.00 31,000.00
Total 3 281,000.00 281,000.00

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

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

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Zvi’s Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) (GW, IR)2021-12-14Zvi Mowshowitz LessWrongSurvival and Flourishing Fund Jaan Tallinn Jed McCaleb The Casey and Family Foundation Effective Altruism Funds:Long-Term Future Fund Center on Long-Term Risk Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters The Centre for Long-Term Resilience Lightcone Infrastructure Effective Altruism Funds: Infrastructure Fund Centre for the Governance of AI Ought New Science Research Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative AI Objectives Institute Topos Institute Emergent Ventures India European Biostasis Foundation Laboratory for Social Minds PrivateARPA Charter Cities Institute Survival and Flourishing Fund Beth Barnes Oliver Habryka Zvi Mowshowitz Miscellaneous commentaryLongtermism|AI safety|Global catastrophic risksIn this lengthy post, Zvi Mowshowitz, who was one of the recommenders for the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2021 H2 grant round based on the S-process, describes his experience with the process, his impressions of several of the grantees, and implications for what kinds of grant applications are most likely to succeed. Zvi says that the grant round suffered from the problem of Too Much Money (TMM); there was way more money than any individual recommender felt comfortable granting, and just about enough money for the combined preferences of all recommenders, which meant that any recommender could unilaterally push a particular grantee through. The post has several other observations and attracts several comments.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (3 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 3)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
250,000.0012021-10AI safetyhttps://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2021-h2-recommendationsSurvival and Flourishing Fund Beth Barnes Oliver Habryka Zvi Mowshowitz Donation process: Part of the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2021 H2 grants based on the S-process (simulation process) that "involves allowing the Recommenders and funders to simulate a large number of counterfactual delegation scenarios using a table of marginal utility functions. Recommenders specified marginal utility functions for funding each application, and adjusted those functions through discussions with each other as the round progressed. Similarly, funders specified and adjusted different utility functions for deferring to each Recommender. In this round, the process also allowed the funders to make some final adjustments to decide on their final intended grant amounts. [...] [The] system is designed to generally favor funding things that at least one recommender is excited to fund, rather than things that every recommender is excited to fund." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kuDKtwwbsksAW4BG2/zvi-s-thoughts-on-the-survival-and-flourishing-fund-sff (GW, IR) explains the process from a recommender's perspective.

Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant to support the BERI-CHAI collaboration, This is BERI's collaboration with the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI). See https://existence.org/collaborations/ for BERI's full list of collaborations.

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by timing of grant round; this is SFF's sixth grant round and the fourth with grants to the grantee. It is the first round with a grant specifically for this collaboration.

Other notes: Jaan Tallinn makes a $248,00 grant to BERI in this grant round for the same collaboration (BERI-CHAI). The Casey and Family Foundation, that also participates as a funder in this grant round, does not make any grants to BERI. Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 100.00%; announced: 2021-11-20.
17,000.0022021-04Global catastrophic riskshttps://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2021-h1-recommendationsSurvival and Flourishing Fund Ben Hoskin Katja Grace Oliver Habryka Adam Marblestone Donation process: Part of the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2021 H1 grants based on the S-process (simulation process) that "involves allowing the Recommenders and funders to simulate a large number of counterfactual delegation scenarios using a spreadsheet of marginal utility functions. Recommenders specified marginal utility functions for funding each application, and adjusted those functions through discussions with each other as the round progressed. Similarly, funders specified and adjusted different utility functions for deferring to each Recommender. In this round, the process also allowed the funders to make some final adjustments to decide on their final intended grant amounts."

Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant to support the BERI-FHI collaboration, This is BERI's collaboration with the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). See https://existence.org/collaborations/ for BERI's full list of collaborations.

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by timing of grant round; this is SFF's fifth grant round and the third with grants to the grantee. It is the first round with a grant specifically for this collaboration.

Other notes: The grant round includes a grant from Jed McCaleb for another BERI collaboration (with SERI) and grants from Tallinn for collaborations with FHI, SERI, and CSER. Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 7.00%.
14,000.0032021-04Global catastrophic riskshttps://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2021-h1-recommendationsSurvival and Flourishing Fund Ben Hoskin Katja Grace Oliver Habryka Adam Marblestone Donation process: Part of the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2021 H1 grants based on the S-process (simulation process) that "involves allowing the Recommenders and funders to simulate a large number of counterfactual delegation scenarios using a spreadsheet of marginal utility functions. Recommenders specified marginal utility functions for funding each application, and adjusted those functions through discussions with each other as the round progressed. Similarly, funders specified and adjusted different utility functions for deferring to each Recommender. In this round, the process also allowed the funders to make some final adjustments to decide on their final intended grant amounts."

Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses

Intended use of funds: Grant to support the BERI-SERI collaboration, This is BERI's collaboration with the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI). See https://existence.org/collaborations/ for BERI's full list of collaborations.

Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): Timing determined by timing of grant round; this is SFF's fifth grant round and the third with grants to the grantee. It is the first round with a grant specifically for this collaboration.

Other notes: The grant round includes a grant from Jed McCaleb for another BERI collaboration (with FHI) and grants from Tallinn for collaborations with FHI, SERI, and CSER. Percentage of total donor spend in the corresponding batch of donations: 5.76%.