Michael Dickens donations made to Animal Charity Evaluators

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
Facebook username michael.j.dickens
LinkedIn username michael-dickens-a4173255
Websitehttp://mdickens.me/
Donations URLhttp://mdickens.me/donations/
LessWrong usernameMTGandP
Effective Altruism Forum usernameMichaelDickens
Effective Altruism Hub usernamemichael-dickens
GitHub usernamemichaeldickens
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?person=Michael+Dickens

Full donor page for donor Michael Dickens

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country United States
Facebook page AnimalCharityEvaluators
Websitehttp://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/
Donors list pagehttps://animalcharityevaluators.org/about/top-donors/
Transparency and financials pagehttps://animalcharityevaluators.org/about/transparency/
Twitter usernameAnimalCharityEv
Wikipedia pagehttps://github.com/vipulnaik/working-drafts/blob/master/wikipedia/ace.mediawiki
Timelines wiki pagehttps://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Animal_Charity_Evaluators
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Animal+Charity+Evaluators
Key peopleJon Bockman
Launch date2012-08

Full donee page for donee Animal Charity Evaluators

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 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000
Animal welfare 1 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000 3,000

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 2015
Animal welfare (filter this donor) 1 3,000.00 3,000.00
Total 1 3,000.00 3,000.00

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

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (2 documents)

Title (URL linked)Publication dateAuthorPublisherAffected donorsAffected doneesAffected influencersDocument scopeCause areaNotes
Where I Am Donating in 20162016-11-01Michael Dickens Effective Altruism ForumMichael Dickens Animal Charity Evaluators The Good Food Institute Mercy For Animals Raising for Effective Giving Single donation documentationAnimal welfare, AI riskDickens described his evaluation of each of the four finalists and the reasoning behind his (tentatively) final decision to give to The Good Food Institute
My Cause Selection: Michael Dickens2015-09-15Michael Dickens Effective Altruism ForumMichael Dickens Machine Intelligence Research Institute Future of Humanity Institute Centre for the Study of Existential Risk Future of Life Institute Open Philanthropy Animal Charity Evaluators Animal Ethics Foundational Research Institute Giving What We Can Charity Science Raising for Effective Giving Single donation documentationAnimal welfare,AI risk,Effective altruismExplanation by Dickens of giving choice for 2015. After some consideration, narrows choice to three orgs: MIRI, ACE, and REG. Finally chooses REG due to weighted donation multiplier

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
3,000.0012015-05Animal welfare/factory farming/meta/charity evaluatorhttp://mdickens.me/donations/Stanford EA Part of a collective donation by Stanford EA; Dickens had a preference for THL but deferred to group consensus.