Survival and Flourishing Fund donations made to Lightcone Infrastructure

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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 info
• Basic donee info
• Donor–donee relationship
• Donor–donee donation statistics
• Donation amounts by cause area and year
• Donor–donee document list
• Donor–donee donation list

Basic donor information

Brief history: The Survival and Flourishing Fund started operation in the third quarter of 2019 as a way to continue the grantmaking portion of Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) so that BERI could focus on its core mission. While SFF initially had some funds of its own to allocate, by 2021 it had spent its own funds and its main role was to run a S-process (simulation process) to help participating donors allocate their own funds, rather than SFF holding or distributing the funds. SFF has used the moniker "virtual fund" to describe itself. Participating donors have included Jaan Tallinn (the biggest donor), Jed McCaleb, and David Marble (via The Casey and Family Foundation). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI has an overview of the S-process and some of SFF's history.

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: SFF's general focus is "to bring financial support to organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing." Three things to note: (1) "organizations": SFF makes grants to organizations; there is another organization Survival and Flourishing (SAF) that makes grants to individuals. (2) "long-term prospects": SFF's funding is mainly evaluated based on longtermist principles. (3) "survival and flourishing": the word "survival" hints at the salience given to global catastrophic risks. With that said, not all grantees may see themselves as longtermist organizations.

Notes on grant decision logistics: The first grant round (2019 Q3) was off-cycle and unusual; since then, each grant round has used a S-process (simulation process) that helps aggregate the opinions of multiple recommenders across grantees, and allows multiple funders to decide how much weight to place on each recommender. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI describes the S-process in detail. The S-process-based grant rounds are run twice a year. For each grant round, applications are opened to grantees in the first quarter of the half-year and the S-process to decide the grants happens in the second quarter, usually being made public around the middle-to-end of the fifth month. The set of recommenders as well as the set of participating funders can vary between grant rounds.

Notes on grant publication logistics: The grant recommendations for each grant round are published on a page dedicated to the grant round (for instance, https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2021-h2-recommendations for the second half of 2021). The full list of grant recommendations is also added to the home page, possibly with some lag. SFF does not include information on whether and when the grant was actually made; the donor Jaan Tallinn publishes information on actual grantmaking (updated annually) at https://jaan.online/philanthropy/ and this generally matches SFF's recommendations.

Notes on grant financing: In 2019 and 2020, SFF had funds of its own that it was granting via the grant rounds. Starting 2019 Q4, it also started using the grant rounds to make funding recommendations to other funders. Starting 2021 H1, it didn't have funds of its own, so it was only making recommendations to other funders, i.e., acting as a "virtual fund." Funders who have participated in SFF's grant rounds include Jaan Tallinn, Jed McCaleb, and David Marble (allocating money for The Casey and Family Foundation). Grants for each of these, including ones made via the SFF's S-process, are listed on their respective donor pages on this site.

Miscellaneous notes: In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI Andrew Critch describes the S-process in more detail. The process involves the use of marginal value functions, several rounds of discussion between recommenders, funders making a decision on the weight to allocate to each recommender, a multi-step allocation rotating between funders to avoid bystander effects and pile-on effects between funders, and funders ultimately having the final say in whether/how much to fund, with the outcome of the S-process being only a recommendation.

This entity is also a donee.

Full donor page for donor Survival and Flourishing Fund

Basic donee information

Full donee page for donee Lightcone Infrastructure

Donor–donee relationship

Donor–donee donation statistics

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.

Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)

Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)

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

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

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