Donations List Website (retroactive)

Project Summary

Vipul created a website that lists thousands of EA-related donations, including from all of the major EA donors like OpenPhil, FTX Future Fund, and EA Funds, from EA-adjacent donors like Vitalik Buterin and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and individual donors like Julia Wise.

This grant is retroactive funding for the work he’s already done on the website.

Project goals

I (Rachel) can’t speak for Vipul’s goals in deciding to create this website, but here are some good things I think it helps accomplish:

Increase transparency: OpenPhil and GiveWell have worked hard to be transparent, but the benefits of transparency–gaining trust, getting feedback, and sparking public discussion–are further realized when data is not only possible to access but easy to access. And in the case of analyzing EA as a whole, or analyzing a cause area as a whole, looking at where one funder gave isn’t as useful as having an aggregate database.
Make it easier to people trying to get funding for projects to figure out where they should apply, by making it easy to see where other projects got funded.
Make it easier for grant makers to see the funding history of organizations they’re considering donating to.
Give people in EA something many of them directly asked for.

How will this funding be used?

This is retro funding. It is just a reward and will not be used for any particular purpose.

How could this project be actively harmful?

I don’t really see how it could be, other than perhaps by diverting Vipul’s time from something higher impact.

(An alternative possibility worth mentioning is that maybe being more transparent ends up damaging EA’s reputation, but in that case the reputation kind of ought to be damaged. If funding is going to reasonable places, I expect transparency does more to increase trust than to harm reputation.)

What other funding is this person getting?

None.

I want to note that I built openbook.fyi, which is basically just a UI on top of Vipul’s data a few months ago. I probably would not have done the project if I’d had to collect the data myself, so I am extra grateful for his work on this.

Main points in favor of this grant

For one, people in EA have asked for a compilation of donation data, and some have done it for their own specific purposes, and when I built a UI on top of it that made the data easier to comb through, I got a positive response on the EA forum. Putting aside for a moment what people actually want to do with the data, just them asking for it is a decent signal that it’s useful.

In practice, easier access to data about where funding is going in EA (and in some cases, why) makes people’s beliefs more accurate which makes their actions more effective (e.g. Vipul donated to the Animal Welfare because the data indicated it was most neglected, OpenBook caused Eliezer Yudkowsky to publicly change his mind about Slime Mold Time Mold). Plus sometimes people don’t know where to apply for funding, and this data helps people figure out how similar projects have gotten funded. Finally, it might be useful to grant makers because they can see how projects they’re considering giving a grant to have been funded in the past.

Since this is providing retroactive funding, it’s not directly causing work to happen that would not have happened otherwise. Still, I think it would be a good community norm if people were rewarded for doing cool projects after the fact, because it creates better future incentives and lets people know concretely that their contribution was valued.

Main reservations

I’m impressed and grateful for their time gathering the data, but I think almost all of the value is left on the table if the data isn’t made easier to interact with and analyzed and aggregated. That remaining work could be done by Vipul or by someone else, I just think it would be a loss if the project ended here.

Reason for amount

Since this is retro funding, it’s less anchored on the precise costs of the project. It feels like a reasonable amount: it’s probably under-compensation in terms of hourly rate, but it’s enough to feel like a significant reward for work well done.

COI

None.