GiveWiki Open Again to All Cause Areas

GiveWiki has reversed its narrowing to just AI safety after barely 3/4 of a year as “AI Safety GiveWiki” or “AI Safety Impact Markets.”

In a truly shocking turn of events GiveWiki has done a 180° about-face and opened its platform back up for projects from any and all cause areas!¹

GiveWiki (née “AI Safety GiveWiki” née “Impact Markets”) is a community-driven platform to capture the effective altruist zeitgeist: You all register your donations, and the platform aggregates them into a list of top charities ranked by their community buy-in.

The team previously thought that a narrower focus on AI safety only would make the marketing easier, but the marketing remained hard. Now they’re hoping for the brighter days of the funding overhangs to return, and for that the cause area shackles are unnecessary.²

Another reason for the previous focus on AI safety was that it made the evaluations easier. The founders have a bit of a network in AI safety, animal rights, and longevity, but not in may other fields, so that they would’ve found it hard to recognize and recruit smart and trusted evaluators in (say) EU policy or space governance.

To address this limitation, GiveWiki has suspended evaluations for the time being. GiveWiki’s last evaluation round had a slight effect on the ranking at best,³ so even in AI safety the time cost was in no proportion to the effect. GiveWiki will resume evaluations once they appear to be necessary again.

While evaluations may not be on the horizon at the moment, the team has hinted at other auspicious developments: They are thinking about airdrops to their top charities to give them an incentive to mobilize their donors!

1. Why am I using the third person? Short answer: Whim. (Long answer: A whim.)

2. We received five responses to our 2023 feedback survey, and all five of them were negative, i.e. that the respondent ended up not using the platform for their donations. Some respondents gave reasons such as not getting reminded of it in December or thinking that we had disabled the donation registration feature. (You need to be logged in to register your donations.) So it seems to us that the ratio of donors/grantmakers (too few) to charities is currently not right for us.

3. E.g., FAR AI’s score with evaluations was 0.5% higher; Rational Animation’s score with evaluations was 0.5% lower. Our evaluations were nowhere near precise enough for that to be meaningful.