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This is: Prioritizing COVID-19 interventions & individual donations, published by IanDavidMoss, catherio on the AI Alignment Forum.
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UPDATE 7/23: Our group has concluded research activities for the time being. Previous updates have been moved to the bottom of the post. All information and recommendations below are current as of late June 2020. If you have questions or are considering a donation, feel free to reach out to one of the authors and we will help you if we can.
Authors: Catherine Olsson and Ian David Moss, with contributions from the collective members of the "Funding Rational Actors Promptly" Pandemic Endowment (FRAPPE).
At the beginning of April, a group of about 20 friends pulled together a messenger chat to discuss how to most effectively spend personal donation funds towards mitigating global suffering caused by COVID-19. What started as an informal effort has since resulted in the distribution of at least $410,000 to charities on this list and indirectly influenced $16 million in additional capital, mostly via the decisions of a single large foundation.
A defining motivation of our group was to find time-sensitive and neglected bottlenecks to effective COVID response that could be eased with rapid funding or other supportive actions. Fast action can be an important source of philanthropic leverage in responses to the current pandemic, a factor that we did not see explored in depth in available analyses of COVID-related giving opportunities. Accordingly, we have summarized our research here in hopes that others can use it to inform their own giving.
This article is organized in two parts. The first shares our working framework for prioritizing interventions, which helped us get oriented in a fast-changing and otherwise confusing landscape. In the second part, we enumerate specific giving opportunities (jump to section) we have found that currently rate highly on this framework as of right now (late June 2020).
We've written this post primarily for the benefit of donors who have already decided to focus on COVID-19 for their own reasons. We haven't made it a priority to weigh the relative value of COVID-related donations as compared to other issues or causes, although we address this briefly at the end.
Some disclaimers: this research is being done and our donations are being made in a purely personal capacity, and none of us is acting as an employee, representative, or spokesperson of our employer or any other organization. Furthermore, because we don't have complete information on many opportunities and the situation is changing so rapidly, none of what follows should be treated as the final word on COVID-related giving opportunities. With that said, we have tried hard to come to the best decisions we could in a short period of time using the resources we had, and are updating this post periodically as our perspective continues to evolve.
I. Executive Summary & Recommendations
When evaluating COVID-19 interventions for importance/scale, our intuition is to look for the following five "scale factors":
⏰Acting quickly, because widespread avoidable suffering is already taking place, because mitigation is more cost-effective when active case numbers are smaller, and because many potentially impactful interventions require lead time to set up.
🌍Concentrating benefits on the global poor, due to both disproportionate vulnerability and huge numbers.
😷Cheap mitigation strategies to limit or slow the spread of the disease, even in populations where full containment is not possible. We are particularly interested in interventions that are cost-effective relative to the burden they impose on society.
🔬Scientific research & development in support of any of the above facets of the problem, because a dollar spent on research can unlock orders of magnitude more ...
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