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I'm honestly not too sure, but could imagine a bunch of different things.

• nonprofit sponsorship (as described above)
• operations support
• coaching / advice (there are lots of things to provide help here with)
• contractor support

Why are you thinking of Asana Business? Like, you would provide free Asana Business accounts?

Great answer, thank you!

Do you know of any examples of the "direct work+" strategy working, especially for EA-recommended charities? The closest thing I can think of would be the GiveDirectly UBI trial; is that the sort of thing you had in mind?

I'd second this. I think great comments/feedback are underrepresented at this point. Do recognize it would be tricky though.

Interesting. This came from chats I had with an attorney. That said, they were based in SF, so maybe their prices were higher. I also asked how much it would cost to do "everything", which I think meant more than strictly file the IRS Form 1023. I believe there's a lot of work that could be done by either yourself or the attorney, and I would hope that in many cases we could generally lean more on the attorney for that work.

Gotcha. I wonder whether it could create substantially more impact from doing over the long term yourself, or setting it up well for someone else to run long term. Obviously I have no context and your goals on the project but I've seen things where people do a short term project aiming for impact creation and where in the end they feel that they could've created much more impact by doing the thing in a more ongoing manner. So this note may or may not be relevant depending on the project and your goals :)

Re footnote 15, did Luisa assume that the two events were independent and that's how she got the 0.02%? (In reality I would think that they are strongly correlated.)

Thanks very much for sharing this. I actually expected to like it a lot - it's an issue I think about a lot - but ended up being quite unsatisfied.

Historians are often criticised for drawing quite general conclusions from relatively sparse data. For example, I recall reading Seeing Like a State and being concerned that he was drawing conclusions from what seemed like a mere handful of data points, even if new and interesting ones. Or recently I read the recent BIS report on the impact of bank capital requirements on financial crises and growth, and was concerned about the relatively small sample set these conclusions were being based on - even though this data spanned many countries and over a hundred years.

But in this case, Anderson is drawing ridiculously strong conclusions from one single data point - a somewhat biased account of the end of slavery in a single country. There is no recognition that other issues in other geographies and other points in time played out rather differently - even examples as proximate as the history of slavery in England and the Empire. Despite this, she presents her conclusions as being a necessary law of history:

Stronger methods are needed to counteract the biases induced by social power. My case study of a society-wide change in moral belief, from proslavery to abolitionist, focused on two such methods. First, contentious politics—active, practical, mass resistance to the moral claims embodied in social institutions enforced by and catering to the powerful—is needed to activate genuine practical reasoning across all levels of society. The powerful won’t really listen to reason—that is, to claims from below—until they no longer have the power to routinely enforce their desires. Second, the subordinated and oppressed must actively participate in that contention. [emphasis added]

It's also the case that, if her views are true, this is very bad news. A key part of EA is promoting the welfare of groups with no voice, like animals or the as-yet-unborn. Groups that we have concluded deserve consideration, not because of activism by these groups, but by considering our moral intuitions. If the only way of improving the treatment of a group is for that group to practice 'mass resistance' then it is literally impossible for animal rights to ever improve, or the rights of children, or future generations. Fortunately, the fact that we do have animal welfare laws, and child welfare laws, and environmental laws, and so on, suggests that she is indeed wrong.

She seems to miss that moral deliberation and reflective equilibrium have a vital advantage: they are asymmetric weapons, that cut more readily against falsehood, while tending to give succor to the truth. Indeed, they are at the core of the EA project.

In contrast, she presents a very dystopian world, where there is little true moral debate - or if there is, it is of little consequence. All there seems to be is a struggle between powerful groups and almost-as-powerful groups. There is no great tendency here for the arc of history to bend towards justice - just leaders telling the masses that they have been oppressed by a cruel minority and need to rise, which history has shown to be a harbinger of tyranny at least as often as of liberation.

Wholesale - the term seems to be synonymous with free-range - egg prices were in the $1.25 per dozen

Wholesale is not synonymous with free-range. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholesaling I already pointed it out when you published this article on your website three weeks ago but I thought that I should point it out here as well because your cage-free egg prices (and consequently the results) could be incorrect because of this mistake.

I’m not yet sure that I’ll be doing this more than 3 months, so I think there’s a bit more value to focus more on generating value in that time.

I'd offer that whatever you can do to make it possible to iterate on your grantmaking loop quickly will be useful. Perhaps starting with smaller grants on a month or even week cycle, running a few rounds there, and then scaling up. Don't try and make it near-perfect from the start, instead try and make it something that can become near-perfect because of iterations and improvements.