Introducing Impact List: a ranking of people by the expected value of their donations

A new website called Impact List, discussed on LessWrong, ranks wealthy philanthropists by the measurable impact of their charitable giving. The site covers seventy-three donors across twenty-eight cause areas — everything from global health to AI existential risk — and assigns each donation an expected value in lives saved, based on research synthesized by large language models. The model is fully customizable; users can adjust assumptions about cost-effectiveness and view how rankings shift under different worldviews. Under the site's current defaults, AI existential risk ranks as the highest-impact cause area, a result that could shift philanthropic funding if Impact List gains traction.

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