Hi, I’ve been interested in EA for years, but I’m not a heavyhitter. I’m expecting to give only dozens of thousands of dollars during my life.
That said, I have a problem and I’d like some advice on how to solve it: I don’t know whether to focus on shortterm organizations like Animal Charity Evaluators and Givewell or longterm organizations like Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS), Center on Longterm Risk (CLR), Longterm Future Fund, Clean Air Task Force and so on. It feels like longterm organizations are a huge gamble, and if they don’t achieve their goals, I will feel like I’ve wasted my money. On the other hand, shorterm organizations don’t really focus on the big picture and it’s uncertain whether their actions will reliably reduce the amount of suffering in the universe unlike how CRS or CLR claim to do. What do you think?
1. Bite all the bullets, uncertain but higher expected impact > certain but lower impact
2. It’s tricky to know how good longtermist organizations are compared to each other. In the past I would have said to just defer to the LTFF, but now I feel more uncertain.
Thank you for answering, your reasoning makes sense if longterm charities have a higher expected impact when taking into account the uncertainty involved.
This is one of the hardest “big questions” in EA, and you’ve outlined what makes the question hard.
You might want to wait another week or two — we have an annual post where people explain where they’re giving and why. You can be notified when it goes up if you subscribe to the donation writeup tag. You can also see last year’s version of that post.
Maybe some of the explanations in these posts will help you figure out what point of view makes the most sense to you!
Hi, I’ve been interested in EA for years, but I’m not a heavyhitter. I’m expecting to give only dozens of thousands of dollars during my life.
That said, I have a problem and I’d like some advice on how to solve it: I don’t know whether to focus on shortterm organizations like Animal Charity Evaluators and Givewell or longterm organizations like Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS), Center on Longterm Risk (CLR), Longterm Future Fund, Clean Air Task Force and so on. It feels like longterm organizations are a huge gamble, and if they don’t achieve their goals, I will feel like I’ve wasted my money. On the other hand, shorterm organizations don’t really focus on the big picture and it’s uncertain whether their actions will reliably reduce the amount of suffering in the universe unlike how CRS or CLR claim to do. What do you think?
Personally,
1. Bite all the bullets, uncertain but higher expected impact > certain but lower impact
2. It’s tricky to know how good longtermist organizations are compared to each other. In the past I would have said to just defer to the LTFF, but now I feel more uncertain.
Thank you for answering, your reasoning makes sense if longterm charities have a higher expected impact when taking into account the uncertainty involved.
This is one of the hardest “big questions” in EA, and you’ve outlined what makes the question hard.
You might want to wait another week or two — we have an annual post where people explain where they’re giving and why. You can be notified when it goes up if you subscribe to the donation writeup tag. You can also see last year’s version of that post.
Maybe some of the explanations in these posts will help you figure out what point of view makes the most sense to you!
Thank you for answering, I subscribed to that tag and I will take a closer look at those threads.