I think we roughly agree on the direct effect of fundraising orgs, promoting effective giving, etc., from a longtermist perspective.
However, I suspect I’m (perhaps significantly) more optimistic than you about ‘indirect’ effects from promoting good content and advice on effective giving, promoting it as a ‘social norm’, etc. This is roughly because of the view I state under the first key uncertainty here, i.e., I suspect that encountering effective giving can for some people be a ‘gateway’ toward more impactful behaviors.
One issue is that I think the sign and absolute value of these indirect effects are not that well correlated with the proxy goals such organizations would optimize, e.g., amount of money raised. For example, I’d guess it’s much better for these indirect effects if the org is also impressive intellectually or entrepreneurially; if it produces “evangelists” rather than just people who’ll start giving 1% as a ‘hobby’, are quiet about it, and otherwise don’t think much about it; if it engages in higher-bandwidth interactions with some of its audience; and if, in communications it at least sometimes mentions other potentially impactful behaviors.
So, e.g., GiveWell by these lights looks much better than REG, which in turns looks much better than, say, buying Facebook ads for AMF.
(I’m also quite uncertain about all of this. E.g., I wouldn’t be shocked if after significant additional consideration I ended up thinking that the indirect effects of promoting effective giving—even in a ‘good’ way—were significantly net negative.)
I think we roughly agree on the direct effect of fundraising orgs, promoting effective giving, etc., from a longtermist perspective.
However, I suspect I’m (perhaps significantly) more optimistic than you about ‘indirect’ effects from promoting good content and advice on effective giving, promoting it as a ‘social norm’, etc. This is roughly because of the view I state under the first key uncertainty here, i.e., I suspect that encountering effective giving can for some people be a ‘gateway’ toward more impactful behaviors.
One issue is that I think the sign and absolute value of these indirect effects are not that well correlated with the proxy goals such organizations would optimize, e.g., amount of money raised. For example, I’d guess it’s much better for these indirect effects if the org is also impressive intellectually or entrepreneurially; if it produces “evangelists” rather than just people who’ll start giving 1% as a ‘hobby’, are quiet about it, and otherwise don’t think much about it; if it engages in higher-bandwidth interactions with some of its audience; and if, in communications it at least sometimes mentions other potentially impactful behaviors.
So, e.g., GiveWell by these lights looks much better than REG, which in turns looks much better than, say, buying Facebook ads for AMF.
(I’m also quite uncertain about all of this. E.g., I wouldn’t be shocked if after significant additional consideration I ended up thinking that the indirect effects of promoting effective giving—even in a ‘good’ way—were significantly net negative.)