Does your direct work give you access to knowledge that others don’t have? Even if you are not a professional grantmaker in your cause area, you might still have lots of expertise. If your current best-guess donation opportunity is based on that knowledge, it might be quite a good guess, and maybe better than many individual donors. That’s why I like it that some staff members of open philanthropy project tell where they donate.
As someone who does not do direct work and wants to donate thoughtfully, domain knowledge is something I miss a lot. I cannot be an expert in my priority cause area, no matter how much I would love to.
I’m not a huge fan of this option because it doesn’t feel like my comparative advantage and I don’t like (and am not good at) splitting my focus like this.
I came here to say this: you have a relatively unique work position relative to most EAs, and are likely to be unusually good at identifying opportunities in countries Wave is located in.
This must be somewhat true but FWIW, I think it’s probably less true than most outsiders would expect—I don’t spend very much personal time on in-country stuff (because I have coworkers who are local to those countries who will do a much better job than I could) and so end up having pretty limited (and random/biased) context on what’s going on!
Does your direct work give you access to knowledge that others don’t have? Even if you are not a professional grantmaker in your cause area, you might still have lots of expertise. If your current best-guess donation opportunity is based on that knowledge, it might be quite a good guess, and maybe better than many individual donors. That’s why I like it that some staff members of open philanthropy project tell where they donate.
As someone who does not do direct work and wants to donate thoughtfully, domain knowledge is something I miss a lot. I cannot be an expert in my priority cause area, no matter how much I would love to.
I agree attention is a thing.
I came here to say this: you have a relatively unique work position relative to most EAs, and are likely to be unusually good at identifying opportunities in countries Wave is located in.
This must be somewhat true but FWIW, I think it’s probably less true than most outsiders would expect—I don’t spend very much personal time on in-country stuff (because I have coworkers who are local to those countries who will do a much better job than I could) and so end up having pretty limited (and random/biased) context on what’s going on!
I think that still ends up net good if your biases are decorrelated from existing grantmaker biases?