This is one thing I’ve updated down quite a bit over the last year.
It seems a bit harsh to treat other user-donors’ disagreement with your views on concentrating funding on their top-choice org (or even cause area) as significant evidence against the proposition that they are “genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles.”
It seems to me that relatively few self-identified EA donors mostly or entirely give to the organization/whatever that they would explicitly endorse as being the single best recipient of a marginal dollar (do others disagree?)
I think a world in which everyone did this would have some significant drawbacks. While I understand how that approach would make sense through an individual lens, and am open to the idea that people should concentrate their giving more, I’d submit that we are trying to do the most good collectively. For instance: org funding is already too concentrated on a too-small number of donors. If (say) each EA is donating to an average of 5 orgs, then a norm of giving 100% to a single org would decrease the number of donors by 80%. That would impose significant risks on orgs even if their total funding level was not changed.
It’s also plausible that the number of first-place votes an org (or even a cause area) would get isn’t a super-strong reflection of overall community sentiment. If a wide range of people identified Org X as in their top 10%, then that likely points to some collective wisdom about Org X’s cost-effectiveness even if no one has them at number 1. Moreover, spreading the wealth can be seen as deferring to broader community views to some extent—which could be beneficial insofar as one found little reason to believe that wealthier community members are better at deciding where donation dollars should go than the community’s collective wisdom. Thus, there are reasons—other than a lack of genuine interest in EA principles by donors—that donors might reasonably choose to act in accordance with a practice of donation spreading.
Thanks, it’s possible I’m mistaken over the degree to which “direct resources to the place you think needs them most” is a consensus-EA principle.
Also, I recognize that “genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles” is implicitly value-laden, and to be clear I do wish it was more the case, but I also genuinely intend my claim to be an observation that might have pessimistic implications depending on other beliefs people may have rather than an insult or anything like it, if that makes any sense.
It seems a bit harsh to treat other user-donors’ disagreement with your views on concentrating funding on their top-choice org (or even cause area) as significant evidence against the proposition that they are “genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles.”
I think a world in which everyone did this would have some significant drawbacks. While I understand how that approach would make sense through an individual lens, and am open to the idea that people should concentrate their giving more, I’d submit that we are trying to do the most good collectively. For instance: org funding is already too concentrated on a too-small number of donors. If (say) each EA is donating to an average of 5 orgs, then a norm of giving 100% to a single org would decrease the number of donors by 80%. That would impose significant risks on orgs even if their total funding level was not changed.
It’s also plausible that the number of first-place votes an org (or even a cause area) would get isn’t a super-strong reflection of overall community sentiment. If a wide range of people identified Org X as in their top 10%, then that likely points to some collective wisdom about Org X’s cost-effectiveness even if no one has them at number 1. Moreover, spreading the wealth can be seen as deferring to broader community views to some extent—which could be beneficial insofar as one found little reason to believe that wealthier community members are better at deciding where donation dollars should go than the community’s collective wisdom. Thus, there are reasons—other than a lack of genuine interest in EA principles by donors—that donors might reasonably choose to act in accordance with a practice of donation spreading.
Thanks, it’s possible I’m mistaken over the degree to which “direct resources to the place you think needs them most” is a consensus-EA principle.
Also, I recognize that “genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles” is implicitly value-laden, and to be clear I do wish it was more the case, but I also genuinely intend my claim to be an observation that might have pessimistic implications depending on other beliefs people may have rather than an insult or anything like it, if that makes any sense.