Your point number 3 is counterproductive and reduces the effectiveness of your donations. Itās understandable to do that if the alternative is that you wouldnāt give the money away at all, but if charitable opportunities are really power-law distributed in effectiveness (which I think is directionally correct) then youāre reducing the good done by your donations by >55%.
I donāt think thereās a settled consensus on the question of āshould individual EAs split donationsā; see Jeff Kaufman here and Eric Neyman/āJP Addison here.
I used to be more on the side of āmath out the impact EV and just give everything to one charity each yearā but Iām now much closer to Nickās recommendation of splitting your donations. Some arguments in favor of splitting:
From an ecosystem perspective, itās better for a charity to have 100 $1k donors than to rely on a single $100k donor, both in terms of resilience and in terms of public transparency
Moral parliament, where I have a swathe of causes I care about and decision theories I consider plausible
Relatedly, self-coordination-like arguments; I got into EA from a global health angle and even though Iām more xrisk-pilled now, it seems good to respect my past wishes
Donating as a way of tracking & registering predictions of which charities will do well, similar to placing public bets on prediction markets. The information value gained from doing the exercise helps with making future donation allocations; or updating my model of what charities are good for future recs (for funding and for jobs)
Thanks for saying what Iām sure a bunch of people were thinking! Strong disagree with this take :-), but I understand why you believe it!
First a point of clarificationāIām confident you think the 10% personal giving is less effective, but itās not 100% clear to me which 45% of my giving budget you consider to be reduced in effectivenessā¦ I assume you mean the high risk, high return bucket? Thatās not how I view it; this is my budget for hits based giving, which in my view has very high expected value, comparable to the higher confidence, lower upside giving budget but with a different theory of change.
At core, I think one crux of our disagreement might be this: is it overall more impactful to optimize the expected value of individual donation decisions sequentially, or is it more impactful to optimize the expected value of all of your donation decisions collectively (i.e. your full portfolio).
I accept that giving opportunities are power-law distributed. But Iām relatively skeptical in my (anyones) ability to accurately assess where any one giving opportunity sits on that power-law distribution with high levels of precision beyond a certain threshold. I feel fairly confident I can identify and exclude bottom 50th percentile giving opportunities, but distinguishing between 75th and 95th percentile giving opportunities Iām less confident in.
Thatās true even when discounting for uncertaintyā¦ in practice there are so many assumptions built into a robust cost-effectiveness estimate, that reasonable people can defensibly land in assessments that are several orders of magnitude different from each other. That doesnāt mean we shouldnāt try! But it does mean we should have high levels of humility in our conclusions.
I make the decision to optimize my portfolio as a whole (with diverse theories of change, diverse risk profiles, diverse world views), which I think makes the expected value of my portfolio higher than if I viewed every donation decision in an isolated manner. Simply because thereās less risk I put all my giving eggs in a basket that ended up being wrong because of a reasonable but minor assumption.
Your point number 3 is counterproductive and reduces the effectiveness of your donations. Itās understandable to do that if the alternative is that you wouldnāt give the money away at all, but if charitable opportunities are really power-law distributed in effectiveness (which I think is directionally correct) then youāre reducing the good done by your donations by >55%.
I donāt think thereās a settled consensus on the question of āshould individual EAs split donationsā; see Jeff Kaufman here and Eric Neyman/āJP Addison here.
I used to be more on the side of āmath out the impact EV and just give everything to one charity each yearā but Iām now much closer to Nickās recommendation of splitting your donations. Some arguments in favor of splitting:
From an ecosystem perspective, itās better for a charity to have 100 $1k donors than to rely on a single $100k donor, both in terms of resilience and in terms of public transparency
Moral parliament, where I have a swathe of causes I care about and decision theories I consider plausible
Relatedly, self-coordination-like arguments; I got into EA from a global health angle and even though Iām more xrisk-pilled now, it seems good to respect my past wishes
Donating as a way of tracking & registering predictions of which charities will do well, similar to placing public bets on prediction markets. The information value gained from doing the exercise helps with making future donation allocations; or updating my model of what charities are good for future recs (for funding and for jobs)
Thanks for saying what Iām sure a bunch of people were thinking! Strong disagree with this take :-), but I understand why you believe it!
First a point of clarificationāIām confident you think the 10% personal giving is less effective, but itās not 100% clear to me which 45% of my giving budget you consider to be reduced in effectivenessā¦ I assume you mean the high risk, high return bucket? Thatās not how I view it; this is my budget for hits based giving, which in my view has very high expected value, comparable to the higher confidence, lower upside giving budget but with a different theory of change.
At core, I think one crux of our disagreement might be this: is it overall more impactful to optimize the expected value of individual donation decisions sequentially, or is it more impactful to optimize the expected value of all of your donation decisions collectively (i.e. your full portfolio).
I accept that giving opportunities are power-law distributed. But Iām relatively skeptical in my (anyones) ability to accurately assess where any one giving opportunity sits on that power-law distribution with high levels of precision beyond a certain threshold. I feel fairly confident I can identify and exclude bottom 50th percentile giving opportunities, but distinguishing between 75th and 95th percentile giving opportunities Iām less confident in.
Thatās true even when discounting for uncertaintyā¦ in practice there are so many assumptions built into a robust cost-effectiveness estimate, that reasonable people can defensibly land in assessments that are several orders of magnitude different from each other. That doesnāt mean we shouldnāt try! But it does mean we should have high levels of humility in our conclusions.
I make the decision to optimize my portfolio as a whole (with diverse theories of change, diverse risk profiles, diverse world views), which I think makes the expected value of my portfolio higher than if I viewed every donation decision in an isolated manner. Simply because thereās less risk I put all my giving eggs in a basket that ended up being wrong because of a reasonable but minor assumption.