I don’t think there’s a settled consensus on the question of “should individual EAs split donations”; see Jeff Kaufman here and Eric Neyman/JP Addison here.
I used to be more on the side of “math out the impact EV and just give everything to one charity each year” but I’m now much closer to Nick’s recommendation of splitting your donations. Some arguments in favor of splitting:
From an ecosystem perspective, it’s 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 I’m 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)
I don’t think there’s a settled consensus on the question of “should individual EAs split donations”; see Jeff Kaufman here and Eric Neyman/JP Addison here.
I used to be more on the side of “math out the impact EV and just give everything to one charity each year” but I’m now much closer to Nick’s recommendation of splitting your donations. Some arguments in favor of splitting:
From an ecosystem perspective, it’s 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 I’m 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)