Welcome to the EA Forum and thank you for posting this! I enjoy both Change.org and now Givedirectly. I agree with most of your points (and every one of your hot takes, I think!)
I’d push back a bit against “4. Use the index funds of giving.” One nitpick is that I’m not sure the analogy holds that well—charitable funds like Givewell and CG’s are more like mutual funds or hedge funds; you can’t actually passively index because there’s no simple metric of market cap to benchmark against. So implicitly, the choice of which fund to give to bakes in a bunch of worldview and effectiveness assumptions, and a lot of trust in the people running the charitable fund (unlike, say, VTI).
More broadly, I think that on the margin, there’s too much deference to charitable funds and too little “do your own research” in the EA space. (Though I understand that your original post on LinkedIn is angled for a wider audience, and there, I think Givewell—or Givedirectly! - is a great default rec).
Thanks Austin! I broadly agree with this point—hedge funds or mutual funds are the better analog for CG or GiveWell. I was trying to keep it simple for people who may not be able to immediately identify the difference between a hedge fund and an index fund.
I also agree it’s often under appreciated in EA how much subjectivity and values gets baked in by the moral weighting that is fundamentally necessary to running a fund. I think GW + CG do that moral weighting in a reasonably robust and defensible way, but even then I know there are many places I personally diverge with some of their choices.
I feel torn on your final point—I’m someone who really values diversity of worldview, theory of change, risk tolerance, decision process, etc. So in my perfect world I’d really love it if more people deferred less and came to their own conclusions. That said, I don’t know how reasonable it is to expect that… and it becomes such an easy reason to not give at all.
I suspect that practically there’s a fairly direct trade-off between how easy it is to give (i.e. not having to do a bunch of thinking / work to come to your own conclusions), and how much ends up being given. And the marginal difference between a more thoughtful gift and not giving at all is fairly large. So my instinct that there’s more value in pushing for the simplicity and scale of a well managed and strategic fund like GW, CG, GD or similar than there is in encouraging thoughtful diversification of gifts.
I would argue that MacKenzie Scott’s giving is pretty close to direct indexing and … pretty not great. Though it does have the one advantage that apparently nobody will criticize you for taking this approach.
Maybe instead of indexing one should do something like, spend 5 minutes upfront to decide what your default option will be, be it GiveDirectly, GiveWell, or something else (even unicef!). And then send whatever you haven’t granted there.
Welcome to the EA Forum and thank you for posting this! I enjoy both Change.org and now Givedirectly. I agree with most of your points (and every one of your hot takes, I think!)
I’d push back a bit against “4. Use the index funds of giving.” One nitpick is that I’m not sure the analogy holds that well—charitable funds like Givewell and CG’s are more like mutual funds or hedge funds; you can’t actually passively index because there’s no simple metric of market cap to benchmark against. So implicitly, the choice of which fund to give to bakes in a bunch of worldview and effectiveness assumptions, and a lot of trust in the people running the charitable fund (unlike, say, VTI).
More broadly, I think that on the margin, there’s too much deference to charitable funds and too little “do your own research” in the EA space. (Though I understand that your original post on LinkedIn is angled for a wider audience, and there, I think Givewell—or Givedirectly! - is a great default rec).
Thanks Austin! I broadly agree with this point—hedge funds or mutual funds are the better analog for CG or GiveWell. I was trying to keep it simple for people who may not be able to immediately identify the difference between a hedge fund and an index fund.
I also agree it’s often under appreciated in EA how much subjectivity and values gets baked in by the moral weighting that is fundamentally necessary to running a fund. I think GW + CG do that moral weighting in a reasonably robust and defensible way, but even then I know there are many places I personally diverge with some of their choices.
I feel torn on your final point—I’m someone who really values diversity of worldview, theory of change, risk tolerance, decision process, etc. So in my perfect world I’d really love it if more people deferred less and came to their own conclusions. That said, I don’t know how reasonable it is to expect that… and it becomes such an easy reason to not give at all.
I suspect that practically there’s a fairly direct trade-off between how easy it is to give (i.e. not having to do a bunch of thinking / work to come to your own conclusions), and how much ends up being given. And the marginal difference between a more thoughtful gift and not giving at all is fairly large. So my instinct that there’s more value in pushing for the simplicity and scale of a well managed and strategic fund like GW, CG, GD or similar than there is in encouraging thoughtful diversification of gifts.
I would argue that MacKenzie Scott’s giving is pretty close to direct indexing and … pretty not great. Though it does have the one advantage that apparently nobody will criticize you for taking this approach.
Maybe instead of indexing one should do something like, spend 5 minutes upfront to decide what your default option will be, be it GiveDirectly, GiveWell, or something else (even unicef!). And then send whatever you haven’t granted there.