Thanks for the comment, Caleb. That might be the case. On the other hand, the sentence I quoted seems to suggest people at GiveWell are “cause-neutral experts”, and I think this applies more to people at Rethink Priorities, which works across multiple areas, and has a Worldview Investigation Team.
I both like and deeply respect people at Rethink, and I think they are certainly worth supporting, but supporting their work is much more a form of pursuing value of information and viewpoint diversity than directly benefitting the world. (Also, I do not believe that they represent a consensus about what a cause-neutral viewpoint would be, as opposed to a principled but idiosyncratic view.)
Thanks for sharing your thinking, David!
Have you considered donating to Rethink Priorities? I would say it is much more cause-neutral than GiveWell, which only focusses on global health and development.
I think David means “giving motivated by impartiality” instead of giving to places that themselves are “cause neutral”.
Thanks for the comment, Caleb. That might be the case. On the other hand, the sentence I quoted seems to suggest people at GiveWell are “cause-neutral experts”, and I think this applies more to people at Rethink Priorities, which works across multiple areas, and has a Worldview Investigation Team.
I both like and deeply respect people at Rethink, and I think they are certainly worth supporting, but supporting their work is much more a form of pursuing value of information and viewpoint diversity than directly benefitting the world. (Also, I do not believe that they represent a consensus about what a cause-neutral viewpoint would be, as opposed to a principled but idiosyncratic view.)
If I were giving tens of millions of dollars, I would view non-trivial investment into VoI as a priority, but as an individual small dollar donor, I do not think that I can justify that type of investment as rationally maximizing the impact of my giving. (But there are some very interesting arguments about value of information with and without control of the decisions being made and the outcomes. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211675322000161 and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1584523)
Yeah that seems very possible.