How have your views on where to give updated over the past year?
I’m wondering if your views on where to give have meaningfully changed throughout 2022.
If they have, please share! I’d love to hear why.
Personally, I’d say my biggest update has been towards giving opportunities that are more speculative but potentially higher EV. My giving portfolio in the past was heavily tilted towards GiveWell, primarily because of their demonstrated track record and the strong evidence behind their top charities.
But now, I’m increasingly feeling comfortable with shifting my portfolio more towards other speculative options.
I still think GiveWell is an excellent choice, but I have a bit of a stronger appetite now for taking risks with my giving. This was partially motivated by a talk I watched Hilary Greaves give on making a difference.
Some charities I have given to/intend to give more to going forward include:
Happier Lives Institute for their work on improving competition and intellectual diversity in the effective giving space;
The Long Term Future Fund due to my increased belief that protecting the long-term future is an especially important moral priority;
And Animal Charity Evaluator’s Recommended Charity Fund due to my increased view that funding charities working to improve animal welfare is a particularly effective way to increase present-day well-being.
In light of FTX, I am updating a bit away from giving to meta stuff, as some media made clear that a (legitimate) concern is EA orgs donating to each other and keeping the money internal to them. I don’t think EAs do this on purpose for any bad reason, in fact I think meta is high leverage, but concern does give one pause to think about why we are doing this and also how this is perceived from the outside.
Living in Australia, I’ve always given to orgs that have tax deductibility here in Australia—even though I know there might be better donation opportunities out there it’s been a bit of a mental blocker for me. But now I’ve managed to internalise the benefit of donating to the charities I think have the highest impact regardless of the tax benefit so I’ll be donating to StrongMinds and GFI this Giving Season as well as some of the other global health charities I normally support.
Has anyone ever looked into the possibility of donation swapping for tax favorability purposes?
E.g., A and B are tax-deductible in the US, only B is in Australia. Someone wants to give $1000 to B, you want to give $1000 to A. Can y’all agree to switch so both people can get tax deductions? The parties have to trust each other but there are potentially ways to facilitate that.
I’m not in a position to give legal advice from a US perspective and haven’t researched, but I don’t see any obvious legal hurdles on thirty seconds of thinking about it.
Not sure if it is active anymore, but there is a longstanding hub for EAs to do this: https://donationswap.eahub.org/
I couldn’t get the contact form to work, so tried the e-mail address. Some of the information looked dated, so I asked if they could use some assistance updating if this is still an active project. To the extent the maintainers need support, this seems like it could be pretty high-impact for the modest amount of work that should be needed to keep it up to date.
If you don’t get a reply via their e-mail, you might want to contact this user: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/calebwithers
Caleb wrote back and confirmed that the project is still running.
They do have a need for US-based participants due to the wide range of organizations that are tax deductible in the US, so I’m going to post some swap offers to the website a little later in the month.
AMF is clearly the most effective swap offer for a US-based participant, since it is tax-advantaged in many countries . . . so I’m going to move some of my planned giving there. I’m indifferent enough among the usual choices for global health/development that I’m willing to switch some of my donations in hopes the other donor is able to donate more with the benefit of the tax writeoff.
Maybe the biggest thing is that I got much more worried about AI risk over the last year. Cliche in this crowd, but you guys got me, I wasn’t expecting it, and I’m not thrilled about it. I went into the year sort of assuming we had about a century and that Stuart Russell had plausibly solved the technical side (in theory at least), I left (not so much because of actual developments in AI, as Yudkowsky’s dramatizing motivating me to do my homework on the field in the way I hadn’t before) thinking we probably have less than 50 years, and Russell is probably wrong even on the broad strokes. I don’t know whether this will cause me to donate directly to AI work or not (I don’t have a good sense of where the best place to donate is, and much of the broader community work seems meta in ways I’m skeptical of), but it’s probably the biggest, most relevant update of my own views this year.
Also more related to the content of this post I’m looking at Strong Minds very seriously. I was aware of them and liked there work before, but this year have been convinced that they are unusually underrated by major granters in the field.
More sympathetic to biosecurity issues than at the start of the year. Pretty convinced there are clear things that would be useful to do and help a lot of people. Plus, FTX situation cut out a lot of money that went to the general area such as SBF’s brother’s group-Guarding Against Pandemics.