Very true. One of the things that makes good delegation hard is its increasing potential for corruption. While I don’t worry much about corruption inside EA for now, this seems to be a significant problem for society at large? I wonder if there are culture-independent patterns for what low-corruption societies look like 🤔
If I try to inquire myself for why I donate directly to GiveDirectly instead of donating to an EA Fund, something that comes up is a desire for “control” and “defensibility”. In an imaginary conversation, I can justify why I give large sums of money to GiveDirectly and why it is a Good Thing To Do to efficiently give money to the very poor. OTOH, giving money to an EA Fund feels much more amorphous and much harder to explain and justify what is happening with it and why it is a good idea.
Thanks agree that corruption is a big problem for society at large. At the same time though, with some work, we can make sure that groups are not very corrupt. My intuition is that a great deal of competitive markets have very low corruption; I’d expect that Amazon runs pretty effectively, for instance. I think we can aim for similar levels in our charity delegation structures. It will take some monitoring/ evaluation/transparency, but it definitely seems doable.
My impression is that many groups that complain about corruption actually do fairly little to actively try to remove corruption. When good and agentic CEOs want to stamp it out, they often do.
With GiveDirectly/ EA Funds, I’m not arguing that right now one is better than the other (as I’m guessing you realized, but I’m not sure about other readers). My main point is that we should be aiming for a future that leans more in the direction of “a really solid EA Funds”. That would help in so many ways.
(Note that if we want more minds on the topic, we can achieve they at the same time, with something more like a Crypto DAO, or a version of EA Funds that takes a lot of user contributions for research)
If you have ideas of what you’d want in EA Funds (or maybe GiveWell’s general fund), those would be interesting.
I also donate directly to charities I choose, looking at recommendations from GiveWell, rather than delegating to EA Funds / GiveWell.
Reasons for delegating:
-better coordination
-they might have better/more up-to-date empirical information about the kinds of charities that match my values
Reasons for not delegating:
-money gets to recipient charity faster (monthly, not quarterly)
-less bank fees
-funds almost certainly won’t match my values exactly
-I can double-check their work (I still think some of the deworming assumptions are absolutely ludicrous)
Ambiguous:
-I’m nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity. Ideally this would be solved by the fund phasing over to the new opportunity slowly. In practice it can also be solved by individual donors taking a long time to move to new recommendations (or not moving).
For what it’s worth, I think the best reason not to delegate is something like: ”Funding work is hard, and funders have limited time. If you can do some funding work yourself, that could basically contribute to the amount of funding work beign done.” (This works in some cases, not for others)
> I’m nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity.
I think that funding work is a lot more work than just making yearly yes/no statements that are in-isolation ideal. There’s more to do, like communicating with charities and keeping commitments.
In theory, a cluster of medium to large funders could do a better job than individual donors, but that’s not always the case.
Very true. One of the things that makes good delegation hard is its increasing potential for corruption.
While I don’t worry much about corruption inside EA for now, this seems to be a significant problem for society at large? I wonder if there are culture-independent patterns for what low-corruption societies look like 🤔
If I try to inquire myself for why I donate directly to GiveDirectly instead of donating to an EA Fund, something that comes up is a desire for “control” and “defensibility”. In an imaginary conversation, I can justify why I give large sums of money to GiveDirectly and why it is a Good Thing To Do to efficiently give money to the very poor. OTOH, giving money to an EA Fund feels much more amorphous and much harder to explain and justify what is happening with it and why it is a good idea.
Thanks agree that corruption is a big problem for society at large. At the same time though, with some work, we can make sure that groups are not very corrupt. My intuition is that a great deal of competitive markets have very low corruption; I’d expect that Amazon runs pretty effectively, for instance. I think we can aim for similar levels in our charity delegation structures. It will take some monitoring/ evaluation/transparency, but it definitely seems doable.
My impression is that many groups that complain about corruption actually do fairly little to actively try to remove corruption. When good and agentic CEOs want to stamp it out, they often do.
With GiveDirectly/ EA Funds, I’m not arguing that right now one is better than the other (as I’m guessing you realized, but I’m not sure about other readers). My main point is that we should be aiming for a future that leans more in the direction of “a really solid EA Funds”. That would help in so many ways.
(Note that if we want more minds on the topic, we can achieve they at the same time, with something more like a Crypto DAO, or a version of EA Funds that takes a lot of user contributions for research)
If you have ideas of what you’d want in EA Funds (or maybe GiveWell’s general fund), those would be interesting.
I also donate directly to charities I choose, looking at recommendations from GiveWell, rather than delegating to EA Funds / GiveWell.
Reasons for delegating:
-better coordination
-they might have better/more up-to-date empirical information about the kinds of charities that match my values
Reasons for not delegating:
-money gets to recipient charity faster (monthly, not quarterly)
-less bank fees
-funds almost certainly won’t match my values exactly
-I can double-check their work (I still think some of the deworming assumptions are absolutely ludicrous)
Ambiguous:
-I’m nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity. Ideally this would be solved by the fund phasing over to the new opportunity slowly. In practice it can also be solved by individual donors taking a long time to move to new recommendations (or not moving).
For what it’s worth, I think the best reason not to delegate is something like:
”Funding work is hard, and funders have limited time. If you can do some funding work yourself, that could basically contribute to the amount of funding work beign done.” (This works in some cases, not for others)
> I’m nervous about a fund finding a new opportunity and suddenly leaving a charity with a large funding gap, crippling a very good charity.
I think that funding work is a lot more work than just making yearly yes/no statements that are in-isolation ideal. There’s more to do, like communicating with charities and keeping commitments.
In theory, a cluster of medium to large funders could do a better job than individual donors, but that’s not always the case.