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.
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.