Note that Toby Ord has long given 10% to global poverty. He doesn’t explain why in the linked interview despite being asked “Has that made you want to donate to more charities dealing on “long-termist” issues? If not, why not?”
My guess is that he intentionally dodged the question because the true answer is that he continues to donate to global poverty charities because he thinks the signaling value of him donating to global poverty charities is greater than the signaling value of him donating to longtermist charities and yet saying this explicitly in the interview would likely have undermined some of that signaling value.
In any case, I think those two things are true, and think the signaling value represents the vast majority of the value of his donations, so his decision seems quite reasonable to me, even assuming there are longtermist giving opportunities available to him that offer more direct impact per dollar (as I believe).
For other small donors whose donations are not so visible, I still think the signaling value is often greater than the direct value of the donations. Unlike in Toby Ord’s case though, for typical donors I think the donations with the highest signaling value are usually the donations with the highest direct impact.
There are probably exceptions though, such as if you often introduce effective giving to people by talking about how ridculously inexpensive it is to save someone’s life. In that case, I think it’s reasonable for you to donate a nontrivial amount (even up to everything you donate, potentially) to e.g. GiveWell’s MIF even if you think the direct cost-effectiveness of that donation is less, since the indirect effect of raising the probability of getting the people you talk to into effective giving and perhaps eventually into a higher impact career path can plausibly more than make up for the reduced direct impact.
An important consideration related to all of this that I haven’t mentioned yet is that large donors (e.g. Open Phil and FTX) could funge your donations. I.e. You donate more to X so they donate less to it and more to the other high impact giving opportunities available to them, such that the ultimate effect of your donation to X is to only increase the amount of funding for X a little bit and to increase the funding for other better things mpre. I don’t know if this actually happens, though I often hope it does.
(For example, I hope it does whenever I seize opportunities to raise funds for EA nonprofits that are not the nonprofits that I believe will use marginal dollars most cost-effectively. E.g. During the last every.org donation match I directed matching funds to 60+ EA nonprofits due to a limit on the match amount per nonprofit despite thinking many of those nonprofits would use marginal funds less than half as cost-effectively as the nonprofits that seemed best to me. My hope was that this was the right call, i.e. that large EA funders would correct the allocation to EA nonprofits by giving less to the nonprofits I gave to and more to the giving opportunities that had highest cost-effectivess than they otherwise would have, thereby making my decision the right call.)
Note that Toby Ord has long given 10% to global poverty. He doesn’t explain why in the linked interview despite being asked “Has that made you want to donate to more charities dealing on “long-termist” issues? If not, why not?”
My guess is that he intentionally dodged the question because the true answer is that he continues to donate to global poverty charities because he thinks the signaling value of him donating to global poverty charities is greater than the signaling value of him donating to longtermist charities and yet saying this explicitly in the interview would likely have undermined some of that signaling value.
In any case, I think those two things are true, and think the signaling value represents the vast majority of the value of his donations, so his decision seems quite reasonable to me, even assuming there are longtermist giving opportunities available to him that offer more direct impact per dollar (as I believe).
For other small donors whose donations are not so visible, I still think the signaling value is often greater than the direct value of the donations. Unlike in Toby Ord’s case though, for typical donors I think the donations with the highest signaling value are usually the donations with the highest direct impact.
There are probably exceptions though, such as if you often introduce effective giving to people by talking about how ridculously inexpensive it is to save someone’s life. In that case, I think it’s reasonable for you to donate a nontrivial amount (even up to everything you donate, potentially) to e.g. GiveWell’s MIF even if you think the direct cost-effectiveness of that donation is less, since the indirect effect of raising the probability of getting the people you talk to into effective giving and perhaps eventually into a higher impact career path can plausibly more than make up for the reduced direct impact.
An important consideration related to all of this that I haven’t mentioned yet is that large donors (e.g. Open Phil and FTX) could funge your donations. I.e. You donate more to X so they donate less to it and more to the other high impact giving opportunities available to them, such that the ultimate effect of your donation to X is to only increase the amount of funding for X a little bit and to increase the funding for other better things mpre. I don’t know if this actually happens, though I often hope it does.
(For example, I hope it does whenever I seize opportunities to raise funds for EA nonprofits that are not the nonprofits that I believe will use marginal dollars most cost-effectively. E.g. During the last every.org donation match I directed matching funds to 60+ EA nonprofits due to a limit on the match amount per nonprofit despite thinking many of those nonprofits would use marginal funds less than half as cost-effectively as the nonprofits that seemed best to me. My hope was that this was the right call, i.e. that large EA funders would correct the allocation to EA nonprofits by giving less to the nonprofits I gave to and more to the giving opportunities that had highest cost-effectivess than they otherwise would have, thereby making my decision the right call.)
That’s a really interesting point about Toby Ord!