This was great and really helpful, thanks for writing it!
This only works if there isn’t some other organization you think would do more good with your money. People may overvalue their particular organization when they would be more objective in choosing among organizations at large.
Extending this thought, there’s a consideration that attracts me—a kind of personal worldview diversification. To take the example of Nucleic Acid Observatory, I might not want to go all in on pandemic prevention by both working on it and directing my counterfactual donations to it through waiving pay. I might instead want to hedge and put some of my donations into, say, animal welfare (or neartermist global development, or what have you).
I’m not sure if this kind of personal hedging has strong objections though. E.g. maybe it’s a strategy that only makes sense if you’re maximising ‘the chance that I do some good’, but is in tension with maximising the overall good.
Since in effect this frees up funding for the kind of funder that funds the NAO, and those funders tend to be diversified, there is still some amount of diversification? See the complicated bullet on funding replaceability.
I think there’s some weaker version that still applies, for two reasons. First because the money that gets freed up may only be freed up within a specific cause area of the funder. Second because even if the freed money goes back to the funder’s general pot, it’d be distributed according to that funder’s cause-area split. But if you think you’ve already put a lot into one cause area, maybe you’d want to push your donations more heavily in the direction of another cause area, rather than just deferring to the funder’s split.
This was great and really helpful, thanks for writing it!
Extending this thought, there’s a consideration that attracts me—a kind of personal worldview diversification. To take the example of Nucleic Acid Observatory, I might not want to go all in on pandemic prevention by both working on it and directing my counterfactual donations to it through waiving pay. I might instead want to hedge and put some of my donations into, say, animal welfare (or neartermist global development, or what have you).
I’m not sure if this kind of personal hedging has strong objections though. E.g. maybe it’s a strategy that only makes sense if you’re maximising ‘the chance that I do some good’, but is in tension with maximising the overall good.
Since in effect this frees up funding for the kind of funder that funds the NAO, and those funders tend to be diversified, there is still some amount of diversification? See the complicated bullet on funding replaceability.
Oh true, I didn’t think that bit through.
I think there’s some weaker version that still applies, for two reasons. First because the money that gets freed up may only be freed up within a specific cause area of the funder. Second because even if the freed money goes back to the funder’s general pot, it’d be distributed according to that funder’s cause-area split. But if you think you’ve already put a lot into one cause area, maybe you’d want to push your donations more heavily in the direction of another cause area, rather than just deferring to the funder’s split.