Mati_Roy
FYI, Hunter says you can have residency in Paraguay easily, and only need to stay 1 day per year to maintain it
I might be interested in hanging out in Panama, but idk if i want the citizenship
If a non-profit organization is:
not solving some public good (in the economic sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics))
not redistributing money directly
not helping agents that can’t help themselves / use money
not helping the donor directly
relying on donations
Then:
it’s probably mostly done for signaling purposes and/or misguided
it’s likely performing worse than the average company
although there could be less efficient ways of redistributing money that would arguably be better than the average company
Good thinking. Names and currency (along with status) are one of the few things you have less when others have more, and so benefit from being put on the blockchain
so am understanding you have short AI timelines, and so don’t think genetic engineering would have time to pay off, but psychedelics would, and that you think it’s of similar relevance as working directly on the problem
thanks for your answer!
Genetic engineering doesn’t seem to have a comparable track record or a comparable evidence base.
You get humans from primates with genetic modifications, not psychedelic :)
oh, by bad. apologies. thanks for the quote!
in terms of augmenting humans, my impression is that genetic engineering is by far the most effective intervention. my understanding is that we’re currently making a lot of progress in that area, yet some important research aspects seem neglected, and could have a transformative impact on the world.
I wonder if you disagree
I feel like the burden of proof is on you, no? how will psychedelics help avoid astronomical waste?
I guess I was working on the assumption that it was rare that people would want to split their donation between local and effective a priori, and my point was that GM wasn’t useful to people that didn’t already want to split their donations in that way before GM’s existence—but maybe this assumption is wrong actually
hummm, I guess it’s fine after all. I change my mind. People can just give whatever fraction they were going to give to local charities, and then be matched. And the extra matching to effective charities is a signal from the matcher about their model of the world. I don’t think someone that was going to give 100% to another charity than those 9 should use GivingMultiplier though (unless they changed their mind about effective charities). But my guess is that this project has good consequences.
I’m henceforth offering a MetaGivingMultiplier. It’s the same structure than GivingMultiplier, but replace “local charities” with “GivingMultiplier” and “super-effective charities” with “a cryonics organization” (I recommend https://www.alcor.org/rapid/ or https://www.brainpreservation.org/). Anyone wants to take advantage of my donation match?
h/t: came up with this with Haydn Thomas-Rose
On handling posts that may violate Forum rules:
Thanks for the clarifications.
On private vs. public communication:
I don’t want to argue for what to do in general, but here in particular my “accusation” consists of doing the math. If I got it wrong, am sure other got it wrong too and it would be useful to clarify publicly.
On that note, I’ve sent this post along to Lucius of the GivingMultiplier team.
Thank you.
I agree with what Kit said as well.
But that the only reason you’re not removing it is because of Kit’s comment makes me pretty concerned about the forum.
I also disagree that private communication is better than public communication in cases like this.
This doesn’t change the “indistinguishable from if I gave X” property, but it is a thing that would have been easy to check before posting.
I did check. As you said, it doesn’t change the conclusion (it actually makes it worse).
Second, point (b) matters. It seems like a bold assumption to assume that EA charities have reached “market efficiency”
I’m >50% sure that it doesn’t fare better, but maybe. In any case, I specified in my OP that my main objection was (a).
Thus, if you actually think one of the “EA” choices at GivingMultiplier is more valuable than the rest, it seems very likely that you contribute more to their work by choosing them to be matched.
Yep, I did mentioned that in my OP.
Did you see anything on the site that actually seemed false to you?
No, I also mentioned this in OP.
Give people an incentive to think about splitting their donation between “heart” and “head”, by...
There’s not really a real incentive though. I feel like there’s a motte-and-bailey. The motte is that you get to choose one of the 9 charities, the bailey is that the matching to the local charity is actually meaningful.
and the local charity of their choice
That’s meaningless as I showed in OP.
If you think they could have been even more clear, or think that most donors will believe something different despite the FAQ, you could say so. But to say that people who use the match “don’t understand what’s going on” is both uncharitable and, as best I can tell, false.
[...]I disagree. shrug
We already have one gateway drug: poverty alleviation. We don’t need more. Psychedelics won’t change the civilisation’s path. Next.
Importance: not really important to read this comment
Update: I updated; see my reply
GivingMultiplier’s description according to the EA newsletter^1:
Let’s assume Effective_Charity and Local_Charity.
If you were going to give 100 USD to Local_Charity, but instead donate 10 USD to Effective_Charity and 90 USD to Local_Charity, GivingMultiplier will give 9 USD to Local_Charity and 1 USD to Effective_Charity, so there’s now 99 USD going to the Local_Charity and 11 USD going the Effective_Charity. GivingMultiplier would give the money to Effective_Charity anyway. So for the donor, this is indistinguishable from donating 99 USD to Local_Charity and 1 USD to Effective_Charity, but it’s done in a more obscure way.^2
Also, sure they are rather transparent about their process – at least in the newsletter; it wasn’t obvious from the main page of the website –, but still, their scheme mostly works only insofar as people don’t understand what’s going on.
Potential motives
A bunch of people don’t know Why you shouldn’t let “donation matching” affect your giving, and so they will be misguided by donation matches. If EA charities don’t use them, then they might be at a disadvantage. So their reasoning might be that the game theory favors also using this technique under a consequentialist moral framework – sort of like a tit-for-tat with other charities, with deceiving donors as an externality.
One could argue that they should link to the piece against donation matching on their website, but maybe both memes are fit to different environments – maybe it would mostly reduce how much people use that specific service to fill their donation matching need, or something like that. I don’t know, I’m trying to steelman it.
They might also want to know where people donate money, so they allow people to choose where some money goes among those 9 charities in exchange for knowing where they donate the rest of the money. And at the same time, they signal support for those 9 charities.
Consequences on the donors
If donation matches don’t change how much donors give, but just where they give (which seems plausible to me), biasing them equally against all charities might actually help them make decisions that are more aligned with their worldview than if they were less biased with only a subset of them.
Footnotes
1) Their website is actually giving different numbers, but the idea is the same.
2) Sure, there’s the real choice of choosing which of the 9 Effective Charities receive the money, but:
a) The part about local charities is a red herring
b) Those charities probably sort-of have reached market efficiency (in the sense that large donors can rebalance their donations according to how much total funding they want each of them to have)
(a) is my main objection.
[Question] Which effective altruism projects look disingenuous?
I posted on my website because I’m using some formatting not supported here: Mati’s 2020 donation recommendations
Ah yes, will do. Had I seen that thread, I would probably only have posted there instead of a top-level post. Thanks!
I just submitted a new wiki article, and it says it’s under review. How long does that usually take? Let me know if you’d like to have more reviewers to help with that.
the community, yes. the practice / approach, no.