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GMcGowan
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I broadly agree that cash management could be improved at many charities, so thanks for this post!
The interest rate for the fiscal year should probably be based on the best available bank account rate. I think that is considerably less than your given interest rates, for example in the UK the best business savings account I could find offered about 0.9%.
I wrote about my donation decisions this year on my blog. I’m hoping to ramp up my giving over the next four years so I’ve decided to be more public about my thoughts.
TL;DR: I’m giving away £35k this year. £3.5k to SCI and the remainder to the Long Term Future Fund.
What would you like to fund, but can’t because of organisational constraints? (e.g. investing in private companies is IIRC forbidden for charities).
I have a cryonics contract with Alcor, and I pay annual dues to them. Most of this is counted as charitable giving.
Can you say a little bit more about this? I tend not to think of cryonics as charitable.
There seems to be something wrong with your footnotes formatting. They all direct me to create a new post on the EA forum, as opposed to linking to the bottom of the page. E.g. `https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/newPost#sdendnote3sym`
Interesting angle that I hadn’t considered before!
Presumably this reasoning would change the calculus for a lot of other actions one could take as well? E.g. various types of global development spending that pay off in the future (e.g. deworming) would become worse relative to spending that pays off soon (e.g. bednets).
Rather than a mere 14 QALYs, kidney donation produces hundreds if not thousands of expected QALYs.
I feel that this may be too strong a claim. In the very long run, I would expect the population to rise to whatever the carrying capacity was (or whatever level was agreed on by the AI or something). So saving a life now would be good (+~7 years) but not worth thousands of years of QALYs, as a new person might well have come into existence if the kidney donee had died.
In particular, this argument reminds me of discussions about cryonics possibly being an EA cause—e.g. Jeff Kaufman’s essay on the subject here. Excerpt of the most relevant part:
If you’re a total hedonistic utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t the real metric. Instead the question is how many lives will there be and how good are they? In a future society with the technology to revive cryonics patients there would still be some kind of resource limits bounding the number of people living or being emulated. Their higher technology would probably allow them to have as many people alive as they chose, within those bounds. If they decided to revive people, this would probably come in place of using those resources to create additional people or run more copies of existing people.
The same goes for bunkers
For what it’s worth, Nick did a shallow investigation of bunker building and found it was likely not very effective (not that this necessarily argues against general efforts to increase civilisation’s robustness).
How do you view this interacting with considerations of giving now vs later? An alternate plan would be invest my donations for e.g. 10 years, then those plus interest would be enough to make me a largeish donor for that year—presumably with lower transaction and coordination costs.
Does that include National Insurance? As you can’t claim back NI from Gift Aid, but you never pay it if you forego salary, the saving looks like it would be 12% on employee NI and 13.8% on employer NI (if I’m interpreting the taxes properly).
(source: https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance-rates-letters/contribution-rates)
I think old people just have more resources than young people, so they give less as a proportion of their resources.
Alternatively, you might think old people have had a lot of time to develop commitments to various causes, and so feel obligated to give more.
Have there been movements broadly like EA before? What happened to them? More generally, why have these ideas become so popular now as opposed to a few decades ago?
Thanks for making this Ryan, I love it already!
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying!