The most important reason missing from ‘Reasons to give now’ is “Giving to particular organizations can accelerate our learning about which causes are best to support.” We’ll probably get better information as time passes, but we’ll get a lot more of it if we fund ongoing projects to figure out what’s best to give to.
lukeprog
Karma: 3,860
Singer probably read Reasons and Persons not long after it came out, but then the Berlin Wall fell a couple years later, and nuclear risk would have looked less pressing. Also, I’m not sure it ever looked to anyone like nuclear risk was at all likely to be an existential catastrophe cutting off billions of future generations.
How are your salaries so crazy low?
(Also, thanks for this informative review and all your hard work on fundraising for EA causes.)
Just FYI, Rob Bensinger is prepping a reply to Davis for MIRI’s blog.
Thanks for doing this, Tom!
Are AMAs on this site announced publicly in advance? By the time I visit the site to discover them, they’ve already concluded.
Note that GiveWell / Good Ventures (unsurprisingly) like to research a charity or cause area themselves before they direct funding to it, and this is tightly constrained by the pace of GiveWell research staff growth, so in practice many high-leverage opportunities are still (in my opinion) available to marginal EtGers — at-least, if those EtGers are willing to be at least 1/5th as proactive about finding good opportunities as, say, Matt Wage is. Maybe that won’t be true after 10 years of additional research conducted by GiveWell (incl. OpenPhil), but I think it’ll be true for the foreseeable future.
There are probably additional reasons GiveWell / Good Ventures won’t fund particular things, besides the fact that they haven’t been researched in sufficient depth by GiveWell. E.g. GiveWell might think it’s a good thing for there to be multiple meta-charities in the EA space that maintain independence, and so even if funding CEA projects is a clear win, they still might think it’s a bad idea for GW/GV to direct any support to CEA projects.
And finally, it’s also possible that individual EtGers might have different values or world-models than the public faces of GW/GV have, and for that reason those marginal EtGers could have good opportunities available to them that are not likely to be met by GW-directed funding anytime soon, if ever.
(I say all this as a random EA who thinks about these things, not as a soon-to-be GW staffer.)
That said, I also think people with the right collection of talents should seriously consider applying to do cause prioritization research at GW or elsewhere, and people with a different right collection of talents should consider starting new projects/organizations, especially when doing so in coordination with an already-interested funder like GV.
I haven’t studied organ donation, but I was under the impression that the current state of the (admittedly non-experimental) evidence suggested that switching to opt-out would likely yield significant (though not huge) increases in organ donation, e.g. see here and here.
Is it easy for you to explain, or link me to, the reasons for your skepticism?
In addition to making available scholarships clearer, I wonder whether there’s anything that can be done to convince prospective attendees of how incredibly expensive it is to run this kind of event (thus necessitating “high” ticket prices). My sense is that people just do not understand how expensive it is to get acceptable venues and acceptable catered food.
I like this idea. I’ll make some suggestions (not already made elsewhere on this page) as replies to this comment.
Seems hard to pick one post in particular from the 80k blog; maybe I’ll have to nominate the book when it comes out.
Seems like this one should probably count for 2009 rather than 2016…
I donated to MIRI this year, too, and it is striking — given that you and I coming at the question from different backgrounds (i.e. with me as past MIRI executive) — how similar my reasons (this year) are to yours, including my reaction to Open Phil’s write-up, my reservations, my perception of how field dynamics have changed, etc.
(Note: I work at Open Phil but wasn’t involved in thinking through or deciding Open Phil’s grant to MIRI. My opinions in this comment are, obviously, my own.)
Just FYI, I’m currently writing up a report on phenomenal consciousness and moral patienthood — but not moral weight, not yet — for the Open Philanthropy Project. Some conversations from this investigation have been published already, see here.
I’m glad you’re happy with MIRI’s lean nonprofit intentions, but as I recently explained, we haven’t implemented much of those plans yet: http://intelligence.org/2013/12/20/2013-in-review-operations/
I’ll be saying more in future posts about our plans for 2014, and my views about research methodology.