Along with my co-founder, Marcus A. Davis, I run Rethink Priorities. I’m also a Grant Manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund and a top forecaster on Metaculus. Previously, I was a professional data scientist.
Peter Wildeford
Karma: 17,706
Giving now currently seems to beat giving later
What Is earning to give?
Why I’m skeptical about unproven causes (and you should be too)
Pitching “effective altruism”?
I appreciate you taking the time to write up about your donations and I definitely appreciate you thinking hard about where your donations go, as well as the fact that you’re committing a lot of money to good causes. However, I feel like some of the logic behind your choices are a bit inconsistent.
First, I’m not clear on why you’re splitting your donation among many different organizations. I think there are some reasons one would want to have diversification, but some of your picks seem clearly better than others, and it’s best to focus specifically on the highest-impact pick. If you’re looking to maximize expected immediate impact, it looks like based on your views you should go all-in on SCI or Deworm the World. If you’re looking to maximize learning, it looks like you should go all-in on either GiveWell (unrestricted) or Dispensers for Safe Water, depending on whether you trust GiveWell or IPA more. I don’t know why you would diversify between both.
Second, I’m not clear on what benefit there is to donating to UNICEF. The benefits of experience working in the developing world is important, but IPA also has this. Also, just because UNICEF rolls out high-impact programs that GiveWell can’t find more room for more funding for doesn’t mean UNICEF itself has more room for more funding in those areas. I suspect that since UNICEF is so well funded, marginal increases in funding will not fund nearly as cost-effective activities.
Where I’m giving and why: Peter Hurford
The link for .impact should point to http://www.dotimpact.im. Sorry for the typo.
I’ve been following the MIRI blog and I look forward to hearing more. The workshops also seem like a potentially valuable model for learning more about producing Friendly AI work. I’d like to hear more about how those workshops are being used to learn and what has been learned sometime, if you have the time to write that up.
Thanks for your comment and keep up the good work.
I endorse the response that Michael Dickens gave. I also just wrote an essay “When Do I Expect Good Giving Opportunities to Improve?”—http://www.everydayutilitarian.com/essays/when-do-i-expect-good-giving-opportunities-to-improve—that is a more lengthy and thorough reply to your comment.
Effective altruism is not a competition
Interview with Boris Yakubchik
What small things can an EA do?
Thanks. I installed that!
Another example, though not as good, could be effective environmentalism. It’s a classic cause among altruists and looks like an x-risk.
Many assets have compounding value (e.g., interest) that comes from owning things earlier. But I don’t think human life is one of those things.
It’s worth pointing out that lives saved now are in a better position to save more lives (c.f., flow-through effects).
What do you mean by “internal support system”? I’ve personally found the EA community to have way more internal support system than other communities I’ve been involved in (atheism, rationalism, animal rights).
I agree with this essay in principle, but I think the examples of potential top domestic charities are poor. It’s not going to be possible to get broad popular agreement on which political party is the “better” one.
Moreover, the amount of time that will need to go into assessing what are the best domestic charities will probably have to be massive as these charities will be much harder to assess and the evidence bases will be fewer. I’d suggest we start by finding all the RCTs on domestic charities and start looking for cost-effectiveness there.
I think another good starting point will be the organizations suggested by GiveWell labs (see http://blog.givewell.org/2013/09/26/givewell-labs-update-2/). Things like geoengeneering research, criminal justice, and open science are pretty domestic and yet still potentially very high impact. Same with, perhaps, x-risk reduction or 80K Hours.