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
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.
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.
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).
Thanks for the response!
As I have some knowledge in this area I am keen to create a project team on this and would love to hear from anybody who is interested in being involved.
This could potentially make a good .impact project. Also, you should talk to Charity Science, which is an EA organization working full-time to fundraise for GiveWell top charities. They just recently had an event that raised $11.6K for Deworm the World.
I was raised Catholic. On my eighth birthday, having received my first communion about a year prior, I casually asked my priest how to reaffirm my faith and do something for the Lord. The memory is fuzzy, but I think I donated a chunk of allowance money and made a public confession at the following mass.
A bunch of the grownups made a big deal out of it, as grownups are like to do. ‘Faith of a child’, and all that. This confused me, especially when I realized that what I had done was rare. I wasn’t trying to get pats on the head, I was appealing to the Lord of the Heavens and the Earth. Were we all on the same page, here? This was the creator. He was infinitely virtuous, and he had told us what to do.
And yet, everyone was content to recite hymns once a week and donate for the reconstruction of the church. What about the rest of the world, the sick, the dying? Where were the proselytizers, the missionary opportunities? Why was everyone just sitting around?
On that day, I became acquainted with civilizational inadequacy. I realized you could hand a room full of people the literal word of God, and they’d still struggle to pay attention for an hour every weekend.
From: “On Saving the World” by Nate Soares.
Apparently Jeff Kaufman tried publicly broadcasting his donations, but it wasn’t too well received each time he did it
Thanks for the insight. Can you clarify how this public broadcasting was done?
I’m Peter. I work as a data scientist at Avant Credit, a non-profit providing online loans to people with near-prime credit ratings. This job helps me earn-to-give, but more valuably it provides a lot of opportunity for learning, to enhance my career prospects later.
When not doing my day job, I work on .impact, a distributed volunteer force of effective altruists working on really useful projects. Recently, this has lead me to collaborate a lot with ACE, where I’m researching the impact of Facebook ads on diet change, and Charity Science, where I’m helping scale up the Birthday Charity fundraisers you guys may have been seeing around a lot (p.s. you should do one).
For which other groups? It might be a matter of different people’s experiences. Or maybe EAs are a bit less savvy at social interaction than other groups. ;) The movement has been accused of being unwelcoming before.
Me too!
What about the rationalization that charitable extracurricular activities teach kids important lessons of moral engagement? There are reasons to be skeptical. A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resumé-building “social action” assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving him back—forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious “lessons” of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.
-- Steven Pinker, “The Trouble With Harvard”
Definitely. I think it takes a good amount of social awareness to decide when and where to announce oneself. Perhaps a better title for this post is “To Inspire People to Give, Don’t Be Overly Anonymous About Your Giving”...
My opinion was that anti-aging and existential risk seem roughly equally neglected and roughly equally tractable, but existential risk seems a whole lot more valuable, so hence the focus on that instead.
I thought the EA Facebook group was going to play “LW Discussion” to the EA Forum’s “LW Main”. Though the open thread does blur that line.
There’s also an EA Reddit for posting articles.
- 20 Sep 2014 3:26 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Open Thread by (
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.