How can we use our resources to help others the most?

This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving (and indeed, this post is largely copied from my similar post last year). I think the first fundamental insight of effective altruism (which really took it from Peter Singer) is that your donation can change someone’s life, and the wrong donation can accomplish nothing. People do not imagine charity in terms of “investments” and “payoffs”, yet GiveWell estimates that you can save a human life for somewhere in the magnitude of $3000.

Many American households donate that much to charity every year, and simply put, if the charities we donate to don’t try to maximize their impact, our donations may not help many people, when they could be saving a life.

This post is a short reminder that we have researched empirical evidence that you can make a difference in the world! The EA movement has already done very impressive work on how we might evaluate charitable giving, why the long term future matters, and what the most important and tractable issues might be.

Apart from the baseline incredible giving opportunities in global poverty (see GiveWell’s top charities), the long term future is an important and underfocused area of research. If humanity lives for a long time, then the vast majority of conscious humans who will exist will exist in the far future. Taking steps to ensure their existence could have massive payoffs, and concrete research in this area to avoid things like existential risk seems very important and underfunded.

I write this blog post not to shame people into donating their entire incomes (see Slate Star Codex on avoiding being eaten by consequentialist charitable impacts), but rather to ask donors to evaluate where you are sending your money within your budget and to see if perhaps the risk of paying such a high opportunity cost is worth it. Alma maters and church groups are the most common form of charity Americans give to, but the impacts from these areas seem much lower than donating to global poverty programs or the long term future.

Finally, part of this blog post is simply to publicly discuss what I donate to and to encourage others to create a charitable budget and allocate it to address problems that are large in the number of people they impact, highly neglected, and highly solvable. I thus donate about a third of my budget to GiveWell as a baseline based on evidence backed research to save lives today. I then donate another third of my budget to long term/existential risk causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. The primary place I’ve donated to this year is the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds. I remain uncertain on the best ways to improve the long term future, and so anything I haven’t spent from this budget item I’ve sent to GiveWell as part of my baseline giving.

The last third of my budget is reserved to focusing on policy, which is where I believe the EA movement is currently weakest. I donate money to the Center for Election Science, especially after their impressive performance this year bringing Approval Voting to St. Louis. I also donate to the Institute for Justice, as they work on fairly neglected problems in a tractable way, winning court cases to improve civil liberties for U.S. citizens. Finally, I donated a small amount to the Reason Foundation which publishes Reason magazine, as they are one of the larger places advocating big tent libertarian ideas today. It would be great to be able to move good policies to polities with bad institutions (i.e. many developing nations), but that problem seems highly intractable. It may be that the best we can do is create good institutions here and hope they are copied. I’m open to different ideas, but I am a relatively small donor and so I believe that taking risks with a portion of my donations in ways that differ from the main EA thrust is warranted.

There are many resources from the Effective Altruism community, and I’ll include several links of similar recommendations from around the EA community. If you haven’t heard of EA charities, consider giving some of your charity budget to GiveWell, or other EA organization you find convincing. If you don’t have a charity budget, consider making one for next year. Even small amounts a year can potentially save dozens of cumulative lives today, or perhaps hundreds in the far future!

How can we use our resources to help others the most?

This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving. I think the first fundamental insight of effective altruism (which really took it from Peter Singer) is that your donation can change someone’s life, and the wrong donation can accomplish nothing. People do not imagine charity in terms of “investments” and “payoffs”, yet GiveWell estimates that you can save a human life for somewhere in the magnitude of $2500.

Many American households donate that much to charity every year, and simply put, if the charities we donate to don’t try to maximize their impact, our donations may not help many people, when they could be saving a life.

This post is a short reminder that we have researched empirical evidence that you can make a difference in the world! The EA movement has already done very impressive work on how we might evaluate charitable giving, why the long term future matters, and what the most important and tractable issues might be.

Apart from the baseline incredible giving opportunities in global poverty (see GiveWell’s top charities), the long term future is an important and underfocused area of research. If humanity lives for a long time, then the vast majority of conscious humans who will exist will exist in the far future. Taking steps to ensure their existence could have massive payoffs, and concrete research in this area to avoid things like existential risk seems very important and underfunded.

I write this blog post not to shame people into donating their entire incomes (see Slate Star Codex on avoiding being eaten by consequentialist charitable impacts), but rather to ask donors to evaluate where you are sending your money within your budget and to see if perhaps the risk of paying such a high opportunity cost is worth it. Alma maters and church groups are the most common form of charity Americans give to, but the impacts from these areas seem much lower than donating to global poverty programs or the long term future.

Finally, part of this blog post is simply to publicly discuss what I donate to and to encourage others to create a charitable budget and allocate it to address problems that are large in the number of people they impact, highly neglected, and highly solvable. I thus donate about a third of my budget to GiveWell as a baseline based on evidence backed research to save lives today. I then donate another third of my budget to long term causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. Top charities I’ve donated to here include the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for AI alignment research, as well as the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds.

The last third of my budget is reserved to focusing on policy, which is where I believe the EA movement is currently weakest. I donate money to the Institute for Justice, as they work on fairly neglected problems in a tractable way, winning court cases to improve civil liberties for U.S. citizens. I also like the Center for Election Science as they work to improve the democratic processes in the US. It would be great to be able to move good policies to polities with bad institutions (i.e. many developing nations), but that problem seems highly intractable. It may be that the best we can do is create good institutions here and hope they are copied. I’m open to different ideas, but I am a relatively small donor and so I believe that taking risks with a portion of my donations in ways that differ from the main EA thrust is warranted. This is by far my most uncertain category, and thus usually I will not entirely fulfill my budget for policy charities. I plan on giving anything remaining to GiveWell.

There are many resources from the Effective Altruism community, and I’ll include several links of similar recommendations from around the EA community. If you haven’t heard of EA charities, consider giving some of your charity budget to GiveWell, or other EA organization you find convincing. If you don’t have a charity budget, consider making one for next year. Even small amounts a year can potentially save dozens of cumulative lives!

Efficient Advocacy

It’s incredible how simple and yet revolutionary the principles are behind effective altruism as well as the ideas behind GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project; if you want to help people, don’t just donate to a charity that is looking to cure a rare disease, donate in a way that can do the maximum amount of “good” per dollar.  That often means donating to a problem that affects many people, that has known, measurable, positive solutions, and that has lots of room for additional resources to combat the problem.   If you don’t know about those organizations, you should definitely check them out.

Of course, there is an obvious elephant in the room when it comes to effective altruism: politics is complex, unscientific, and unpopular. In fact, GiveWell largely sidesteps the political sphere, ignoring a big swath of human activity which has tremendous impacts on society.  Of course, they have good reason to do this; it allows them to focus on doing good things without harming anyone’s tribal identities or alienating their donor base. Moreover, it’s hard to get good unbiased data on what political policies would actually provide benefits; if there was, politics wouldn’t be so divisive.

However, I don’t have a donor base, and I have slightly different feelings on which policies would be most effective than the average American or even the average effective altruist.  I wanted to see what would happen if we could assume away some of the unknowns about political policy.  Let’s assume that the postlibertarian philosophy this blog espouses is correct: markets are pretty good at allocating resources efficiently, government policy can help address some economic areas where markets might not work (inequality, externalities), giving the state power is generally a bad thing and must be justified, and individuals should have robust protections from their government. We aren’t assuming away the current political landscape of the US, we’re just assuming we’re right.

So what would a libertarian trying to maximize efficiency in advocacy do? Do you try and emulate the Koch brothers and create or fund political organizations that change policy outcomes? Do you focus on viable candidates? How much do you accept the political process as given? Do you focus on political reforms (proportional representation), education (IHS, Economics of Library and Liberty), or do you try to work on making your own rules (crypto, seasteading, space exploration)? Let’s leave those hard questions for another time, and focus on perhaps the most mainstream approach to politics: how should you prioritize the importance of various political issues? People usually have specific issues they care about that determine which candidate they’d like to back, and the Open Philanthropy Project even has a U.S. policies page.   But which issues are actually the most important? Continue reading Efficient Advocacy