Depending on what worldview you hold, you might consider different EA charities “the world's most effective charity."

For instance, Shrimp Welfare Project is the most effective charity if you are concerned about reducing near-term suffering and you have a very specific view of how neurons correlate with the capacity to experience pain.

Similarly, GiveWell’s top charities are the most effective charities if you are concerned about reducing near-term human suffering, and you want to be extremely confident that your donation will have the intended effect.

And, Founders Pledge’s Climate Fund is only the most effective charity if you think that reducing climate change is more important than work on other issues.

But, of course, most people hold different worldviews than these. For instance, I don’t care whether a charity has guaranteed-impact or is more hits-based.

For this reason, I’m wondering if anyone has compiled the most effective charities according to different worldviews.

The dimensions I’m most interested in would be:

  • Near-term (5-10 years) vs medium-term (20 years) vs. long-term (75 years)
  • General cause area (Factory farming vs. global health vs. climate change vs. pandemics vs. AI)
  • General theme (Overall suffering vs. Human suffering vs. animal suffering vs. human flourishing)
  • Whether focus is on helping those who are worst off vs. preventing harm in general vs. doing the most good overall
  • Guaranteed impact vs hit-based
  • Definition of good (wellbeing vs. something else)

I find that there are a lot of charities that I would guess fit on certain dimensions, but I personally would rather rely on the judgement of an expert rather than myself.

For instance, to me, it seems like work on global health is probably more important than work on climate change (from a strictly utilitarian view), but that's mostly based on vibes.

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This isn't a precise answer to your question, but you might find this from Rethink pretty interesting. They've made a few different tools which help you figure out where you should donate based on your philosophical beliefs. It won't tell you which real-life charity to donate to, but it will tell you which kind of charity you should look for in real life. 

Thanks for sharing that. I feel like there cheating a bit by having the user enter in how many DALYs they think $1000 will prevent, lol.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W4JksntnuFABZCkCw/funding-strategies-for-global-public-goods

^ I would read this to get some perspective on how to think about funding mechanisms and converting all the way to morally actionable outputs. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopsmd3JELJRyTTty/ozzie-gooen-s-shortform?commentId=GHT2r3ubscoXPwfb3

https://www.longtermwiki.com/wiki/E411 
https://ea-crux-project.vercel.app/ai-transition-model-views/graph 
 

^ check out what ozzie is doing here (ea quick take + longtermism wiki + ea crux project). 


https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/a-proposed-hierarchy-of-longtermist-concepts

^ good way to try to operationalize real world quantities into morally relevant long termism. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/y5n47MfgrKvTLE3pw

^ moral weights project to give baseline for moral circle sliders. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hH9NRqzGam65mgPG/five-steps-for-quantifying-speculative-interventions
^ broad post on trying to do this for more speculative stuff. 

but yea this is hard and goes exponential quickly 

My take is we should start by really drilling down a db of charity financials, charity outputs (or intervention outputs and charities are composed of interventions), then pipes for converting between outputs into outcomes, with fungible philosophy pipes that take outcomes and pipe into rankings

ranking charities requires solving or assuming:

  • Metaethics 📚
  • Population ethics 👥
  • Philosophy of mind 🧠
  • Decision theory 🎲
  • Astrobiology 👽
  • The nature of consciousness 💭
  • Whether distance matters (in space 🌌 AND time ⏳)
  • on top of all the boiler plate auditing. 

Ah, thanks, Charlie! This is super helpful!

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