Take the 2025 EA Forum Survey to help inform our strategy and prioritiesTake the survey

Context:  I have given around $1000 to GiveWell this year and I am considering giving around $1000 more. I'm a college student, so that works out to around 10% or 20% of last year's income.

It seems like EA-aligned causes and professional grant makers like the FTX future fund have more money than they know what to do with; the general consensus on the forum appears to be that EA is (for the moment, at least) no longer funding constrained. If this is true, the case for direct work seems very strong, but the case for personally giving seems weak. 

I don't expect to do better than e.g. William MacAskill when selecting funding opportunities, and if he thinks that last-dollar funding is not cost effective, why should I? (I know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they aren't funding more projects, but aren't out of dollars.)

In other words, professionals I expect to be able to make better decisions then I am think that marginal EA-aligned funds are better saved than spent right now. Why not do the same for my personal giving? If the EA landscape doesn't return to being funding constrained, why ever give more?

26

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Comments14
Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

We still don't have enough money to bring everyone out of extreme poverty, even if EA spent all its money. The fact that I can still save a child's life with my donations really motivates me to help where I can.

That said, as a student, it might be worth saving until you've finished your studies, especially if you don't have a safety net to fall back on (like parents or a spouse).

The other people gave reasons why you might want to donate money on the margin. But my personal guess is that in most cases, college students in EA probably should not be donating large amounts (to them) of money, and instead invest it in either improving their own career capital, or (if they don't have good social or governmental safety nets) saving.

Almost all of your wealth as a college student is in human capital, so investing $s in ways that lets you either do direct work later or donate much more later is likely the best route to impact for your money. 

To my eyes, honestly the strongest reason to donate money for most people in your position is something like "identity formation": you might consciously want to form an honest self-image as someone who cares about others and is willing to make large personal sacrifices to do so. I did this when I was younger, and I'm glad to have done so. But on the other hand, I value money now much less than I used to, and if I could send money back to my past self, I would gladly do so.

There have been a few posts discussing the value of small donations over the past year, notably:

  1. Benjamin Todd on "Despite billions of extra funding, small donors can still have a significant impact"
  2. a counterpoint, AppliedDivinityStudies on "A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations"
  3. a counter-counterpoint, Michael Townsend  on "The value of small donations from a longtermist perspective"

There's a lot of discussion here (especially if you go through the comments of each piece), and so plenty of room to come to different conclusions.

Here's roughly where I come out of this:

  • What's the relevant counterfactual? Many of these comment threads turn into discussions about earning-to-give vs direct work, but if you have $1000 in your hand, ready to donate, that's not the relevant question. Rather, you should ask, "if I don't donate this, what would I do with it instead, and how much impact would that have?"
  • You say "I know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they aren't funding more projects, but aren't out of dollars." I think this frames the issue incorrectly. It's not that big funders know that other projects aren't cost-effective, it's that they don't currently have enough projects that clear a certain cost-effectiveness bar. But crucially, that bar is still far above zero!

This means

  • there are probably many opportunities that are just as cost-effective that they haven't found (potentially you have information they don't that you could exploit; see this section of the above ADS post)
  • marginal donations should have a cost-effectiveness at worst just below that bar, which means you're only doing a little worse than the big funders. (This point taken from Benjamin Todd here.)

If you aren’t opposed to donating to political campaigns: some campaign finance laws restrict the amount of money that can go directly to campaigns on a per-person basis, so at least that seems like an area where “small” donors can still matter.

Agree with this point.  Jeffrey Ladish wrote "US Citizens: Targeted political contributions are probably the best passive donation opportunities for mitigating existential risk". 

He says: 

Recently, I’ve surprised myself by coming to believe that donating to candidates who support policies which reduce existential risks is probably the best passive donation opportunity for US citizens. The main reason I’ve changed my mind is that I think highly aligned political candidates have a lot of leverage to affect policies that could impact the long-term future and are uniquely benefited from individual donations.

If you're not a US citizen, you can volunteer for a campaign (that's legal!). 

My answer is that you should primarily be focused on saving, so that you have the financial freedom to pivot, change jobs, learn more, or found an organization. Previously, I recommended new EAs (esp. college students) give 1%, save at least 10% (so that they were building at least some concrete altruistic habits, while mostly focusing on building up slack).

I think this remains good practice in the current environment. (Giving 1% is somewhat a symbolic gift in the first place, and I think it's still a useful forcing function to think about which organizations are valuable to you). But also, as long as you're concretely setting aside money and thinking about your future, I think that's a pretty good starting point.

With respect to the last dollar of funding: I think Open Philanthropy expects to spend their last dollar on something more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. So I think the last dollar of spending will still look good, and at the worst case your spending now will move some other funding to something somewhat less effective but still pretty good down the line.

Another potential advantage for an individual donor would be identifying something not currently receiving large amounts of funding that you think is worth taking a bet on. That would give the initiative more time to demonstrate it's value and to gather information on how well it's achieving its goals (or it could be funding an individual to grow their skills or something).

We've also seen Will write that the FTX Future Fund rejected 95% of their applicants, so it's not the case that there's a money firehose that everyone has access to. Plenty of people are, presumably, open to working on new projects given funding.

I know that professional grant makers think that last-dollar funding is not cost effective because they aren't funding more projects, but aren't out of dollars.

None of our big donors were intending to spend all of their funding before now. It's taken Open Phil years to grow their capacity and increase their giving in line with their standards of diligence. They intend to spend down their funds, I believe, within the lifetime of their funders.

Reframe the idea of "we are no longer funding-constrained" to "we are bottlenecked by people who can find new good things to spend money on". Which means you should plausibly stop donating to funds that can't give out money fast enough, and rather spend money on orgs/people/causes you personally estimate needs more money now.

Are there any good public summaries of the collective wisdom fund managers have acquired over the years? If we're bottlenecked by people who can find new giving opportunities, it would be great to promote the related skills. And I want to read them.

Others will have better answers, but I have decided to keep donating some if my income to global health and development orgs (despite leaning pretty strongly longtermist) on the basis that:

a) non-longtermist orgs are, AFAIK, not totally funded; and

b) I won't miss it that much, and so it won't really impact any direct work I do

Even if some of the big near termist stuff is funded enough in the near future (e.g. LLIN distribution), seems like there could still be lots of cool unfunded opportunities (e.g. paying for mental health support for people in low to middle income countries).

More money in EA just means that it makes sense for us to have a lower bar for cost-effectiveness in our donations and spending.

It doesn’t actually change any moral obligations surrounding donations.

However, the lower cost effectiveness bar makes it more likely than before that the most cost-effective donations could be to incubators like CE and new orgs like CE charities, since it’s more likely than before that these orgs could meet our new, lower cost effectiveness bar.

The lower cost-effectiveness bar also means that expected value maximising, hits-based giving based more on theory and less on evidence makes more sense than before, because it’s more likely to meet the lower cost effectiveness bar.

Even though there are some EA-aligned organizations that have plenty of funding, not all EA organizations are that well funded. You should consider donating to the causes within EA that are the most neglected, such as cause prioritization research. The Center for Reducing Suffering, for example, has only received £82,864.99 GBP in total funding as of late 2021. The Qualia Research Institute is another EA-aligned organization that is funding-constrained, and believes it could put significantly more funding to good use.

mic
19
0
0

The Qualia Research Institute might be funding-constrained but it's questionable whether it's doing good work; for example, see this comment here about its Symmetry Theory of Valence.

Even if the Symmetry Theory of Valence turns out to be completely wrong, that doesn't mean that QRI will fail to gain any useful insight into the inner mechanics of consciousness. Andrew Zuckerman sent me this comment previously on QRI's pathway to impact, in response to Nuño Sempere's criticisms of QRI. The expected value of QRI's research may therefore have a very high degree of variance. It's possible that their research will amount to almost nothing, but it's also possible that their research could turn out to have a large impact. As far as I know, there aren't any other EA-aligned organizations that are doing the sort of consciousness research that QRI is doing.

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
This morning I was looking into Switzerland's new animal welfare labelling law. I was going through the list of abuses that are now required to be documented on labels, and one of them made me do a double-take: "Frogs: Leg removal without anaesthesia."  This confused me. Why are we talking about anaesthesia? Shouldn't the frogs be dead before having their legs removed? It turns out the answer is no; standard industry practice is to cut their legs off while they are fully conscious. They remain alive and responsive for up to 15 minutes afterward. As far as I can tell, there are zero welfare regulations in any major producing country. The scientific evidence for frog sentience is robust - they have nociceptors, opioid receptors, demonstrate pain avoidance learning, and show cognitive abilities including spatial mapping and rule-based learning.  It's hard to find data on the scale of this issue, but estimates put the order of magnitude at billions of frogs annually. I could not find any organisations working directly on frog welfare interventions.  Here are the organizations I found that come closest: * Animal Welfare Institute has documented the issue and published reports, but their focus appears more on the ecological impact and population decline rather than welfare reforms * PETA has conducted investigations and released footage, but their approach is typically to advocate for complete elimination of the practice rather than welfare improvements * Pro Wildlife, Defenders of Wildlife focus on conservation and sustainability rather than welfare standards This issue seems tractable. There is scientific research on humane euthanasia methods for amphibians, but this research is primarily for laboratory settings rather than commercial operations. The EU imports the majority of traded frog legs through just a few countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, creating clear policy leverage points. A major retailer (Carrefour) just stopped selling frog legs after welfar
 ·  · 10m read
 · 
This is a cross post written by Andy Masley, not me. I found it really interesting and wanted to see what EAs/rationalists thought of his arguments.  This post was inspired by similar posts by Tyler Cowen and Fergus McCullough. My argument is that while most drinkers are unlikely to be harmed by alcohol, alcohol is drastically harming so many people that we should denormalize alcohol and avoid funding the alcohol industry, and the best way to do that is to stop drinking. This post is not meant to be an objective cost-benefit analysis of alcohol. I may be missing hard-to-measure benefits of alcohol for individuals and societies. My goal here is to highlight specific blindspots a lot of people have to the negative impacts of alcohol, which personally convinced me to stop drinking, but I do not want to imply that this is a fully objective analysis. It seems very hard to create a true cost-benefit analysis, so we each have to make decisions about alcohol given limited information. I’ve never had problems with alcohol. It’s been a fun part of my life and my friends’ lives. I never expected to stop drinking or to write this post. Before I read more about it, I thought of alcohol like junk food: something fun that does not harm most people, but that a few people are moderately harmed by. I thought of alcoholism, like overeating junk food, as a problem of personal responsibility: it’s the addict’s job (along with their friends, family, and doctors) to fix it, rather than the job of everyday consumers. Now I think of alcohol more like tobacco: many people use it without harming themselves, but so many people are being drastically harmed by it (especially and disproportionately the most vulnerable people in society) that everyone has a responsibility to denormalize it. You are not likely to be harmed by alcohol. The average drinker probably suffers few if any negative effects. My argument is about how our collective decision to drink affects other people. This post is not
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It’s been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it’s finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing? In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead.  Why?  Well, even if we survive, we probably just get a future that’s a small fraction as good as it could have been. We could, instead, try to help guide society to be on track to a truly wonderful future.    That is, I think there’s more at stake when it comes to flourishing than when it comes to survival. So maybe that should be our main focus. The whole essay series is out today. But I’ll post summaries of each essay over the course of the next couple of weeks. And the first episode of Forethought’s video podcast is on the topic, and out now, too. The first essay is Introducing Better Futures: along with the supplement, it gives the basic case for focusing on trying to make the future wonderful, rather than just ensuring we get any ok future at all. It’s based on a simple two-factor model: that the value of the future is the product of our chance of “Surviving” and of the value of the future, if we do Survive, i.e. our “Flourishing”.  (“not-Surviving”, here, means anything that locks us into a near-0 value future in the near-term: extinction from a bio-catastrophe counts but if valueless superintelligence disempowers us without causing human extinction, that counts, too. I think this is how “existential catastrophe” is often used in practice.) The key thought is: maybe we’re closer to the “ceiling” on Survival than we are to the “ceiling” of Flourishing.  Most people (though not everyone) thinks we’re much more likely than not to Survive this century.  Metaculus puts *extinction* risk at about 4