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?
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.