Effective Altruism
Last updated: 2024-04-22.Where to Give?
For small donors, I currenly think that the best place to give, absent matching schemes, is to a donor lottery, like the one that Giving What We Can runs at the end of each year. This is because, assuming that you're risk neutral (which you probably should be, if you're a small donor and hence are donating a small amount compared to the amount dedicated to optimising in your cause area), there's only upside: at worst you'll donate the same expected monetary amount to wherever you were going to donate, and you can also spend time evaluating where to donate to find somewhere even better. Given that there is increasing marginal utility from it being optimal to spend more effort evaluating with a larger bankroll, the largest donor lottery (up until one starts hitting significant diminishing returns) is the best to give to.
On the object level, because "Donor Lottery" is passing the buck to a longer deliberation process and you might want my opinions on where that deliberation process might end up, I'm not so sure where to give. I think giving to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) might be a good idea; I don't expect MIRI to spend money on things that are alignment-themed but that they don't think would help.
My Donations
The following is a list of every charitable donation I have made, as of the last donation listed, along with the reasoning behind it, so that you too can maximise utility. Each amount donated has been scaled so that the area covered by the number roughly corresponds to the amount, in the interests of scope sensitivity.
| Date | Organisation | Cause Area | Amount | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-12-23 | Lottery | £3699.74 | The donor lottery was the destination for the usual reasons, the amount is to make up the remaining of my 10% Try Giving pledge for this year. Because often when I mention the Donor Lottery people ask what the donor lottery is, and tend to have the same few followup questions, I wrote a pitch for them in a Twitter thread.
| |
| 2023-12-05 | Meta | £12.50 | They give you a badge next to your username on the EA forum if you donate to the fund. Since this was made just to get the badge and not to impartially maximise utility, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2023. | |
| 2023-11-17 | Long-term | £187.50 | The EA Forum Donation Election is ongoing, and for nominating a charity requires that a fundraiser be made that raises >$50 for that charity. I expect that MIRI is unlikely to win (Manifold has it at 4%, and probably that's an overestimate because of liquidity problems), but because I was probably going to donate to MIRI anyway giving it a chance at all of being on the donation election is +EV anyway. Maybe there is an unknown grassroots groundswell of support! (There isn't). This is £187.50, instead of $50.01, because I wasn't sure if the first donation went through, and the second donation was taking quite a long time to process and I wanted it to be nominated in time. | |
| 2023-11-17 | Meta | £12.50 | When I was donating to MIRI, GWWC prompted me to add 10% to my donation to support GWWC operations, and hey, sure, why not. | |
| 2023-08-15 | Animals | £62.50 | So two things! Firstly, in my non-consequentialist carnist apology donations, I forgot to take into account eggs and milk. Free range eggs are -26.7 welfare points per kilogram with 11.37 kg being consumed a year (OWID chart), and milk is -0.1 welfare points per kilogram with 200 kg being consumed a year (OWID chart), so over the last two years I've failed to account for another -1000 welfare points. Those have been added on to this donation. Secondly, I am now vegetarian plus no eggs plus no milk except if it's some random insignificant additive because I don't want many complicated rules on whether I'm allowed to eat that is extremely doomed for Tetraspaces, and plan to stay that way, so I added on the welfare points cost up to when I started being vegetarian in 2023. Just straightforwardly being vegetarian is way more sensible than this farce I had going on! Recommend, factory farming is horrible. Since this was deliberately made as an offset, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2023. | |
| 2023-07-15 | Animals | £76.84 | Offset meat consumption for 2022. Since this was deliberately made as an offset, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2023. | |
| 2023-01-05 | Long-term | £4010.43 | I pledged to donate 10% of my income in 2023; this makes up the rest of that amount. It's to MIRI, rather than to the donor lottery, because I was split between them and it seems that MIRI is efficient with respect to the alignment community, in the sense that if there's some avenue that has a large amount of hope, MIRI would be working on that. One reason you might not give to a donor lottery is if the overhead of a donor lottery isn't worth the additional benefit, and I don't strongly expect looking to find something reliably better than MIRI that MIRI itself can't find, or if they think they might be unhappy if they lose the lottery, and when considering giving to MIRI or to the Donor Lottery the Donor Lottery did feel somewhat unsatisfying. | |
| 2022-12-01 | Long-term | £42.02 | Part two of my monthly donation to make use of every.org's matching funds. | |
| 2022-11-01 | Long-term | £43.57 | every.org was running a 2× match for monthly donations made in November and December. I made the donation to MIRI because they're trying different things that are trying to aim directly at the heart of the alignment problem which I have become more concerned about this year; this year and the last they've been sharing their models of alignment due to being in somewhat of a rut after their main research direction didn't pan out, which isn't too much of a knock on them because no research directions are panning out; see the 2022 MIRI Alignment Discussion posts and the 2021 MIRI Conversations. Possibly CEA might be better, though I haven't estimated the flowthrough funding specifically towards well-aimed alignment research that tries to be something that scales up to superintelligences (i.e. actually notkilleveryoneism) from attracting large donors. | |
| 2022-10-10 | Global Poverty | £31.25 | @mealreplacer on Twitter told me to if I smiled at the meme, and I did indeed smile at the meme, so I donated. | |
| 2022-07-18 | Environment | £147.24 | Climate change offsets for 2022, same reasoning as before. Also I was frustrated because the weather was really hot, and if everyone does this then the weather would be normal. As in, sometimes hot anyway. Nevertheless. Since this was deliberately made as an offset, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2022. | |
| 2021-12-12 | Animals | £75.00 | UK per capita meat consumption is 32 kg poultry, 25 kg pork, 18 kg beef, 4 kg mutton, 1 kg other land animals (relevant OWID graph), and 20 kg fish (relevant OWID graph), for a total of 32×-40 + 25×-30 + 18*2 + ~5×-20(?) + ~20×-100(?) = about -4000 welfare points (relevant EA forum post) per year, which is about -5000 per non-vegan adult. 1 chicken life = 2 kg chicken = -80 welfare points, so saving 60 chickens offsets this. This donation is about the estimated cost to save that many animals. If everyone did this or became vegan, there would be no more factory farming; I am not yet vegan, so I am doing this. Since this was deliberately made as an offset, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2021. | |
| 2021-11-27 | Lottery | £2619.46 | And thus we reach the donor lottery, where I donate what is needed to make up a total of 10% of my income. This gives me a 0.174% chance of winning. Hopefully, someone exactly aligned with my values who is not me wins 😜. I think that a donor lottery is the optimal place to give because, assuming that you're risk neutral (which I should be, because total meta funding as of approximately the time of this donation was $26,000,000/year according to Benjamin Todd's estimates, much larger than what I am giving, so I'm unlikely to hit diminishing returns), there's only upside: at worst you'll donate the same expected monetary amount to wherever you were going to donate, and you can spend time evaluating where to donate to find somewhere better. Given that there is increasing marginal utility from it being optimal to spend more effert evaluating with a larger bankroll, the largest donor lottery (up until one starts hitting significant diminishing returns) is the best to give to, so I decided to give to the $2,000,000 one. | |
| 2021-11-18 | Non-EA | £14.11 | I use LibreOffice as my desktop document editor suite. Since I think people shouldn't be poor if they are nice enough to make software free (as they should), I donated a standard anchoring amount when they asked me to when I updated it. Since this was not made with the goal of producing the maximum amount of utility, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2021. | |
| 2021-11-10 | Meta | £73.95 | This donation was also to make use of every.org's donation matching event. Founders Pledge, as an organisation intented to facilitate giving among high-net-worth people and get them on board, seemed like plausibly it was also working in the long-tailed distribution that contains potential billionaire EAs and hence I guessed it would be at least half as effective as whatever I would eventually decide to grant to if I was chosen to allocate a future Donor Lottery pool too. | |
| 2021-10-21 | Meta | £73.31 | Between April and October, I become more intuitively aware of the heavy-tailed-ness of effective altruism, especially given the coninued rise of Sam Bankman-Fried, who in April had $9 billion and in October had $23 billion, all pledged to eventually be doned to effective altruism. At the end of July,Benjamin Todd estimated that effective altruism had a net present value of total commited funding of $46 billion, about half of which was one guy (Dustin Moskovitz), and about a third of which was one other guy (Sam Bankman-Fried). It seemed to me like the most impactful thing to do was to get more such guys on board with effective altruism. In response, I threw up my hands and resolved to give to the Donor Lottery, and to think very hard about the issue if I won. In November, every.org offered a doubling of donations of up to $100 for any organisation on its list. The Center for Effective Altruism has a track record of incubating important effective altruist projects that help with getting more people on board, such as EA Funds and the Donor Lottery (which I have donated to), as well as 80,000 Hours which worked with SBF earlier in his career, and so I guessed it would be at least half as effective as whatever I would eventually decide to grant to if I was chosen to allocate a future Donor Lottery pool. (Update 2023-07-07: And what of Sam-Bankman Fried being a fraud? Well, that's a problem! Because of that one guy's mistakes, effective altruism shrank by a third! Effective altruism shouldn't be so reliant on individual people like that. One thousand EA billionaires!) | |
| 2021-07-12 | Environment | £125.00 | At UK levels of carbon intensity, 1 day of income is about enough to fund sequestration or emissions reduction of one’s yearly CO2 emissions ($38k gdp per capita, one day of which is $100, 6 tons means $15/ton, which is about offset costs). Since, if everyone donated enough to avert their carbon emissions, global warming would be solved, I donated about a day worth of my income to reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A tentative name for this if I generalise it into a campaign is #AllInADaysWork. Since this was deliberately made as an offset, I do not count this towards my 10% Try Giving pledge for 2021. | |
| 2021-04-24 | Long-term | £600.00 | I decided to aim for the full 10% Try Giving pledge at this point; this donation took me up to 10%. | |
| 2020-12-22 | Lottery | £50.00 | ||
| 2020-12-18 | Lottery | £50.00 | Some more waters-testing on the donor lottery, which I was kind of sold on at this point but not enough to stake a huge amount of money on being the best place to give. | |
| 2020-12-15 | Animals | £32.81 | The Humane League was running a pretty impressive 3× match for the end of 2020. | |
| 2020-12-02 | Long-term | £7.53 | every.org offers $25 charity giftcards, redeemable after donating $10. I made this out to MIRI as a default inoffensive longtermist organisation. | |
| 2020-12-01 | Global Poverty | £18.79 | GiveDirectly was matching donations to its Remote Liberia Program, and I wanted to show a little support, especially since@decadantism on Twitter was so nice as to raise it to my attention when I was making a thread of 2020 year-end matching opportunites (sidenote: it seems from looking at my donation history that people can get me to donate like £30 to a global poverty charity just by asking me to. I hope all readers will use this power over me only for good). | |
| 2020-11-30 | Long-term | £50.00 | ||
| 2020-11-25 | Lottery | £12.50 | At this point, I'd read some arguments in favour of the donor lottery, though I wasn't totally sold on the prospect that it was the best place for small donors to give to. This tiny donation was something of a testing the waters, to see if I could feel motivated by buying a tiny chance of allocating a pool. | |
| 2020-11-20 | Global Poverty | £25.00 | @antirobust on Twitter got invited to a donors-exclusive online event, and I wanted in on it. I actually don't think this donation actually got me invited to any of them. | |
| 2020-11-18 | Long-term | £200.00 | ||
| 2020-11-11 | Global Poverty | £18.75 | @ellegist on Twitter pointed out that if everyone reading the silly little games donated £15, then many malaria nets could be provided. I was reading those silly little games so I donated £15. | |
| 2020-10-30 | Long-term | £50.00 | ||
| 2020-09-30 | Long-term | £50.00 | First regular donation. This was made to be about 2% of my income, because in the US 1.44% of GDP goes to charity and I didn't want to be less charitable than the average person and call myself an EA even when I was considering whether to go for a full 10% Try Giving pledge. I chose the Long Term Future fund because their focus of existential risk, primarily from unfriendly AI with a lesser focus on artificial pandemics, is the object-level cause area with the greatest marginal impact. This fund hence mostly shares my goals, but is able to donate a larger pool of money and spend more time evaluating the most effective places to grant it to. I was also guided by 80,000 Hours' 2018 talent gaps survey, in which the median respondent from a survey of EA leaders guessed that donations to the Long Term Future were 167% as impactful as donations to the EA Infrastructure fund. |
Chart
Chart of my donations by cause area and date, up to 2023-12-30.
