I think there’s a lot of variety in the capabilities, resources, and amount of effort that people have to put into “trying to improve the world via philanthropy”. This advice is excellent for a someone who’s better at identifying excellent performers than most “normal” donation targets AND has the right mix of time available to find/evaluate recipients but not to do direct work. I suspect that’s a pretty small number of philanthropists.
If you make programmer money and a bunch of your friends are working on weird projects that take two hours to explain and justify—and I know that describes a lot of people here—then you’re in an excellent position to do this. Essentially it’s legibility arbitrage.
I would expect that one of the key reasons why many people would not do this, is because it’s socially weird and they are uncertain about how to handle how that changes their social relationship to the people around them.
Especially, given that many programmers are more on the shy side, writing a check to a GiveWell-recommended charity is easier. I think it would be valuable if someone who acts like that would write more about their experience doing it, so that people have an easier model to copy.
I like the term “legibility arbitrage” but I don’t think it’s actually useful as a model.
It’s possible that you happen to have a friend with sufficient skill, drive, and connections to make a bigger difference with your support than a more established organization could. It’s possible that you have enough friends with this potential that you really should go with the VC model—small throwaway investments in a number of tiny ventures, in the hopes that one of them will be bigger than the sum of your investments.
I’ve actually done this and it worked incredibly well, so I’m not persuaded by your vague doubts that it’s possible. If you insist on using “opinion of established organizations” as your yard stick then I’ll add that a strong majority of the people I supported would later go on to get big grants and contracts from well-respected organizations, always after years of polishing and legibilizing the projects which I’d supported in their infancy.
Certainly it wouldn’t work for the median person on Earth. But “LW reader who’s friends with a bunch of self-starting autodidacts and has enough gumption to actually write a check” is not the median person on Earth, and people selected that hard will often know some pretty impressive people.
In the absence of very quantifiable outcomes, evaluating whole organizations seems harder than evaluating individuals. I think it’s actually quite easy to get a good idea of how promising someone is within <1hr. I agree with many of Cowen’s takes on Talent.
But I agree that most philanthropists probably shouldn’t take the person-first approach. I do think more people should. Sensible alternatives are legible effective global health charities with quantifiable outcomes / clear plans, and progress-driving entrepreneurship.
This seems like a crux “evaluating whole organizations seems harder than evaluating individuals.” I don’t think it’s even close to correct, for most small-time (say, less than 5 hours/week and $200K/year donated) philanthropists.
I believe exactly the opposite: it’s far easier to identify a reasonable number of candidate organizations than it is individuals, and far easier to pick one that’s acceptably likely to be effective. Picking exceptional individuals aligned with your philanthropic goals is really difficult and error-prone.
I think there’s a lot of variety in the capabilities, resources, and amount of effort that people have to put into “trying to improve the world via philanthropy”. This advice is excellent for a someone who’s better at identifying excellent performers than most “normal” donation targets AND has the right mix of time available to find/evaluate recipients but not to do direct work. I suspect that’s a pretty small number of philanthropists.
If you make programmer money and a bunch of your friends are working on weird projects that take two hours to explain and justify—and I know that describes a lot of people here—then you’re in an excellent position to do this. Essentially it’s legibility arbitrage.
I would expect that one of the key reasons why many people would not do this, is because it’s socially weird and they are uncertain about how to handle how that changes their social relationship to the people around them.
Especially, given that many programmers are more on the shy side, writing a check to a GiveWell-recommended charity is easier. I think it would be valuable if someone who acts like that would write more about their experience doing it, so that people have an easier model to copy.
I like the term “legibility arbitrage” but I don’t think it’s actually useful as a model.
It’s possible that you happen to have a friend with sufficient skill, drive, and connections to make a bigger difference with your support than a more established organization could. It’s possible that you have enough friends with this potential that you really should go with the VC model—small throwaway investments in a number of tiny ventures, in the hopes that one of them will be bigger than the sum of your investments.
But I doubt it.
I’ve actually done this and it worked incredibly well, so I’m not persuaded by your vague doubts that it’s possible. If you insist on using “opinion of established organizations” as your yard stick then I’ll add that a strong majority of the people I supported would later go on to get big grants and contracts from well-respected organizations, always after years of polishing and legibilizing the projects which I’d supported in their infancy.
Certainly it wouldn’t work for the median person on Earth. But “LW reader who’s friends with a bunch of self-starting autodidacts and has enough gumption to actually write a check” is not the median person on Earth, and people selected that hard will often know some pretty impressive people.
In the absence of very quantifiable outcomes, evaluating whole organizations seems harder than evaluating individuals. I think it’s actually quite easy to get a good idea of how promising someone is within <1hr. I agree with many of Cowen’s takes on Talent.
But I agree that most philanthropists probably shouldn’t take the person-first approach. I do think more people should. Sensible alternatives are legible effective global health charities with quantifiable outcomes / clear plans, and progress-driving entrepreneurship.
This seems like a crux “evaluating whole organizations seems harder than evaluating individuals.” I don’t think it’s even close to correct, for most small-time (say, less than 5 hours/week and $200K/year donated) philanthropists.
I believe exactly the opposite: it’s far easier to identify a reasonable number of candidate organizations than it is individuals, and far easier to pick one that’s acceptably likely to be effective. Picking exceptional individuals aligned with your philanthropic goals is really difficult and error-prone.
Yes, this is a crux. To a large extent, the answer to what is easier depends on what one aims to achieve with philanthropy, which varies a lot.