$100 to general fund. I’ve recently received some unexpected cash and am looking at ways to increase humanity’s expected utility. I’ll be donating to SENS and the Methuselah Foundation as well. Where else should I be looking?
A friend points out one possible way this reasoning doesn’t work: charities can gain political power by quoting a larger number of individual donors. This would argue for giving $10 to several charities and the rest of the money to the best one.
I suspect that this reasoning is not only reasonably defensible, but also much more palatable; that the underlying biases are tested much less strongly by the policy conclusion “give the bulk of your money to one charity” than “give nothing to other charities”. I will try to remember to use this version henceforth.
I have to confess, if I had a lot of money to donate I’d find it very hard to swallow this advice whole and give it all to the SIAI; I’d feel like donating half to GiveWell or suchlike would be a “hedge” against the possibility that I fear UFAI for irrational reasons I haven’t identified. However, I can’t find a reason to think that uncertainty about my own sanity will plug into the math any differently than any other kind of uncertainty.
Probably a wash if everyone does it, but might give a selective advantage to rationalists if practiced by rationalists only and the practice didn’t spread beyond that… which seems unlikely in the long run, but not too impossible in the short run.
I can’t, but item five here makes a similar statement.
Under US tax law, a 501(c)(3) public charity must maintain a certain percentage of “public support”. [...] If, over a four-year period, any one individual donates more than 2% of the organization’s total support, anything over 2% does not count as “public support”.
Edit: The parent, before being edited, at the time I responded, as I recall, read:
That’s about large donors, not small donors
It now reads:
That’s a reason for large donors to diversify. It is not at all a reason for small donors to diversify.
I am disappointed by this departure from LessWrong’s excellent track record of not abusing the edit feature to change the context of responding comments.
End Edit
The point is that the more total money they get from small donors, the more money large donors can give without going over certain percentages of the total that have arbitrary legal significance.
I meant, that’s the point of Document’s quote from SIAI’s statement about the value of small donors. It may not be an example of what ciphergoth was talking about, but it is about the importance of small donors.
This law does not provide a good reason for individual donors to diversify, but it does provide good reason for non-profits to actively solicit from small donors, and it shows that small donors are important.
Aggregated with similar people, is that worth any political clout?
Not really. If SIAI made a fuss and about how many individual donors they got and they got some benefit from this then you would be best off… hang on I just read Guy’s reply. I was just going to say ‘donate under multiple names’.
After shutting up and multiplying, I agree those arguments are valid. This presentation by Anna Salamon is also instructive.
I’m uncertain as to whether funding for SIAI or anti-aging research provides the best marginal utility. Both would have a gigantic positive impact if successful; SIAI’s would be larger but in my estimation anti-aging has a better chance of success. The matching donations tip the balance to SIAI today, so $900 more is on the way.
I do believe the political argument with number of donors may apply to SENS and MF, so I’m making smaller donations there. I’m disappointed that curing aging hasn’t been mentioned during the frequent discussions of rising health care costs; with more publicity and more donors willing to make the obvious point that aging and death suck, it might. In my estimation it will be easier for them to go mainstream than SIAI, so I believe it’s most effective to separately target my monetary and political support.
I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they’re already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.
However, I’m raising my estimate of Landsburg’s level based on this—I guess one mostly hears about the disputable points he got wrong, not the indisputable points he got right, of which this is one (and a rarely appreciated one at that).
Landsburg’s argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.
And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:
To please diverse stockholders, corporations tend to diversify their giving, often through the United Way. For individuals, by contrast, it really is quite impossible to justify that level of diversity. Surely among the hundreds of United Way recipients there are some you consider worthier than others. That means you can target your charity more effectively by bypassing the United Way.
But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn’t it?
I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they’re already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.
Fair enough.
However, I’m raising my estimate of Landsburg’s level based on this
Glad to hear it; I’ve been a fan of his for years, based mainly on his Slate column and his first two books.
When I try to view that page, it briefly shows the math, then blanks and sits there loading forever, so I can’t quite see what he’s saying. If you’re able to see it, could you cut and paste?
Here’s my attempt at copy-and-paste, for those who have difficulty viewing (will require edits to fix):
[ETA: All right, can’t get the LaTeX plugin to work, so I’ll just use something like the old Usenet conventions.]
Suppose that there are three charities (the same argument would work with any number other than three), that those charities currently have endowments of x, y, and z, and that you plan to make contributions of delta x, delta y, and delta z). A truly charitable person will care only about each charity’s final endowment, and so will seek to maximize some function
U(x + delta x, y + delta y, z + delta z)
subject to the constraint that delta x+ delta y + delta z = C, where C is the amount you’ve decided to give to charity.
But assuming that your contributions are small relative to the initial endowments, this quantity is well approximated by
U(x,y,z)+ (partial U/partial x) dot delta x + (partial U/partial y) dot delta y+ (partial U/partial z) dot delta z.
which is maximized by bulleting everything on the charity that corresponds to the largest of the partial derivatives.
(The linear approximation fails if your contributions are large relative to the initial endowments, or if you have sufficient delusions of grandeur to believe that your contributions are large relative to the initial endowments.)
Note that if you have any uncertainty about what the various charities will do with their endowments, the costs of that uncertainty can be built into the definition of the function U. Thus, such uncertainty in no way undermines the main argument.
On the other hand, if you care not about what the charitable organizations receive but about what you give to them (as would be the case, for example, if you give in order to enjoy being thanked), then you will want to maximize some function
U(x,y,z)
In this case, it’s unlikely that the solution would be to bullet.
$100 to general fund. I’ve recently received some unexpected cash and am looking at ways to increase humanity’s expected utility. I’ll be donating to SENS and the Methuselah Foundation as well. Where else should I be looking?
Eliezer and SteveLandsburg agree: don’t diversify your (altruistic) giving.
A friend points out one possible way this reasoning doesn’t work: charities can gain political power by quoting a larger number of individual donors. This would argue for giving $10 to several charities and the rest of the money to the best one.
I suspect that this reasoning is not only reasonably defensible, but also much more palatable; that the underlying biases are tested much less strongly by the policy conclusion “give the bulk of your money to one charity” than “give nothing to other charities”. I will try to remember to use this version henceforth.
I have to confess, if I had a lot of money to donate I’d find it very hard to swallow this advice whole and give it all to the SIAI; I’d feel like donating half to GiveWell or suchlike would be a “hedge” against the possibility that I fear UFAI for irrational reasons I haven’t identified. However, I can’t find a reason to think that uncertainty about my own sanity will plug into the math any differently than any other kind of uncertainty.
Or perhaps giving $10+e to lots of people on the condition that they give $10 to the charity you’d like to target.
This would make the IRS sad if they found out. You wouldn’t like them when they’re sad.
Good point. Even better, then: charity trades. I give $10 to your charity and you give $10 to my charity.
Probably a wash if everyone does it, but might give a selective advantage to rationalists if practiced by rationalists only and the practice didn’t spread beyond that… which seems unlikely in the long run, but not too impossible in the short run.
Could you give an example?
I doubt that the above charities are interested in the political power that can be bought that way.
I can’t, but item five here makes a similar statement.
That’s a reason for large donors to diversify. It is not at all a reason for small donors to diversify.
Edit: The parent, before being edited, at the time I responded, as I recall, read:
It now reads:
I am disappointed by this departure from LessWrong’s excellent track record of not abusing the edit feature to change the context of responding comments.
End Edit
The point is that the more total money they get from small donors, the more money large donors can give without going over certain percentages of the total that have arbitrary legal significance.
No, that’s not the point.
I meant, that’s the point of Document’s quote from SIAI’s statement about the value of small donors. It may not be an example of what ciphergoth was talking about, but it is about the importance of small donors.
So, arguments are soldiers?
Not much of an argument here.
This law does not provide a good reason for individual donors to diversify, but it does provide good reason for non-profits to actively solicit from small donors, and it shows that small donors are important.
I don’t want to diversify my altruistic giving of political clout any more than I want to diversify my altruistic giving of money.
So, here I explicitly declare that: I donate money exclusively to SIAI, because I believe it is the most efficient way of buying humanitarian utility.
Aggregated with similar people, is that worth any political clout?
Not really. If SIAI made a fuss and about how many individual donors they got and they got some benefit from this then you would be best off… hang on I just read Guy’s reply. I was just going to say ‘donate under multiple names’.
After shutting up and multiplying, I agree those arguments are valid. This presentation by Anna Salamon is also instructive.
I’m uncertain as to whether funding for SIAI or anti-aging research provides the best marginal utility. Both would have a gigantic positive impact if successful; SIAI’s would be larger but in my estimation anti-aging has a better chance of success. The matching donations tip the balance to SIAI today, so $900 more is on the way.
I do believe the political argument with number of donors may apply to SENS and MF, so I’m making smaller donations there. I’m disappointed that curing aging hasn’t been mentioned during the frequent discussions of rising health care costs; with more publicity and more donors willing to make the obvious point that aging and death suck, it might. In my estimation it will be easier for them to go mainstream than SIAI, so I believe it’s most effective to separately target my monetary and political support.
I usually try not to push people on this particular point unless I think they’re already very high-level; my default assumption is that people are very akrasic and fragile when it comes to charity.
However, I’m raising my estimate of Landsburg’s level based on this—I guess one mostly hears about the disputable points he got wrong, not the indisputable points he got right, of which this is one (and a rarely appreciated one at that).
Landsburg’s argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.
And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:
But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn’t it?
*http://www.slate.com/id/77619/
I see ciphergoth already made my first point. Sorry about that.
Fair enough.
Glad to hear it; I’ve been a fan of his for years, based mainly on his Slate column and his first two books.
Um....you might want to have a look at Landsburg’s math and see if you notice anything wrong.
ETA: Actually, never mind. I overlooked something. Silly me.
Of course, it’s still a good exercise to check.
When I try to view that page, it briefly shows the math, then blanks and sits there loading forever, so I can’t quite see what he’s saying. If you’re able to see it, could you cut and paste?
Here’s my attempt at copy-and-paste, for those who have difficulty viewing (will require edits to fix):
[ETA: All right, can’t get the LaTeX plugin to work, so I’ll just use something like the old Usenet conventions.]
Damn, sorry, I deleted the comment asking for this when I managed to find a way to read it. Thanks for sorting it out!
Is the error that he says x where he means delta-x in a couple of places?
No, that was my copying mistake. Fixed.
Then I don’t see the error, help me out?
The Future of Humanity Institute.