I intend to donate to MIRI this year; do you anticipate that upcoming posts or other reasoning/resources might or should persuade people like myself to donate to CFAR instead?
calebwithers
Karma: 5
What would be the advantage of bartering tutoring compared to the flexibility of simply selling and buying?
As a counterpoint, I intended to contribute to the donation lottery (couldn’t arrange tax deductibility outside the US), and think it would be a good thing if most EAs participated in donation lotteries.
As Benquo notes, “GiveWell does not purport to solve the general problem of ‘where should EA’s give money.’”. Personally, I believe that existential risk interventions are the best donations, so there is no equivalent to GiveWell for me to defer to. If I won the lottery, I imagine it would be worth my time engaging thoroughly with organisations fundraising documents, refining my world-model on how to reduce existential risk, and reaching out to those likely to have better knowledge than myself. I’m not already spending “tons of time doing this”—I work full-time, and in particular don’t have the cognitive space to do high-quality thinking on this in the pockets of time I have available.
At a community-level, it does seem that most EA’s have thought insufficiently about cause prioritization. Challenging one’s beliefs isn’t easy though, so I’m hopeful that a donor lottery can provide a mechanism for someone to say “I recognise that there’s some worthwhile reflection and research I haven’t done, and I don’t have the motivation to do it when the stakes are lower, but will do so on the off-chance I win the lottery.”
If I won the lottery, I imagine I’d take a few weeks consecutive leave from work to research.