If someone identifies as a longtermist, should they donate to Founders Pledge's top climate charities than to GiveWell's top charities?

Upvote this if you think that someone who identifies as a longtermist should donate to Founders Pledge's top climate charities rather than to GiveWell's top charities.

Hey Brian,

Just a very quick answer from me to your first question.

At 80k we rate climate change ahead of global health since it seems more pressing from a longtermist perspective (e.g. Toby Ord thinks it's a significant existential risk factor).

• https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
• https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/

So, I would say that longtermists should donate to climate change over global health from an impact perspective, if choosing equally good charities from each cause (though I think it would be even better to donate to GCBRs of AI safety).

One might think that GiveWell is better at selecting charities than FP (and they've certainly done more research), but I think the edge on charity selection is unlikely to be big enough to offset the difference in cause area.

Another difference is that GiveWell focuses on evidence-backed interventions, whereas FP takes more of a hits based approach, but that seems like another advantage of the FP picks to me.

Finally, I'm focusing more on direct impact above. There could be other reasons to donate to global health (e.g. for advocacy reasons - since lots of great people have entered EA via global health), though I'm pretty unsure those factors would tell in favour of global health going forward (e.g. it seems plausible to me that EA should make climate change our standard 'mainstream' cause rather than global health).

PS Hauke's post is comparing GiveWell recommendations to climate change on a neartermist perspective, so doesn't answer your question.

[Giving just my impression before updating on others people's views.]

Very briefly:

• I think donating to GiveWell top charities (and more generally donating to charities that have been selected not primarily for their long-term effects) clearly doesn't maximize long-term impact, at least at first glance. I think this is shown by arguments such as the following:
  • Evidence, cluelessness, and the long-term
  • If you value future people, why do you consider near-term effects?
  • Beware surprising and suspicious convergence
• In some cases, there may be reasons other than the long-term effect of the funded charity's work in favor of giving to GiveWell charities. For example, perhaps this better maintains someone's motivation and altruism, thus increasing the long-term impact of their non-donation activities. Or perhaps this will better allow them to share their excitement for effective altruism with others, thus allowing them to acquire more resources, including for long-term causes.
  • However, I'm skeptical that these reasons are often decisive, except maybe in some extremely idiosyncratic cases.
• I don't have much of a view on FP's climate change charities in particular. My best guess is they are higher-impact than GiveWell charities from a long-term perspective. However, I'd also guess there are other options that are even better from just a narrow impact perspective. Examples include:
  • Donation lotteries
  • The EA Long-Term Future Fund
• It's much more plausible to me that among options that have been selected for having 'reasonably high long-term impacts' "secondary" considerations such as the ones mentioned above can be decisive (i.e. effect on motivation or ability to promote EA, etc.).

In my view yes, for the reasons Ben Todd gives below. I also did some brief back of the envelope calculations using Danny's Bressler's mortality cost of carbon here. This is also something Will MacAskill has been talking about a lot more recently, and he talks about the long-term importance of climate change here. And also as Ben Todd and Max say below - I also agree that it's possible there's longtermist work, e.g. on GCBRs and maybe AI, that has a higher expected impact. But I think climate change is a fairly straightforward longtermist bet. We've recently added the Founders Pledge climate fund to EA Funds here.  

Upvote this if you think that someone who identifies as a longtermist should donate to GiveWell's top charities rather than to Founders Pledge's top climate charities.