The Most Valuable Dollars Aren’t Owned By Us

By Aidan Alexander @ 2024-12-17T07:27 (+91)

At this time of year, we forum-dwellers tend to spend quite a bit of energy thinking about where we should donate. This year especially, the forum team has outdone themselves, running an interesting debate week on "global health vs. animals" —global health was trounced.. I still love you though, bed-net warriors! — followed by an action packed Giving Season:

While I personally find it very interesting to think about what the very best marginal donation would be, I think it's important to remember where the bigger opportunity lies..

Consider this: When we fine-tune our own donations or help other EAs do the same, the gains are probably quite modest. While there are likely meaningful differences between top charities[1], we can be far less certain about which charity is the very best than we can about which are in the top-tier and which are in the "meh"-tier. So factoring in this uncertainty, optimizing an existing donor's dollar might only generate about 5% of the value that could be achieved by inspiring a new donor to give their first dollar to a highly effective charity. 

This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren't owned by us. They're owned by people who currently either don't donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here. A dollar that you can only direct to one effective charity by taking it away from another is far less valuable than a dollar that comes from a "meh"-tier charity or from someone's Uber Eats budget.

This insight should reshape how we think about our marginal effort. While it's valuable to help each other find the very best giving opportunities, we should probably do more personal outreach instead, on the margin. 

You don't own the most valuable dollars, but you can still influence them!

Trying to influence people who aren't yet supporting effective charities might sound hard, but it's more tractable than you might think.

I've seen this work firsthand. To give a couple examples:

I'd wager that the expected value of you attempting to encourage those around you to donate to effective charities this Giving Season far exceeds what you'll achieve through your own fine-tuning on the forum. 

[To be clear, I really value the Giving Season 'festivities' that the forum team have arranged. They have an important role to play. I'm simply trying to bring more attention to a relatively neglected way to have impact at this time of year]

Tips for making it happen

  1. Have an audience? Use it! If you have followers on social media, a blog, or a professional network, you have a unique opportunity to introduce effective giving to many people at once. (FarmKind would love to partner with you to help you make this successful. Hit me up at aidan@farmkind.giving if you're interested)
  2. No audience? No worries! Focus on meaningful conversations with people close to you, like family and friends. The holiday season often creates some particularly good opportunities!
  3. Embrace relationship-based giving. Friends and family will often happily make a donation for the purpose of supporting you, rather than supporting a particular cause or charity (e.g. contributing to your birthday fundraiser). While it'd be even better if they were convinced to become effective givers, the value of a one-off donation is still super high!
  4. Connect emotionally. While philosophical arguments are persuasive for some, most people's primary motivation when donating is supporting a cause they feel personally and emotionally connected to. So help them connect to the issue! Meet them where they are, drawing connections between what they already know they care about and cause/charity you're recommending.
  5. Make it easy to take action. Have a specific charity recommendation in mind, with a simple, low-friction donation process. Send them a link to make it even easier.

The key ask, once more:

This giving season, try influencing the most valuable dollars: The ones that aren't owned by us. 

Thanks for reading!

  1. ^

    There's an argument that charity cost-effectiveness follows a long tail distribution, meaning the difference between the best and second-best charity could be even larger than the difference between top-tier and "meh"-tier.

Charles Dillon 🔸 @ 2024-12-17T14:15 (+29)

This seems likely to be incorrect to me, at least sometimes. In particular I disagree with the suggestion that the improvement on the margin is likely to be only on the order of 5%.

Let's take someone who moves from donating to global health causes to donating to help animals. It's very plausible that they may think the difference in effectiveness there is by a factor of 10, or even more.

They may also think that non-EA dollars are more easily persuaded to donate to global health initiatives than animal welfare ones. In this case, if a non-EA dollar is 80% likely to go to global health, and 20% to animal welfare, then by their own lights the change in use of their dollar was more than 3x as important as the introduction of the extra non-EA dollar.

Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-12-17T19:32 (+22)

Similarly if you think animal charities are 10x global health charities in effectiveness, then you think these options are equally good:

  • Move 10 EA donors from global health to animal welfare
  • Add 9 new animal welfare donors who previously weren't donating at all

To me, the first of these sounds way easier.

Milli🔸 @ 2024-12-20T15:44 (+1)

IIRC studies show it's easier to motivate people to give more than to shift existing donations.

Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-12-22T02:54 (+2)

I think that EA donors are likely to be unusual in this respect -- you're pre-selecting for people who have signed up for a culture of doing what's best even when it wasn't what they thought it was before.

I guess also I think that my arguments for animal welfare charities are at their heart EA-style arguments, so I'm getting a big boost to my likelihood of persuading someone by knowing that they're the kind of person who appreciates EA-style arguments.

Milli🔸 @ 2024-12-20T15:43 (+3)

How sure are you are right and the other EA (who has also likely thought carefully about their donations) is wrong, though?
I'm much more confident that I will increase the impact of someone's donation / spending if they are not in EA, rather than being too convinced of my own opinion and causing harm (by negative side effects, opportunity costs or lowering the value of their donation).

Charles Dillon 🔸 @ 2024-12-21T10:44 (+5)

Personally speaking, if I say I think something is 10x as effective, I mean that as an all-things-considered statement, which includes deferring however much I think it is appropriate to the views of others.

Milli🔸 @ 2024-12-21T11:12 (+3)

That's not what I asked: In percentage points, how likely do you think you are right (and people who value e.g. GHWB over Animal Welfare are wrong)?

Charles Dillon 🔸 @ 2024-12-21T17:38 (+4)

It's the same thing - if I think the expected value of one thing vs another is 10x, all things considered, then that is what I think the expected value is, already factoring in whatever chance I think there is that I am various versions of wrong, which is very under specified here.

For example, let's say I do a back of the envelope calculation that says ABC is 20x as valuable as XYZ, but I see lots of people disagree with me. Then my estimate of the relative value of ABC vs XYZ will not be 20x, but probably some lower number, which could be 15x or 2x or 0.5x or 0.001x or -2x even (if it seems ABC is harmful somehow), depending on how uncertain I am and the strength of the evidence provided. That adjustment is already attempting to take into account the possibility of my thought process being bad, my argument being wrong etc.

Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-12-22T03:05 (+4)

Keep in mind that you're not coercing them to switch their donations, just persuading them. That means you can use the fact that they were persuaded as evidence that you were on the right side of the argument. You being too convinced of your own opinion isn't a problem unless other people are also somehow too convinced of it, and I don't see why they would be.

GraceAdams🔸 @ 2024-12-17T08:18 (+26)

Absolutely love this take! I'd love to see our community advocating for effective giving to their networks in ways that make sense for them!

I also see this as a reason to take a pledge with GWWC, even if you're already giving - by adding your name to the list of pledgers, and helping that list grow longer - you're showing that this is a real  movement of people who are taking giving effectively and significantly seriously. 

(Honestly, just scrolling through a really long list of names helped give me confidence to pledge despite not knowing anyone)

Help us reach 10,000 pledgers, so that the next 10,000 are easier for us to convince!

You can pledge here for Pledge Week

Sarah Cheng @ 2024-12-17T19:39 (+13)

I think this is a great point (though I also feel that reasonable people can disagree and it's hard to know for sure), and I really appreciate the call to action and tips! :) I definitely agree that personal outreach to people that know you can be quite valuable.

A few related points:

  1. I think overall, EAs donate a surprisingly small amount (this may be outdated info though), so probably by making effective giving more salient in EA spaces you can influence a fair amount of giving.
  2. People (including myself) are lazy (or busy) and I'm sure many EAs don't dedicate a significant amount of time optimizing their donations. I've personally been moved to give significant amounts by reading Marginal Funding Week posts — I think it can be really helpful to meet people where they are at (i.e. they care but don't have a lot of time to spend on research).
  3. I've been pushing the Forum team to do more Giving Season-related outreach on other platforms, because I also feel more optimistic about the value of influencing donations in spaces that are more "EA-sympathetic" than core (for example, posting in the EA subreddit, on our Forum Twitter account, and our new Forum Instagram account).
    1. Perhaps I would guess that the most valuable dollars are owned by people in these "EA-sympathetic" spaces.
Habryka @ 2024-12-18T03:33 (+6)

The title and central claim of the post seems wrong, though my guess is you mean it poetically (but poetry that isn't true is I think worse, though IDK, it's fine sometimes, maybe it makes more sense to other people). 

Clearly the dollars you own are the most valuable. If you think someone else could do more with your dollars, you can just give them your dollars! This isn't guaranteed to be true (you might not know who would ex-ante best use dollars, but still think you could learn about that ex-post and regret not giving them your money after the opportunity has passed), but I think it's almost always true.

The correct title and argument would be "influencing other people's donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own", but I think that is a very different claim from the title and central bolded sentence. 

"Thinking someone else's dollars are more valuable than your own" would IMO clearly imply that you would prefer the world where they had more money, and you had less money. But that's not what the post is talking about (and is I think wrong in almost all cases). Or maybe alternatively that you would prefer having their dollars instead of your current dollars (though given that dollars are fungible, that seems kind of weird).

Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2024-12-18T11:44 (+10)

FWIW given the context of previous discussions on the EA Forum, I read the title as meaning something like "influencing other people's donation decisions is often more valuable than improving your own" when I saw it on the frontpage. 

Habryka @ 2024-12-18T21:25 (+2)

I agree that this is what the post is about, but the title and this[1] sentence do indeed not mean that, under any straightforward interpretation I can think of. I think bad post titles are quite costly (cf. lots of fallout from "politics is the mindkiller" being misapplied over the years), and good post titles are quite valuable.

  1. ^

    "This points to an important conclusion: The most valuable dollars to aren't owned by us. They're owned by people who currently either don't donate at all, or who donate to charities that are orders of magnitude less effective than the ones we typically discuss here.

PabloAMC 🔸 @ 2024-12-19T07:03 (+4)

I think there might be a confusion here. Your claim is that the dollars we own are more valuable per dollar

Clearly the dollars you own are the most valuable. If you think someone else could do more with your dollars, you can just give them your dollars!

But the post is referring to the overall amount of dollars. Eg Jeff Bezos dollars might be more valuable than mine.

Habryka @ 2024-12-19T18:43 (+2)

I don't think anyone uses "valuable" in that way. Saying "the most valuable cars are owned by Jeff Bezos" doesn't mean that in-aggregate all of his cars are more valuable than other people's cars. It means that the individual cars that Jeff Bezos owns are more valuable than other cars.

Caroline Mills @ 2024-12-18T22:26 (+5)

Thanks for writing this, Aidan! As a fundraiser, this take resonates. One of the strategies we use to acquire new donors is encouraging our existing supporters to engage in relational fundraising, whether that's a peer-to-peer birthday fundraiser as you suggest, or a larger time investments (and potentially $, as hosts will also sometimes offer matching gifts to incentivize their friends) like hosting a fundraising event in your home or leading a giving circle. (I've also participated in non-EA giving circles that do political education as part of the gift allocation process, which EAs could emulate, but that's an aside.) Your network likely shares many of your values, and educating them about effective giving opportunities is super helpful to charities. 

That said, it is difficult to convince people who don't care about a particular cause area to care. For those in the farmed animal advocacy space, consider how difficult it can be to get people to reduce or eliminate their animal product consumption. It's more about presenting values-aligned people with opportunities to enact those values, rather than changing people's values altogether, in my experience. 

Aidan Alexander @ 2024-12-19T09:14 (+3)

Hey Caroline! Fun to interact outside of emails. I agree it’s not about changing people‘s values, but I think that most people’s values (if they allow themselves to think about it) support taking action against factory farming. They just have other forces like food preferences, social norms and misinformation about the issue holding them back. What’s great about donating is that people can do it without changing their diet or dealing with the social costs that come with that. So I’m hopeful that this can be the easier on-ramp that gets far more people to begin taking action on this issue 🤞

Caroline Mills @ 2024-12-19T14:44 (+1)

Agree on all counts, Aidan!

Luke Moore 🔸 @ 2024-12-17T09:50 (+5)

Great post! At GWWC we're currently looking for pledgers excited to help us shape our new Pledge Advocacy Programme. 

We've found that word of mouth is one of the best ways for people to learn about the pledge! But, we’ve also heard from many pledgers that it can be difficult to bring up the pledge in conversation so we're launching a new Pledge Advocacy Programme to support our community members to have thoughtful conversations about pledging with their friends, family, and colleagues. 

We're still in the pilot phase, but if you're keen to help shape this exciting new initiative then please sign up here!