Where are you giving and why?

I'm still thinking on this, and I hope to write up my thoughts in more detail sometime soon. Broadly, my thoughts last year still hold.

I intend to fulfill my Giving What We Can pledge of 10%, of which I have currently fulfilled 9.2% mainly by helping supply matching funds for Charity Science's birthday and Christmas fundraisers. I'm not sure what I'll do with the remaining 0.8%. I'll probably donate it to GiveWell top charities. (EDIT: I've now given away 10% of my income as matching funds, so that settles my giving for this year.)

I keep a pretty detailed donation log, and I just updated it to make it current. A lot of the stuff is still ongoing, though, so you'll have to check back later.

I intend to donate a lot more in 2015, because that will be the year I intend to itemize, and I can take advantage of some bunching. I'm also considering getting money together to provide seed money for various new EA projects that I like.

What about you, Ben? I'd be keen to hear your thoughts.

Normally I think it's better to donate later rather than now. (Partly because of potential returns to investing in stocks, but mostly because of the value of gaining new information.) However, this year I'll be donating a significant chunk to Effective Altruism Outreach. I was convinced by their arguments that we're on the cusp of a great opportunity to push EA, so there really is value to donating now.

Here's some thoughts from me on this:

Effective Altruism Outreach has room for more funding and an excellent plan, so that's what I would give to personally at the moment: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/c5/effective_altruism_outreach_needs_your_donations/

I think with some confidence Giving What We Can, Charity Science and GiveWell all dominate giving to, e.g. AMF, because of the fundraising and movement-building multiplier they provide. I would expect them to be at least twice as good, and potentially more than 5 times as good.

Last I checked MIRI had a lot of reserves, so I think there's a case for holding onto your money and waiting to read the details of their scale-up plans. CSER could definitely use extra money, so if I were going to give to existential risk charity specifically that is where I would probably donate.

CFAR could be a good movement building approach, but I would want to see what evidence they've collected on their impact on their alumni before donating.

(N.B. I am personally involved with EAO and GWWC).

In 2015 I'll be donating 10% of my salary to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. CSER is a particularly good giving opportunity right now: with such superb academic bona fides, it has the potential to hugely raise the profile of the study of existential risk and boost the whole field of future-oriented work, so if you are at all moved by the idea of the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future then CSER is well worth considering as a recipient. It's a particularly good cause for me to give to because I'm in the UK, so there are substantial tax advantages.

FHI are also a very appealing cause for UK taxpayers; I've been a donor to them in the past and may shift back to them in the future depending on how each is looking in room for more funding.

Great idea for a thread Ben!

The end charity I'd favour is AMF, for the reasons I outlined in my contribution to the "Where I'm Giving And Why" series: it had robust evidence and also came out top in cost-effectiveness estimates. The only issue is that its room for more funding situation still seems complicated. However I'll use some of my donations as matching funds for fundraising that Charity Science does, because this provides leverage and supports experiments to find scalable ways to fundraise for effective charities, which I think are very valuable.

The meta charity that I see as having a proven case for impact (besides Charity Science!) is GiveWell, which has plausibly moved tens of millions of counterfactual dollars. I discussed donating to them a year ago, but I'm not currently clear on whether they'll be short of funds.

I'm too lazy to write down the reasons, but I just wrote a post listing my recent donations.

(With thanks to Peter Hurford for inspiration.)

This year, I'm donating to MIRI, essentially because of the classic argument for MIRI. Here is a very short summary:

• Artificial General Intelligence is possible and reasonably probable in the medium-term.
• Such AI would be very powerful.
• Without careful steps to avoid it, this AI is likely to be unfriendly. This would be very bad. Unfriendly AIs do not hate us, but we are made of atoms they can use for purposes not our own.
• A freindly AI dedicated to promoting our values would be a very good thing.
• Donating to MIRI is one of the best ways of doing this, as they are the only organisation fully focused on this one issue.

Even ignoring the risk of UFAI, I think that FAI may be one best ways of preventing run-away value drift from destroying all value in the future.

cross-posted on my blog

edit: minor formatting

Worth noting that it can still be worth posting to your personal blog if only to increase how many people see it.

My values align fairly closely with GiveWell's. If they continue to ask for donations then probably about 20% of my giving next year will go to them (as in the past two years). Apart from that:

GiveWell's preferred split across their recommended charities AMF/SCI/GD/EvAc (Evidence Action, which includes Deworm the World) is 67/13/13/7. Since most of the reasoning behind that split is how much money each charity could reasonably use, and I agree with GiveWell that bednets are really cost-effective, I won't be deviating much from GiveWell's recommendation.

Probably I will reduce GiveDirectly's prominence down to 5% or so (with increases for SCI and EvAc) -- I haven't studied GiveWell's latest numbers for the cost-effectiveness calculation closely, but their headline result has their effectiveness far lower than either deworming or bednets. So I'll continue donating a relatively small amount to GD in recognition of them being methodologically really great.

I haven't yet given much thought to GiveWell's other 'standout' charities, and whether it's correct to donate to them or not.

Denise and I are looking at AMF and the CEA-nexus of charities (Effective Altruism Outreach, Giving What We Can, 80000 hours) primarily. I actually think EAO is the most promising of these on what it wants to do with it's planned funding (http://eao.causevox.com/), but I also fully expect it to meet its target.