We Could Move $80 Million to Effective Charities, Pineapples Included

DC

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Buy and email them a copy of books like Doing Good Better (comment if you’ve done that so there’s no duplication of effort).

I like this one, and just sent Doing Good Better and Superintelligence with some explanations to their email.

Peter Wildeford

He ended up donating $5M to GiveDirectly. People are giving him grief in the announcement though... maybe we should give him some love?

itaibn

I've spent some time thinking and investigating what the current state of affairs is, and here's my conclusions:

I've been reading through PineappleFund's comments. Many are responses to solicitations for specific charities with him endorsing them as possibilities. One of these was for SENS foundation. Matthew_Barnett suggested that this is evidence that he particularly cares about long-term future causes, but given the diversity of other causes he endorsed I think it is pretty weak evidence.

They haven't yet commented on any of the subthreads specifically discussing EA. However, these subthreads are high up on the Reddit sorting algorithm and have many comments endorsing EA. This is already a good position and is difficult to improve: They either like what they see or they don't. It may be better if the top-level comments explicitly described and linked to a specific charity since that is what they responded well to in other comments, but I am cautious about making such surface-level generalizations which might have more to do with the distribution of existing comments than PineappleFund's tendencies.

Keep in mind that soliciting upvotes for a comment is explicitly against Reddit rules. I understand if you think that the stakes of this situation are more important than these rules, but be sure you are consciously aware of the judgment you have made.

CarlShulman

Keep in mind that soliciting upvotes for a comment is explicitly against Reddit rules. I understand if you think that the stakes of this situation are more important than these rules, but be sure you are consciously aware of the judgment you have made.

I'd say our policy should be 'just don't do that.' EA has learned its lesson on this from GiveWell.

Also:

Integrity:

Because we believe that trust, cooperation, and accurate information are essential to doing good, we strive to be honest and trustworthy. More broadly, we strive to follow those rules of good conduct that allow communities (and the people within them) to thrive. We also value the reputation of effective altruism, and recognize that our actions reflect on it.

itaibn

Indeed, maybe I should made the point more harshly. To be clear, that comment is not about something people might do, it's about what's already present in the top post, which I see as breaking the Reddit rules.

I used soft language because I was worried about EA discussions breaking into arguments whenever someone suggests a good thing to do, and was worried that I might have erred too much in the other direction in other contexts. I still don't feel I have a good intuition on how confrontational I should be.

CarlShulman

I think it was an understandable first thought for someone who didn't know those rules, and Dony shouldn't be castigated for not knowing about them in a useful post about an important topic. But I think we should be definite about not violating the rules (e.g. by editing the post) now that everyone involved knows about them, while pursuing Dony's other good ideas.

Keep in mind that soliciting upvotes for a comment is explicitly against Reddit rules. I understand if you think that the stakes of this situation are more important than these rules, but be sure you are consciously aware of the judgment you have made.

Oh dear! No, I didn't explicitly realize this beyond passing thoughts. In retrospect, I'm confused why this wasn't cached in my mind as being against reddiquette. I should eat my own dogfood regarding brigading. I edited it so it's not soliciting. Let me know here or privately if there are any further fixes I should make to the post (i.e. if I should just remove the links to the known EA comments).

Matthew_Barnett

Just a thought: if you think that earning-to-give is a good strategy, then this is one of the best things you can do as an effective altruist. Just to put things in perspective here, if you donated $50,000 to an effective charity for 20 years, then you would be doing just about as much good as merely leaving a good comment in that thread. I hope that helps to internalize just what's at stake here.

Just make sure that the Pineapple fund doesn't generate some animosity towards EA. If it takes 100 good reasons to change someone's mind, it only takes 1 really bad one to turn them away. The person doing the giveaway said that they are interested in the SENS foundation. This is pretty good evidence that they care about the long-term future. We might be able to do the most good if we focus our efforts on that cause area specifically.

Cullen 🔸

A final update for this: it looks like they have stopped considering new applications. They have made grants to the following (arguably) EA orgs:

GiveDirectly ($2 MM)
Possible ($1 MM)
MAPS ($5 MM)
SENS ($2 MM)

Total directed to EA orgs: $10MM

Apologies if I'm missing any.

Cullen 🔸

I'm running a PredictionBook prediction on the success of this: https://predictionbook.com/predictions/188373 :-)

Denkenberger🔸

Thanks for letting us all know! I put Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) into the running. It's great to see so much support for EA in the discussion.

brunoparga

I messaged Nate Soares of MIRI for them to apply, in case they hadn't done it yet. If they do, the post should probably be updated to reflect that (same for other EA charities).

Edit: they've already applied.

vaniver

Thanks! Also, for future opportunities like this, probably the fastest person to respond will be Colm.

Cullen 🔸

It looks like they also donated to Possible, which is a TLYCS charity :-)

Kirsten

Commented for AMF. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/comment/dr8f0es

Mjreard

Am I violating Reddiquette by advising people to browse the thread, use ctrl+F, and sort by new to find comments they might enjoy?

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