The advice below is only about where to donate it, but that's only one of the key questions.
It's also worth thinking hard about how much you want to give, and how to time your giving.
Even if you decide you want to use the entire amount for good, Phil Trammel's model about giving now vs. giving later suggests that you should donate x% of the capital per year, where x% is mainly given by your discount rate. In general people think the community as a whole should donate 1-10% per year, so I'd suggest, as a starting point, you could pick a percentage in that range to donate each year.
(There are lots of complications. A few examples: (i) If you think the community is too tilted towards investment, and you've found an unusually good opportunity to donate now, then it could be justified to donate the entire amount right fairly soon. But I think a good prior is to donate something close to the optimal percentage for the community as a whole. (ii) If you think AI is coming soon, or lots of big donors are going to enter EA in the coming years, you could argue for a lot of urgency (iii) likewise if you anticipate you might give up on donating in the future (iv) Otoh, you might radically change your views of which causes are best in the coming years. If you donate everything now, you can't take advantage of that learning. (iv) there are also questions about psychology and practicalities e.g. whether you'll still be willing to donate in the future, how much time you have for research, taxes.)
There's also the question of how much to give to charity vs. spend on yourself. As one consideration: once you've donated the money, that's irreversible - if you run into financial hardship later, you could really regret it. Disbursing more slowly is not only probably optimal for impact, but it also preserves this option value.
I think a procedure that makes a lot of sense is to work out how much you'd like to live on per year, and how that might change over time. Then you can donate a significant fraction of any income you earn above that.
For instance, if you'd like to live on $50k, need to save $20k per year for retirement, you get $70k of income from work, and you earn $20k of income from your investments, then your 'excess' that year is $20k, so maybe you put that $20k into your 'altruism' fund, and then donate 1-10% per year of that. (While bearing in mind your altruism fund could be used as emergency funds.) I think this is a pretty good procedure from a tax pov too.
As a rough rule of thumb, I think you can plan to withdraw ~2% per year from money invested in the global index indefinitely, if you want your spending to keep pace with nominal GDP. The 2% is chosen to be roughly the dividend yield on global stocks, accounting for net buybacks, so this percentage will go up and down over time. But right now this means your $1m can provide an indefinite income of ~$20k (pre-tax).
The above was all framed in terms of income, but it probably makes sense to have some wealth goals as well e.g. maybe you should put aside enough for retirement + runway + some income insurance, and then donate excess income after those goals are made.
Related, it's worth thinking about whether you can use the money to empower yourself to do something high-impact. E.g. you now have the freedom to take 1-2 years off work – should you consider retraining, studying, or trying to make a big career change? You might be able to think of ways to increase your long-term impact a lot, perhaps with higher-rates of return than investing the money in the stockmarket.
Hi Question Mark. While Nuño evaluated many longtermist orgs in that post, he didn’t actually evaluate QRI. Here’s the full quote: “Below is a list of perhaps notable organizations which I could have evaluated but didn't. […] Qualia Research Institute. Its pathway to impact appears implausible and overly ambitious.” It’s unfortunate that no explanation is actually given for why the view is held. The name of any longtermist org could have replaced QRI’s name and the statement would sound exactly the same.
QRI’s path to impact has three steps. Step 1: understand what things are conscious and how to measure and quantify valence (how good or bad an experience feels). Fortunately, we’re in a great position to make progress. Michael Johnson’s Principia Qualia breaks down the problem of consciousness into eight clear sub-problems and lays out a testable theory for what valence is. You can read about the progress made since the theory was presented here.
After we can measure valence, step 2 is to do just that in humans, animals, and anything we suspect is conscious. We'll do it in a variety of situations and conditions. We’d confirm whether valence follows a log scale, as Andrés Gomez Emilsson has suggested. All this data will make it easier to make economic decisions, allocate capital, and do effective altruism. It’ll also let us learn what the situation is with the quintillions of organisms on the planet and come up with a triage plan to help. For more on this topic, see Johnson’s “Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY."
Step 3: reduce suffering, increase baseline well-being, reach new heights of happiness. Solving valence measurement will probably yield insight into how to take a suffering mind and nudge it toward something better. We also take inspiration from the quote: ‘Thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine to thermodynamics.’ So we’ll be working on how to measure valence (step 1) and how to reliably create positive valence (step 3) at the same time. If AGI is involved in creating an awesome future, chances are it’s because we aligned its values to care about valence too. Johnson wrote about this in more detail here. That’s the path to impact. If it seems implausible, I’m curious what step doesn’t make sense. As for it being overly ambitious, well, that’s only a problem if the project isn’t able to be accomplished. It definitely will be hard to accomplish without money, but we’re working on it anyway.