For the first year and a half since taking the GWWC pledge, I donated exclusively to the long-term future fund. As a longtermist, that seemed the obvious choice. I now find I have a nagging feeling that I should instead donate to global health and factory farming initiatives. With an hour to kill in BER Terminal 2 and a disappointing lack of plant-based food to spend my remaining Euros on, I figured I should lay out my reasoning, to get it straight in my own head, and invite some feedback.
I am more convinced of the arguments for longtermism than other cause areas. Hence, my career planning (beyond the scope of this post) is driven by a high longtermist upside. In retrospect, I wonder if one's assessment of the top cause area needs to apply universally, or if the SNT framework could produce a different outcome when considering one's money as opposed to one's work. Obviously, scale will be unchanged, but the tractability of my funding and my time are likely different, and cause areas will be limited by money or talent but not both.
I just read George Rosenfeld's recent article on free spending. The point highlighting the strange situation where EA has an excess of longtermist funding available while efficient global health programmes could absorb more, very tangibly doing good in the process, really grabbed me. There are a few reasons why that feeds into my thinking.
Having billionaires donating fortunes to longtermism is great. If that temporarily saturates the best opportunities there, maybe small donors like me should move elsewhere?
Furthermore, when I read through a donation report for the long-term future fund, I noticed an appreciable fraction of pay-outs were for things like 'this person will use this as a grant, allowing them to gain credentials and work AI alignment'. I appreciate the value of this. Nevertheless, it's mightily difficult to explain to wider friends and family why, having dedicated 10% of my income to "doing the most good possible, with reason and evidence", funding people to get ML qualifications is literally the best use of that money. Even if a raw EV estimate decided this was the best thing, I'd cite the burgeoning discussion on the optics of EA spending to be cause for concern. A few massive donors making sure these opportunities are funded is reassuring but small donors will account for the lion's share of all conversation that is had about EA donation. People talking about the community surely accounts for much of how the outside world perceives us. It troubles me that these conversations might be quite alienating or confusing when transmitting the message "I want to use reason and evidence to maximise my altruistic impact, so I fund people in developed countries to get postgraduate degrees instead of cheap ways to save lives."
I can't get away from this feeling that the PR bonus from donating to GiveWell or ACE charities is worth switching to, given the angst I am starting to feel about community optics and the well-funded state, on aggregate, of the longtermist sphere. Does this make sense to you? I'd be interested to see other arguments for or against this point of view.
Note that Toby Ord has long given 10% to global poverty. He doesn't explain why in the linked interview despite being asked "Has that made you want to donate to more charities dealing on “long-termist” issues? If not, why not?"
My guess is that he intentionally dodged the question because the true answer is that he continues to donate to global poverty charities because he thinks the signaling value of him donating to global poverty charities is greater than the signaling value of him donating to longtermist charities and yet saying this explicitly in the interview would likely have undermined some of that signaling value.
In any case, I think those two things are true, and think the signaling value represents the vast majority of the value of his donations, so his decision seems quite reasonable to me, even assuming there are longtermist giving opportunities available to him that offer more direct impact per dollar (as I believe).
For other small donors whose donations are not so visible, I still think the signaling value is often greater than the direct value of the donations. Unlike in Toby Ord's case though, for typical donors I think the donations with the highest signaling value are usually the donations with the highest direct impact.
There are probably exceptions though, such as if you often introduce effective giving to people by talking about how ridculously inexpensive it is to save someone's life. In that case, I think it's reasonable for you to donate a nontrivial amount (even up to everything you donate, potentially) to e.g. GiveWell's MIF even if you think the direct cost-effectiveness of that donation is less, since the indirect effect of raising the probability of getting the people you talk to into effective giving and perhaps eventually into a higher impact career path can plausibly more than make up for the reduced direct impact.
An important consideration related to all of this that I haven't mentioned yet is that large donors (e.g. Open Phil and FTX) could funge your donations. I.e. You donate more to X so they donate less to it and more to the other high impact giving opportunities available to them, such that the ultimate effect of your donation to X is to only increase the amount of funding for X a little bit and to increase the funding for other better things mpre. I don't know if this actually happens, though I often hope it does.
(For example, I hope it does whenever I seize opportunities to raise funds for EA nonprofits that are not the nonprofits that I believe will use marginal dollars most cost-effectively. E.g. During the last every.org donation match I directed matching funds to 60+ EA nonprofits due to a limit on the match amount per nonprofit despite thinking many of those nonprofits would use marginal funds less than half as cost-effectively as the nonprofits that seemed best to me. My hope was that this was the right call, i.e. that large EA funders would correct the allocation to EA nonprofits by giving less to the nonprofits I gave to and more to the giving opportunities that had highest cost-effectivess than they otherwise would have, thereby making my decision the right call.)
That's a really interesting point about Toby Ord!