Effective giving
Effective giving
Finding effective donation opportunities, discussing giving strategies, and coordinating with other donors
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Quick takes
12
1mo
2
Thinking back to my first big (well, big for me) donation and an unusual series of thoughts I had. Sharing in case anyone has experienced the same.
--
I've practiced frugality to a significant extent, largely because I want to donate/salary sacrifice so much of my income to effective charities. As a result, whenever I'm spending a significant amount of money on anything, alarm bells go off.
I was surprised that alarm bells went off when donating. I had thought through where I donated extensively, and charity was the reason why I wanted to save money in the first place. But I still felt stressed because I was "spending money."
This is such a clear example of missing the forest for the trees. I think we need to be careful about instrumental values/rules and making sure they don't become absolute limitations that decrease overall impact.
48
7mo
3
EA Animal Welfare Fund almost as big as Coefficient Giving FAW now?
This job ad says they raised >$10M in 2025 and are targeting $20M in 2026. CG's public Farmed Animal Welfare 2025 grants are ~$35M.
Is this right?
Cool to see the fund grow so much either way.
26
4mo
10
Earning to give is lonely and requires repeated decisions. This is bad.
If you're earning to give, you are lucky if you have one EtG team-mate. The people you talk to every day do not have moral intuitions similar to yours, and your actions seem weird to them.
If you do direct work, the psychological default every day is to wake up and do work. You are surrounded by people who think the work is important, and whose moral values at least rhyme with your own.
If you earn to give, most days you do not give (you're probably paid bi-weekly, and transaction costs discourage even donating that frequently).
These differences apply continual pressure for EtG folks to become less hard-core than we intended to be. I wish I had more counter-pressure.
[None of these observations are novel]
18
3mo
2
Over 40% of my lifetime donations happened this month. I expect to never be able to make that statement again. These are weird times.
For context on why it is extra weird, I've been donating since 2015 and have always donated 10% of my salary each year (or more).
38
7mo
1
I’ve donated about $150,000 over the past couple years. Here are some of the many (what I believe to be) mistakes in my past giving:
1. Donating to multiple cause areas. When I first started getting into philosophy more seriously, I adopted a vegan lifestyle and started identifying as EA within only a few weeks of each other. Deciding on my donation allocations across cause areas was painful, as I assign positive moral weights to both humans and animals and they might even be close in intrinsic value. I felt the urge to apologize to my vegan, non AI-worrier friends for increasing my ratio of AI safety donations to animal welfare donations, and my non-vegan, non-EA friends and family thought that donating to animals over humans was crazy. Now my view is something like: donations to AI safety are probably orders of magnitude more effective than to animal welfare or global health + development, so I should (and do) allocate 100% to AI safety.
2. Donating to multiple opportunities within the same cause area. Back in my early EA global health + development days, I found and still find the narrative of “some organizations are 100x more effective than others” pretty compelling, but I internally categorized orgs into two buckets: high EV and low EV. I viewed GiveWell-recommended organizations as broadly 'High EV,' assuming that even if their point estimates differed, their credence intervals overlapped sufficiently to render the choice between them negligible. This might even be true! However, I do not believe this to generalize to animal welfare and AI safety. Now I’ve come full circle in a way, and believe that actually, some things are multiple times (or even orders of magnitude) higher EV than other things, and have chosen to shut up and multiply. If you are a smaller donor, it is unlikely that your donation will sufficiently saturate a donation opportunity such that your nth dollar should go elsewhere.
3. Donating to opportunities that major organizations recommend
38
9mo
2
Consider whether you're comparatively advantaged to give to non-tax-deductible things.
(Not financial advice.) I think people -- especially donors who are giving >$100k/year -- often default to thinking that they should stick to tax-deductible giving, because they have an unusually high "501c3 multiplier" due to high marginal income tax rates or low cost basis for capital gains taxes. I claim this is a mistake for some donors, because what matters is whether your 501c3 multiplier is unusually high relative to the average dollar in the donor mix, which is usually coming from other people in very high tax brackets.
People who do have unusually high "501c3 multipliers" include those with employer matches to 501c3 donations. For a 1:1 match for cash donations, I think the multiplier is something like 3.5x, and even higher if you're donating appreciated assets like equity.[1] I would guess that you need to have a multiplier at least that good to actually be comparatively advantaged [ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic].[2]
The reason this matters is that if too many people think they're comparatively advantaged for tax-deductible giving, then non-tax-deductible opportunities (e.g. 501c4 advocacy, political giving, even future 501c3s awaiting their 501c3 determination) will unduly struggle to fundraise, so the best marginal opportunities are often going to be in that category.
1. ^
If your donation budget is $10,000 (of post-tax income) and you're, say, a single San Franciscan making $500k (and therefore paying a 42.53% marginal tax rate, per SmartAsset), I think this means you could donate ~$17,400 in cash (a 1.74x multiplier) and deduct that from your income, reducing your tax burden by $7,400 = $10,000 from your post-tax income. Then your 1:1 employer match means the charity gets double that, or $34,800 (a 3.48x multiplier). If
30
6mo
5
It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding.
Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.
As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.
79
2y
1
As earn to giver, I found contributing to funding diversification challenging
Jeff Kaufmann posted a different version of the same argument earlier than me.
Some have argued that earning to give can contribute to funding diversification. Having a few dozen mid-sized donors, rather than one or two very large donors, would make the financial position of an organization more secure. It allows them to plan for the future and not worry about fundraising all the time.
As earn to giver, I can be one of those mid-sized donors. I have tried. However, it is challenging.
First of all, I don't have expertise, and don't have much time to build the expertise. I spend most of my time on my day job, which has nothing to do with any cause I care about. Any research must be done in my free time. This is fine, but it has some cost. This is time I could have spent on career development, talking to others about effective giving, or living more frugally.
Motivation is not the issue, at least for me. I've found the research extremely rewarding and intellectually stimulating to do. Yet, fun doesn't necessarily translate to effectiveness.
I've seen peer earn to givers just defer to GiveWell or other charity evaluators without putting much thought into it. This is great, but isn't there more? Others said that they talked to an individual organization, thought "sounds reasonable", and transferred the money. I fell for that trap too!
There is a lot at stake. It's about hard-earned money that has the potential to help large numbers of people and animals in dire need. Unfortunately, I don't trust my own non-expert judgment to do this.
So I find myself donating to funds, and then the funding is centralized again. If others do the same, charities will have to rely on one grantmaker again, rather than a diverse pool of donors.
Ideas
What would help to address this issue? Here are a few ideas, some of them are already happening.
* funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know r
(I realised after I wrote this that the metaphor between brains and epistemic communities is less fruitfwl than it seems like I think, but it's still a helpfwl frame in order to understand the differences anyway, so I'm posting it here. ^^)
TL;DR: I think people should consider searching for giving opportunities in their networks, because a community that efficiently capitalises on insider information may end up doing more efficient and more varied research. There are, as you would expect, both problems and advantages to this, but it definitely seems good to encourage on the margin.
Some reasons to prefer decentralised funding and insider trading
I think people are too worried about making their donations appear justifiable to others. And what people expect will appear justifiable to others, is based on the most visibly widespread evidence they can think of.[1] It just so happens that that is also the basket of information that everyone else bases their opinions on as well. The net effect is that a lot less information gets considered in total.
Even so, there are very good reasons to defer to consensus among people who know more, not act unilaterally, and be epistemically humble. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take these considerations into account. What I'm trying to say is that even after you've given them adequate consideration, there are separate social reasons that could make it tempting to defer, and we should keep this distinction is in mind so we don't handicap ourselves just to fit in.
Consider the community from a bird's eye perspective for a moment. Imagine zooming out, and seeing EA as a single organism. Information goes in, and causal consequences go out. Now, what happens when you make most of the little humanoid neurons mimic their neighbours in proportion to how many neighbours they have doing the same thing?
What you end up with is a Matthew effect not only for ideas, but also for the bits of information that get promoted to public consciousness. Imagine ripples of information flowing in only to be suppressed at the periphery, way before they've had a chance to be adequately processed. Bits of information accumulate trust in proportion to how much trust they already have, and there are no well-coordinated checks that can reliably abort a cascade past a point.
To be clear, this isn't how the brain works. The brain is designed very meticulously to ensure that only the most surprising information gets promoted to universal recognition ("consciousness"). The signals that can already be predicted by established paradigms are suppressed, and novel information gets passed along with priority.[2] While it doesn't work perfectly for all things, consider just the fact that our entire perceptual field gets replaced instantly every time we turn our heads.
And because neurons have been harshly optimised for their collective performance, they show a remarkable level of competitive coordination aimed at making sure there are no informational short-circuits or redundancies.
Returning to the societal perspective again, what would it look like if the EA community were arranged in a similar fashion?
I think it would be a community optimised for the early detection and transmission of market-moving information--which in a finance context refers to information that would cause any reasonable investor to immediately make a decision upon hearing it. In the case where, for example, someone invests in a company because they're friends with the CEO and received private information, it's called "insider trading" and is illegal in some countries.
But it's not illegal for altruistic giving! Funding decisions based on highly valuable information only you have access to is precisely the thing we'd want to see happening.
If, say, you have a friend who's trying to get time off from work in order to start a project, but no one's willing to fund them because they're a weird-but-brilliant dropout with no credentials, you may have insider information about their trustworthiness. That kind of information doesn't transmit very readily, so if we insist on centralised funding mechanisms, we're unknowingly losing out on all those insider trading opportunities.
Where the architecture of the brain efficiently promotes the most novel information to consciousness for processing, EA has the problem where unusual information doesn't even pass the first layer.
(I should probably mention that there are obviously biases that come into play when evaluating people you're close to, and that could easily interfere with good judgment. It's a crucial consideration. I'm mainly presenting the case for decentralisation here, since centralisation is the default, so I urge you keep some skepticism in mind.)
There are no way around having to make trade-offs here. One reason to prefer a central team of highly experienced grant-makers to be doing most of the funding, is that they're likely to be better at evaluating impact opportunities. But this needn't matter much if they're bottlenecked by bandwidth--both in terms of having less information reach them and in terms of having less time available to analyse what does come through.[3]
On the other hand, if you believe that most of the relevant market-moving information in EA is already being captured by relevant funding bodies, then their ability to separate the wheat from the chaff may be the dominating consideration.
While I think the above considerations make a strong case for encouraging people to look for giving opportunities in their own networks, I think they apply with greater force to adopting a model like impact markets.
They're a sort of compromise between central and decentralised funding. The idea is that everyone has an incentive to fund individuals or projects where they believe they have insider information indicating that the project will show itself to be impactfwl later on. If the projects they opportunistically funded at an early stage do end up producing a lot of impact, a central funding body rewards the maverick funder by "purchasing the impact" second-hand.
Once a system like that is up and running, people can reliably expect the retroactive funders to make it worth their while to search for promising projects. And when people are incentivised to locate and fund projects at their earliest bottlenecks, the community could end up capitalising on a lot more (insider) information than would be possible if everything had to be evaluated centrally.
(There are of course, more complexities to this, and you can check out the previous discussions on the forum.)
This doesn't necessarily mean that people defer to the most popular beliefs, but rather that even if they do their own thinking, they're still reluctant to use information that other people don't have access to, so it amounts to nearly the same thing.
This is sometimes called predictive processing. Sensory information comes in and gets passed along through increasingly conceptual layers. Higher-level layers are successively trying to anticipate the information coming in from below, and if they succeed, they just aren't interested in passing it along.
(Imagine if it were the other way around, and neurons were increasingly shy to pass along information in proportion to how confused or surprised they were. What a brain that would be!)
As an extreme example of how bad this can get, an Australian study on medicinal research funding estimated the length of average grant proposals to be "between 80 and 120 pages long and panel members are expected to read and rank between 50 and 100 proposals. It is optimistic to expect accurate judgements in this sea of excessive information." -- (Herbert et al., 2013)
Luckily it's nowhere near as bad for EA research, but consider the Australian case as a clear example of how a funding process can be undeniably and extremely misaligned with the goal producing good research.