Maybe to spell this out more, I think my argument requires several assumptions: JP AddisonĬool, yeah, I agree that "how much correlation" and "which decision theory" are important uncertainties/cruxes. If I'm wrong and EAs' judgments are not very correlated, then donating all your budget to the charity that looks best to you seems like a good policy. Note that how this policy plays out in practice really does depend on how correlated your judgments are to those of other EAs. (Is this true for AMF and Malaria Consortium, in some order?) And in such a situation, I'd rather that EAs have a policy that causes some fraction to be allocated to B, than a policy that causes all the money to be allocated to A. Like I think it's pretty realistic to have a situation in which a large fraction of EAs agree that some charity A is the best in a cause area, with B a close second. But I observe that in practice, EAs' judgments are really correlated. Now, of course EAs are not a monolith and they have different views about which charities are good. And both policies are better than the outcome where every EA reasons that A is better on the margin and all $1M goes to A. (In practice this will mean that the first few hundred thousand donations go to A, and then A and B will each be receiving donations in some ratio such that they remain equally good on the margin.)īut if you don't have running counters of how much has been donated to A and B, the first policy is easier to implement. Instead, over the course of giving season, keep careful track of how much A and B have received, and donate to whichever one is best on the margin. Donate $700 to A and $300 to B (donation splitting) or.What policy should each EA use to decide how to allocation their donation? It seems like the two sensible policies are: Suppose further there are two charities, A and B, and that the EAs are in agreement that (1) both A and B are high-quality charities (2) A is better than B on the current margin but (3) A will hit diminishing returns after a few hundred thousand dollars, such that the optimal allocation of the total $1M is $700k to A and $300k to B. Here's the basic shape of my argument: suppose there are 1000 EAs, each of which will donate $1000. Here's the donation splitting policy that I might argue for: instead of "donate to the charity that looks best to you", I'd argue for "donate to charities in the proportion that, if all like-minded EAs donated their money in that proportion, the outcome would be best". I personally do make some fuzzies-based donations, but do not count them towards my Giving What We Can Pledge. : Most definitions of effective altruism have language about maximizing ("as much as possible"). The standard argument against donation splitting, which seems right to me, is that the answer to that question is "probably not." After that, donations to Acme Charity would go towards another program. The basic question that this line of argument takes is: is there some amount of money within your donation budget that will cause the marginal effectiveness of a dollar to that charity to fall below that of the second best charity.įor example, you could imagine that Acme Charity has a program that has only a $50k funding gap. There is some charity that can use your first dollar to do the most good. We'll also take for the moment that you are a small donor giving <$100k/year. We'll start with the (important!) assumption that you are trying to maximize the amount of good you can do with your money. I'll start us off with the standard argument against donation splitting.
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