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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
Sadly, I don't think existential risk reduction is sufficiently sympathetic to the general population (and we do need them on board for this to work). And if you have a large basket with stuff like the Methuselah foundation in it, you're likely to have people wondering why they can't put in "The Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies".
Ideally, you'd pick something simple and widely acceptable. Obviously, it would be difficult to find a single charity that could productively use a billion extra dollars per year. But the basket should be as simple and uncontroversial (and obviously, productive) as possible).
Edit: Thinking about it, using a trusted intermediary might make the most sense. Using a grant-making agency avoids the appearance that we're funneling the money to our pet causes, it reduces the marketing/lobbying incentives (though it doesn't eliminate them) and it makes the money relatively productive (if we choose a good agency). Givewell may be a poor choice, due to the Metafilter flap, but we could specify, say the MIT Poverty Action Lab or something.
Obviously, we'd need the organizations cooperation, or at least permission.
I would like to see this bundled with a Rational Charity meme. Let's be frank here: if this ends up going to the Society for Rare Diseases in Photogenic Puppies, it wasn't worth LW's time. If we can manage to get some money to things that actually matter, it was.
Trying to get something worthwhile done, as opposed to "making a billion dollars go to charity", might make the whole project fail because of that added extra inconvenience. So what?
If you wanted to boil it down to a meme, it would be "Do something effective for a change". Supposing you actually can generate a billion dollars, that's enough for ten million dollars for one hundred charities. "Ten million dollars apiece for one hundred unusual and effective charities." Like that.
In the past, you've pointed out that it can never be more efficient to split a small donation between two charities than to give all to the best bet, even if you are uncertain which is best. So I take it the advantage of lots of charities here is a political one, that we can include some sops to fuzzy-purchasing, lots of GiveWell-ish charities whose efficiency we can calculate, and perhaps one or two x-risk charities which we consider to be very efficient but which most people aren't sold on?
We're not talking about a small donation.
True :-) But is it really so much that in order not to reach diminishing returns on an individual charity, it has to be split 100 ways? Even splitting it five ways would seem to be enough to offset that effect.
Unless one of the charities is SingInst.
As long as some amount of it goes to worthwhile charities, I think the whole thing would be worthwhile. I think we'd be hard pressed to lose control of the meme such that of a billion dollars at least 10 million didn't go to charities that we would want to support.