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Torben comments on Transparency and Accountability - Less Wrong
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Comments (141)
For most realistic interest rates this statement would have made it more rational to put your previous traditional aid donation into a banking account for a year to see if your bet had come out -- and then donating to SIAI.
I donate now using GiveWell to signal that I care about transparency and accountability to incentivize charities to improve.
You would have done that by putting the money in a DAF and announcing your policy, rather than providing incentives in what you say is the wrong field. You're signaling that you will use money wastefully (in its direct effects) by your own standards rather than withhold it until a good enough recipient emerges by your standards.
This is an effective signal. It sounds like multi considers changing the current standard of existential risks charities from ineffective to effective far more important than boosting the income of said class of charities. This being the case showing that there is a potential supply of free money for any existential risk focussed charity that meets the standards multi considers important.
As well as influencing the world in the short term and satisfying his desire to signal and feel generous donating to Givewell effectively shows that multi is willing to put his money where is mouth is. He knows that if he wasn't currently donating Eliezer would use that as another excuse to avoid the issue, since Eliezer has previously declared that to be his policy.
DAF?
Donor-Advised-Fund, a vehicle which allows one to place money into an investment account where it can only be used to make charitable donations. It allows you to commit yourself to giving (you can't take the money back to spend on beer) even if you don't know what's best now, or can allow you to accumulate donations over time so that you can get leverage with the simultaneous disbursal of a big chunk. Here's the Fidelity DAF site.
I like the site!
The limits may be a little frustrating for some potential users... you need to start with US$5,000. (And pay a minimum of $60 per year in fees).
What exactly do you mean by leverage?
When you're giving a large donation all at once, the transaction costs of meeting your demands are smaller relative to the gains, and the transaction costs of doing nonstandard donations (e.g. teaming up with others to create a whole new program or organization) are more manageable.
I don't get it, why would you want to make demands? Isn't the point of donating that you think others are better positioned to accomplish goal X than you are, so they're able to make more efficient use of the money?
Charities sometimes favor the work they believe to be popular with donors over the work they believe would be more useful. Specifically, I'm thinking of monitoring and evaluation. By designating money for unpopular but useful tasks, you encourage them to better fund it. Before doing this, I would talk to the organizations you're considering funding and find out what unsexy projects they would like to fund more. Then decide if you think they're worth funding.
E.g. demands for work to be done providing information to you, or to favor a specific project (although the latter is more murky with fungibility issues).
This doesn't sound like a bad idea. Could someone give reasons to think that donations to SIAI now would be better than this?
In your specific case, given what you have said about your epistemic state, I would think that you subjectively-ought to do something like this (a commitment mechanism, but not necessarily with a commitment to reducing existential risk given your normative uncertainty). I'll have more to say about the general analysis in 48 hours or more, following a long flight from Australia.
One problem with this is that skeptics like Eliezer would assume that mulitfoliaterose will just move the goal posts when it comes time to pay.
Fortunately a specific public commitment does at least help keep things grounded in more than rhetoric. Even assuming no money eventuates there is value in clearly meeting the challenge to the satisfaction of observers.