$100 for the best article on efficient charity -- deadline Wednesday 1st December

Roko

Reposted from a few days ago, noting that jsalvatier (kudos to him for putting up the prize money, very community spirited) has promised $100 to the winner, and I have decided to set a deadline of Wednesday 1st December for submissions, as my friend has called me and asked me where the article I promised him is. This guy wants his god-damn rationality already, people!

My friend is currently in a potentially lucrative management consultancy career, but is considering getting a job in eco-tourism because he "wants to make the world a better place" and we got into a debate about Efficient Charity, Roles vs. Goals, and Optimizing versus Acquiring Warm Fuzzies.

I thought that there would be a good article here that I could send him to, but there isn't. So I've decided to ask people to write such an article. What I am looking for is an article that is less than 1800 words long, and explains the following ideas:

Charity should be about actually trying to do as much expected good as possible for a given amount of resource (time, $), in a quantified sense. I.e. "5000 lives saved in expectation", not "we made a big difference".
The norms and framing of our society regarding charity currently get it wrong, i.e. people send lots of $ to charities that do a lot less good than other charities. The "inefficiency" here is very large, i.e. Givewell estimates by a factor of 1000 at least. Our norm of ranking charities by % spent on overheads is very very silly.
It is usually better to work a highly-paid job and donate because if you work for a charity you replace the person who would have been hired had you not applied
Our instincts will tend to tempt us to optimize for signalling, this is to be resisted unless (or to the extent that) it is what you actually want to do. Our instincts will also tend to want to optimize for "Warm Fuzzies". These should be purchased separately from actual good outcomes.
Our human intuition about how to allocate resources is extremely bad. Moreover, since charity is typically for the so-called benefit of someone else, you, the donor, usually don't get to see the result. Lacking this feedback from experience, one tends to make all kinds of gigantic mistakes.

but without using any unexplained LW Jargon. (Utilons, Warm Fuzzies, optimizing). Linking to posts explaining jargon is NOT OK. Just don't use any LW Jargon at all. I will judge the winner based upon these criteria and the score that the article gets on LW. Maybe the winning article will not rigidly meet all criteria: there is some flexibility. The point of the article is to persuade people who are, at least to some extent charitable and who are smart (university educated at a top university or equivalent) to seriously consider investing more time in rationality when they want to do charitable things.

Charity should be about actually trying to do as much expected good as possible for a given amount of resource (time, $), in a quantified sense. I.e. "5000 lives saved in expectation", not "we made a big difference".
The norms and framing of our society regarding charity currently get it wrong, i.e. people send lots of $ to charities that do a lot less good than other charities. The "inefficiency" here is very large, i.e. Givewell estimates by a factor of 1000 at least. Our norm of ranking charities by % spent on overheads is very very silly.
It is usually better to work a highly-paid job and donate because if you work for a charity you replace the person who would have been hired had you not applied
Our instincts will tend to tempt us to optimize for signalling, this is to be resisted unless (or to the extent that) it is what you actually want to do. Our instincts will also tend to want to optimize for "Warm Fuzzies". These should be purchased separately from actual good outcomes.
Our human intuition about how to allocate resources is extremely bad. Moreover, since charity is typically for the so-called benefit of someone else, you, the donor, usually don't get to see the result. Lacking this feedback from experience, one tends to make all kinds of gigantic mistakes.

I don't think it depends on the motivations of those in the charities, based on my views of the insides of a few - some of which had succumbed thoroughly to the Iron Law of Institutions (where the people working there didn't believe any more), some of which were pretty solidly oriented to their stated purpose, and some of which were in between (some recoverable, some not).

I think we can reasonably just assume, without making this question meaninglessly hypothetical, that the charities want money and we don't need to go more deeply into it for the question to be applicable to the real world - and I am indeed asking because I am interested in the real world applications of this question:

What is the best giving strategy for charities to encourage: for people to spread their donations, or for people to give their year's charity spend to a single charity?

(For a start, I would guess this would vary with size and fame of charity. Large charities would be more confident of being the winner, small charities would be more pleased to get anything at all. Then there is the fact that not only are the donors not independent actors, the donors and charities aren't either. Can a donor and a charity be said to be conspiring to achieve their aim? I think they can. This complicates things, though I'm not sure if it's enough to make a difference.)

[And I would be flatly amazed if there wasn't considerable study on this subject already, as there have been enough large charities for long enough who would be considerably interested in the topic that anything claiming to be a radical breakthrough in thinking on the subject from outside the charity field will need to be assessed in the context of existing work, rather than being regarded as a completely new idea in an unexplored field. As I recall, there was no mention of any past work in this area at all. Is there actually none, or did the authors just not look?]

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$100 for the best article on efficient charity -- deadline Wednesday 1st December

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$100 for the best article on efficient charity -- deadline Wednesday 1st December

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