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multifoliaterose comments on Efficient Charity - Less Wrong
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You seem to be Missing The Trees For the Forest. The statement that on average aid has not contributed to economic growth does not imply that the best foreign aid charities do not contribute to economic growth.
See, e.g. a comment by Unnamed. I agree that there's not an ironclad case that donating to such charities having positive impact on countries' economic growth, but would you bet against it? If so, with what odds and why? At present I judge the expected impact on economic growth to be positive.
If on average aid has not contributed to economic growth, and the best foreign aid charities positively contribute a lot to economic growth, then as many other foreign aid charities negatively contribute a lot to economic growth, and people cannot tell them apart (if they could, they would definitely shift their contributions).
The result that macro effects are about zero is pretty solid, what terms of the bet are you proposing as I'd take it if it wasn't for difficulty of measurement.
My impression is that the situation is closer to a very large majority having small negative impact and a very small minority having a large positive impact.
The reason that people cannot tell them apart is that they're putting essentially no effort into doing so. According to the recent Money for Good study only $4.1 billion of the $300 billion donated mentioned in the above was donated by donors who do research comparing multiple charities when deciding where to give. It's plausible that donors who make an active effort to maximize the positive effects and minimize the negative effects of their donations can do far better than the average donor.
I'm not literally proposing a bet; I'm just saying that while it could be that donating to charities like Deworm the World and VillageReach doesn't have a positive impact on economic growth, I judge the expected value to be moderately positive and I don't see any reason to think otherwise.This is in line with MassDriver's comment
There are plausible explanations for why the net effect of aid has been trivial that don't preclude the hypothesis that the interventions under discussion are effective.
This implies that GiveWell is much better charitable cause than Village Reach.
In any case, all of my charitable budget goes towards provision of public goods - this has clear large net positive effect, while alleviating suffering would only have positive effect under some rather strong assumption about how well informed I am.
I haven't donated anything to CPC yet (other than a few throwaway comments about how remarkable their performance has been, I tend to do that for things I like and it's hardly much of "charity"). I consider this a very interesting idea, but I'd like someone else to verify that it makes sense.
Upvoted.
Actually, the situation is probably quite a bit worse than the $4.1 billion figure that I cited suggests: "doing research comparing multiple charities" probably entails visiting several charities websites and/or referring to charity watchdog organizations which rate charities on financials rather than impact.
If one ignores signaling/incentive effects then I agree.
Up until this point, GiveWell has been focusing on attracting donations for its recommended charities rather than soliciting money for itself. The more money GiveWell moves the more influence it will have subsequently. Whether or not donating to GiveWell's recommended charities is genuinely a good way to support GiveWell is unclear to me; but what I've done so far on their recommendation.
I think that their thinking has been that they want to prove that they're doing something tangibly useful by directing more money to their recommended charities before fundraising for themselves. Presumably this comes from their emphasis on proven programs.
I personally would like to see them shift toward evaluating charities like Wikipedia, etc. for which it's more difficult to assess the impact but which have potentially very high expected value.
Sure, makes sense. If you're interested I'd encourage you to fill out GiveWell's survey - this could influence what causes they look into next and help you optimize your public goods donations. They've been going where the interest is, presumably in an effort to gain broader traction (e.g. they started looking into disaster relief as a cause in response to receiving a number of queries from prospective donors).
Interesting :-). Is the CPC accepting donations?
Maybe better still would be to fund a (hypothetical) advocacy group that offers the CPC money in exchange for greater openness / freedom of speech in China (potentially leading to simultaneous progress on two fronts at once)? (This idea presupposes that straightforwardly increased civil rights in China would not indirectly reduce its economic growth; an assumption which admittedly may not be valid.)
It is clear to me that the real efficient charitable cause is rationality itself. Givewell is giving money to VillageReach as a way of proving to stupid, irrational people that efficient charity is better than random charity. (Duh).
But if you could find a way to make rationality more widely accepted, even by a tiny amount, then you would incrementally solve the "efficient charity" problem along with a host of others, including existential risk, lack of life-extension advocacy, etc etc.
Agree, but easier said than done :-).
Beware the fallacy of the drunkard who looks for his keys under the streetlight rather than in the alley where he dropped them, because "the light is better here"
Sure, I'm not saying that one shouldn't try. Several points here:
My observation has been that there's a tendency for people with lower innate levels of rationality who are exposed to rationality to adopt "rationality as attire" analogous to Science As Attire. People can nominally become more rational without this having a deep impact on them, and this can give rise to an illusion that raising levels of rationality is easier than it actually is. I have limited data and the relative significance of this factor is unclear to me.
I'd certainly be interested in brainstorming with you about ways to raise the global standard for rationality.
Concerning easy accessible projects vs. difficult inaccessible projects: I think that as a heuristic younger people should aim for smaller successes to develop a credible track record to leverage toward later more ambitious goals.
I think that it might help if one could make rationality look more like a way to win and less like a cult(ure) of self-sacrifice and loserdom. This is a big problem have with LW: it generates Losers, not winners. Yes, generous losers who want to help others, but losers nontheless. An ideology that makes you into a loser (no matter how generous a loser) is going to sell like warm dog-poo.
Maybe it would be possible to turn a branch of rationality into a machine that outputs people who are "winners" according to a diverse set of already-acepted standards of winningness. I.e. not "how much has this person helped random strangers", rather "has this person got an expensive car" "has this person got an active social life", "has this person got a hot partner", "does this person give off signals of high-status" etc.
I think it's hard to even imagine rationality as popular because what we have here is so different from what could ever be popular.
Maybe there simply isn't a way for one to use epistemic rationality to generate winning people. Maybe the only way to reap any reward from rationality is to have a whole society simultaneously adopt it, producing an irrationality/collective-action-problem catch 22 which will be the end of us all.
( irrationality/collective-action-problem catch 22 = can't make anyone rational without solving important collective action problems, can't solve important collective action problems without most people being rational. Hence impasse, stupid, fail, die. )
"Rationality as attire" can actually win really well because it takes so little to do better than most people. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Guilty! ;)
Also, we know much of the aid has been done with knowledge that it would cause harm, and designed to be stolen/abused, because it was being used as bribes for nasty regimes in geopolitical contests. That can provide a sizable chunk of the "negative" effect to balance out positives.