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GuySrinivasan comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
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The points made here are sound. I was particularly awakened by calling out the rule about overhead as wrong, since that has been a major factor in my charitiable giving in the past.
However, if we imagine everyone behaving according to these rules, we wind up with very few (incompetent) people running a few charities with piles of cash. If no lawyers take time off and contribute their expertise to a charity, then how do charities protect themselves from lawsuits, for example? The optimal charity solution is not for everyone to follow your guidelines, but for almost everyone to follow your guidelines, and a few people to deviate. Yet, how do we know whether we should be the ones who deviate?
The answer is that until the world's culture of giving changes massively, you should not be the one to deviate. And you'll notice when the world's culture of giving is changing massively. And then we can solve the new problem of "but the marginal gain of one lawyer from zero really is large!", but until then, it's nothing more than a hypothetical.
Unless! I haven't thought about this before, but what if the great majority of people of important-to-charity category X who currently donate their time are also the sort of people who will switch to these much better guidelines before it becomes a worldwide phenomenon? Does such a category exist? It's the only thing that would make a "just switch to these guidelines and fix the other problems if these guidelines are widely adopted" policy turn out badly if implemented, I think...