Update: I should've said "non-existential risk charity", rather than specifically exclude SIAI. I'm having trouble articulating why I don't want to give to an existential risk charity, so I'm going to think more deeply about it. This post is close to my source of discomfort, which is about the many highly uncertain assumptions necessary to motivate existential risk reduction. However, I couldn't articulate this argument properly before, so it might not be the true source of my discomfort. I'll keep thinking.
I received my first pay-cheque from my first job after getting my degree, so it's time to start tithing. So I've been evalating which charity to donate to. I'd like to support the SIAI but I'm not currently convinced it's the best-value charity in a dollars-per-life sense, once time-value of money discounting is applied. I'd like to discuss the best non-SIAI charity available.
By far the best source of information I've found is www.givewell.org. It was started by two hedge fund managers who were struck by the absence of rational charity evaluations, so decided that this was the most pressing problem they could work on.
Perhaps the clearest, deepest finding from the studies they pull together and discuss is that charity is hard. Spending money doesn't automatically translate to doing good. It's not even enough to have smart people who care and know a lot about the problem think of ideas, and then spend money doing them. There's still a good chance the idea won't work. So we need to be evaluating programs rigorously before we scale them up, and keep evaluating as we scale.
The bad news is that this isn't how charity is usually done. Very few charities make convincing evaluations of their activities public, if they carry them out at all. The good news is that some of the programs that have been evaluated are very, very effective. So choosing a charity rationally is absolutely critical.
Let's say you're interested specifically in HIV/AIDS relief.[1] You could fund a program that mainly distributes Anti-Retroviral Therapy to HIV/AIDS patients, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $1494 per disability adjusted life-year (DALY). Alternatively, you could fund a condom distribution program, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $112 per DALY. Or, you could fund a program to prevent mother-to-child transmission, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $12 per DALY. So even within HIV/AIDS, funding the right program can make your donation two orders of magnitude more effective. By tithing 10% of my income every year for the next thirty years, I could have a bigger impact than a $25 million donation, if the person who placed that donation only did an okay job of choosing a charity.
GiveWell currently gives its top recommendation to VillageReach, a charity that seeks to improve logistics for vaccine delivery to remote communities. The evidence is less cut-and-dried than you'd ideally want, but it's still compelling. They took vaccine rates up to 95%, and had very low stock-out rates for vaccines during the 4 year pilot project in Mozambique. They're estimated to have spent about $200usd per life saved. Even if future projects are two or three times less efficient, you're still saving a life for $600. Think about how little money that is. If you tithe, you can probably expect to save 10 lives a year. That's massive.
Instead of donating directly to VillageReach, I'm going to just donate to GiveWell. They pool the funds they get and distribute them to their top charities, and I trust their analytic, evidence-based, largely utilitarian approach. Mostly, however, I think the work they're doing gathering and distributing information about charities is critically important. If more charities actually competed on evidence of efficacy, the whole endeavour might be a lot different. Does anyone have any better suggestions?
[1] I don't understand why people would want to help sufferers of one disease or condition specifically, instead of picking the lowest-hanging fruit, but apparently they do.
Yes, that's what you do. And my analysis is that the best decision under the available uncertainty is that the probability of donating to NTI doing massive good is not distinguishable from the probability of it doing massive harm. The case for 1.0 vs. 0.8 is not any more convincing to me than the case for 0.8 vs. 1.0. Given a hundred questions on the level of whether the Nuclear Threat Initiative is a good thing to do or not, I would not expect my answers to have any more chance of being right than if I answered based entirely on the results of a fair coin. I would, as I said elsewhere in this discussion, take an even-money bet on either side of reality, in the fullness of time, proving the result either is massive weal or massive woe. The massiveness on either side is meaningless because both sides cancel out. The expected utility of a donation to the NTI is, by my estimates, accordingly zero.
Furthermore, I am of the opinion that the question is, given the current state of human knowledge, such that no human expert could do better than a fair coin, any more than any Babylonian expert in astronomy could say whether Mars or Sirius was the larger, despite the massive actual difference in their size. Anyone opining on whether the NTI is a good or bad idea is, in my opinion, just as foolish as Ptolemy opining on whether the Indian Ocean was enclosed by land in the south. I don't know, you don't know, nobody on Earth knows enough to privilege any hypothesis about the value of NTI above any other.
When you don't know enough to privilege any particular hypothesis over any other, the sheer scale of the possible results doesn't magically create a reason to act.
Your conclusion follows from your premises.
I find some of the description of your state of knowledge doubtful.
50% is a very specific probability. It is reasonable here because it is the prior for the truth of a statement. If there were truly no majo... (read more)