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ChristianKl comments on What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity? - Less Wrong
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My rebuttal:
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Typically when LWers talk about charitable giving, we are talking about effective altruism.
I didn't say anything about trying to maximise your investment. I strongly suspect that the people behind Endaga, for example, could get more money by operating in a more conventional business environment. Entrepreneurship in the third world is emphatically not thoroughly picked over, but it is just not as profitable as selling to rich Americans. If you are willing to pay that opportunity cost, you can have a big effect.
Secondly, effective altruism is a result, not a process. If the most effective way of helping the world is to give nothing to charity and set up businesses instead, then effective altruism would say set up the businesses. I am precisely questioning the assumption that effective altruism == charitable giving.
In that case your example of bike rides is pretty bad. It's a strawman. The comparison is bed nets or deworming.
It's not a strawman, I linked to an actual website. No, those people don't call themselves Effective Altruists, but they are engaged in altruism and are trying to be effective. EA is an outcome, not a process, and the EA movement has no patent on it. Yes, it's a weakman, in that I deliberately chose an obviously ineffective charity. But my opinion of the rest of the EA movement is not much higher. The comparison is neither bed nets nor deworming - according to GiveWell's top ranked charity, it's sending money unmonitored, and hoping against 60 years of experience that this actually improves things rather than just being a leaky bucket.
There not much experience with sending money directly. Most of aid spending traditional went to big organisations and not to individual people in form of money.
This thread is interesting, but off-topic. There is lots of useful discussion on the most effective ways to give, but that wasn't my question.
To forestall an objection: I think investing with a goal of improving the world as opposed to maximizing income, is basically the same as giving, so that comes into the category of how to spend, not how much money to allocate for it. If you were investing rather than giving, and had income from it, you'd simply allocate it back into the category.