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ThrustVectoring comments on On not diversifying charity - Less Wrong Discussion
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There are timeless decision theory and coordination-without-communication issues that make diversifying your charitable contributions worthwhile.
In short, you're not just allocating your money when you make a contribution, but you're also choosing which strategy to use for everyone who's thinking sufficiently like you are. If the optimal overall distribution is a mix of funding different charities (say, because any specific charity has only so much low-hanging fruit that it can access), then the optimal personal donation can be mixed.
You can model this by a function that maps your charitable giving to society's charitable giving after you make your choice, but it's not at all clear what this function should look like. It's not simply tacking on your contribution, since your choice isn't made in a vacuum.
This is already addressed in the post (a late addition maybe?)
Yeah, it wasn't there when I posted the above. The "donate to the top charity on GiveWell" plan is a very good example of what I was talking about.
This plan can work if GiveWell adjust their top charity as a function of incoming donations sufficiently fast. For example, if GiveWell have precomputed the marginal utility per dollar of each donation as a function of its budget and they have access to a continuously updated budget figure for each charity, they can create an automatically updated "top charities" page.