The idea that efficient charity is about "doing good" and that "doing good" equates with "lives saved" is one giant availability bias. And of course there is absolutely no sense in going all in on any cause in a risky world with agent exhibiting time preference.
I'll argue the first and second claim seperately. In the conjunction we take the first statement as a premise, let efficient charity be about maximising good. It is not obvious that "doing good" equates to preventing a preventable, premature death, my interpretation of "saving a life", as everyone has to die at some point, cryonics not withstanding. A much better metric, which GiveWell in fact does use, is quality adjusted life years, QALY, independent of the exact choice of quality adjustments. It measures how many more "good" life years a person is expected from the intervention. And still it is difficult to see how this is absolutely equal to "good". We see people donating to their local high school sports team, the catholic church, WWF, UNICEF, Wikipedia, the Linux foundation and many more. All these people are said to "do good". Is "doing good" then not more about solving problems involving public goods? Of course if I can extend a life by 20 QALY for $1000 it is difficult to see how I could get the same amount of good from donating to the local high school sports team, but a couple of hours more Wikipedia uptime, especially in the developing world, could measure up.
Why then do people ride on and on about the QALY metric? Simple, it is a number that can be relatively easily calculated, instead of having to map all public goods to some kind of measure of good. It is more available, thus it is used.
Now to the second claim. We live in a risky world and we exhibit time preference. Good now is more valuable than the same amount of good later, we have a discount function. So I have a very good reason to think about whether I want to donate to GiveWell to purchase some QALY now or donate to MIRI/FHI to purchase a lot of QALY in a hundred years. But what is worse, any intervention, any donation is inherently risky as the conversion from donated money to actual good can fail, if only for failiures of the organisation receiving money. Take GiveWell's clear fund to be a certain conversion and take their second highest rated charity to be risky with a 50% chance of donated $1000 being turned into double the QALY of the clear fund - and one QALY more - and 50% of nothing happening. (Whether this is per donation or for all donations at once is irrelevant here) Should I go all in on either? Basic betting theory says no. I'll have to mix. And I'll have to mix according to my values, how much I care about the world in any given future and how risky I am willing to be.
Also, I am human. I am donating not because I am altruistic, but because it gives me a good feeling. Moreover, I can only decide for myself how to donate, not for all the world at once, so there's that.
Edit: I'm happy you linked Yvain's article because there is a point in it about investing that makes my argument even more complicated. But I'm even more happy because the point about investing the money is something I thought about before and have to research more, again.
Should I go all in on either? Basic betting theory says no.
This is my issue. I'm not sure what justification we have for ignoring the theory, assuming we actually want to be maximally helpful. Can you elaborate?
Apparently, at a recent EA summit Robin Hanson berated the attendees for giving to more than one charity. I think his critique is salient: given our human scope insensitivity, giving all your charity-money to one cause feels like helping with only *one* thing, even if that one organization does vastly more good, much more efficiently, than any other group, and so every dollar given to that organization does more good than an anything else that could be done with that dollar. More rational and more effective is to find the most efficient charity and give only to that charity, until it has achieved its goal so completely that it is no longer the most efficient charity.
That said, I feel that there are at least some circumstances under which it is appropriate to divide one's charity dollars: those that include risky investments.
If a positive singularity were to occur, the impact would be enormous: it would swamp any other good that I could conceivably do. Yet, I don't know how likely a positive singularity is; it seems to be a long shot. Furthermore, I don't know how much my charity dollars affect the probability one way or another. It may be that a p-singularity will either happen or it won't, and there's not much I can do about it. There's a huge pay-off but high uncertainty. In contrast, I could (for instance) buy mosquito nets for third world counties, which has a lower, but much more certain pay-off.
Some people are more risk-seeking than others, and it seems to be a matter of preference whether one takes risky bets or more certain ones. However, there are "irrational" answers, since one can calculate the expected pay-off of a gambit by mere multiplication. It is true that it is imprudent to bet one's life savings on an unlikely chance of unimaginable wealth, but this is because of quirks of human utility calculation: losses are more painful than gain are enjoyable, and there is a law of diminishing marginal returns in play (to most of us, a gift of a billion dollars is not very emotionally different than two billion, and we would not be indifferent between a 100% chance of getting a billion dollars and a 50% chance of getting two billion dollars on the one hand, and a 50% chance of getting nothing on the other. In fact, I would trade my 50/50 chance of a billion, for a 100% certainty of a 10 million). But, we would do well to stick to mathematically calculated expected-pay-offs, for any "games" that are small enough or frequent enough, that improbable flukes will be canceled out on the net.
Let's say you walk into the psychology department, Kahneman and Tversky offer you a trade off: you can save 50 lives, or you can "sell" some or all of those lives for a 0.005% increase in the probability of an outcome in which no one ever dies again and every problem that has ever plagued humanity is solved and post-humans impregnate the universe with life. That sounds fantastic, but at best you can only increase the probability of such an outcome by a quarter of a percent. Is any ratio of "lives saved" to "incremental increases in the probability of total awesomeness" rational? Is it just a matter of personal preference how much risk you personally decide to take on? Ought you to determine your conversion factor between human lives and increases in the probability of a p-singularity, and go all in based on whether the ratio that is offered you is above or below your own (i.e. you're getting a "good deal")?
I feel like there's a good chance that we'll screw it all up and be extinct in the next 200 years. I want to stop that, but I also want to hedge my bets. If it does all go boom, I want to have spent at least some of my resources making the time we have better for as many people as possible. It even seems selfish to to not help those in need so that I can push up the probability of an awesome, but highly uncertain future. That feels almost like making reckless investment with other people's money. But maybe I just haven't gotten myself out of the cognitive-trap that Robin accused us off.