Tl;dr: Cryonics companies have a pre-written bottom line. If people believe cryonics has a reasonable chance of success, they are significantly morally obligated to form a charity that would give cryonics away, as such a charity would be far more effective in convincing, and by extension saving people, since it would have no incentive to pre-write a bottom line. Over time, such a charity would increase general demand for cryonics, bringing it into the mainstream and making traditional cryonics companies more successful.

Let us assume for the purposes of this post, as I'm sure many of you believe, cryonics stands a reasonable chance (Let's pick p = 0.05) of being successful. It seems pretty clear that you have a pretty strong moral obligation to attempt to get people signed up for cryonics. There is a lot of talk about things like Cryonics versus charity. Robin Hanson even has a post "Cryonics as Charity", although he means an entirely different thing than I do. But in searching, I was surprised not to find a post that asked this question: why isn't there a charity that provides cryonics to, for example, people that can't afford it? Or one offering it to the greatest minds of our time, in the hopes that they'll be around for all of our futures?

There's been a lot of speculation as to why cryonics isn't more popular. The answer, at least for me, is obvious. There's a tremendous dearth of reliable information on the subject. The fundamental problem with medicine is the information gap between consumer and provider - consumers don't have the scientific knowledge to make an informed purchase. But in conventional medicine, you can easily get a second opinion, whereas in cryonics, few people, from the media to medical professionals, take it seriously enough to offer a well thought out second opinion, even if that opinion is against it. And what information I have seen linked to on the subject is generally published by CI or Alcor. Ironically, when I asked for "unbiased" information on the matter, I got exactly what I wasn't looking for - information from a company that wants me to pay them, at minimum, $200,000. The result? An informational balance where one side presents no argument, and the other side presents an argument with a pre-written bottom line.

This is where the idea of a charity comes in. A charity would have no financial incentive to pre-write the bottom line, and is generally seen as a more reputable source of information, as it should be. Furthermore, it would help destigmatize cryonics, as part of the stigma (as I see it, I can't really tell you what gives me this impression) is that you've been "hoodwinked" by the companies. Obviously, it's not tenable for everyone to freeload their way to cryonics. But a charity would serve to bring cryonics into the mainstream and increase demand, providing a (more) neutral source of information. Which would, in time, make organizations like CI and Alcor far more popular.

My purpose in writing this is twofold.

First (chronologically: I thought of this earlier than the other), I want to discuss some of the pragmatic points in how I got myself to do it.

The most important thing is that I didn't try to force the decision through with willpower. Instead, I slipped it through with doublethink. I knew perfectly well - and have known for months - that giving money to SIAI was the right thing to do. But I didn't do it. I spent money on things like Minecraft instead.

But somehow I found myself at the donation page, and I didn't think about it. Or, rather, I didn't let myself think about the fact that I was thinking about it. I made a series of expected-value guesstimates aimed at working around my own cognitive limitations.

I chose monthly donation over one-time because $20 monthly sounds like about the same amount of money as $20; past experience with recurring donations suggests that I tend to leave automatic recurring donations in place for about a year or two, so that probably gained me about a factor of 20. Similarly, I chose $20 as the largest amount that wouldn't put me in serious risk of chickening out and not donating anything.

In order to pull this off, I had to avoid thinking certain true thoughts. Numbers like "$240 per year" only drifted through my consciousness just long enough to make the expected-value judgment, and were then discarded quickly so as to avoid setting off my rotten-meat hypervisor.

This was not the first time I decided that I should give money to SIAI. It was the first time I actually did give them money. (Except for that one time with the $1 charity-a-day thing, which actually might have helped with dissolving psychological barriers to the general idea.)

I think this is important.

The second fold of my purpose is to reinforce the behavior using the glowy feeling that comes from having other people know what an awesome person I am.¹ Anyone else who's done anything worthwhile should feel free to post in this thread too.

1. It's true. Statistically speaking, I probably saved like a jillion people's lives per dollar. And more-than-doubled quality of life for a zillion more. Let me also note that you can get in on this action.

I know that sounds advertisementy, but... well, that's kind of the point. Practice Dark Arts on yourself for fun and profit.

From the GiveWell blog, which is often interesting & applicable to our interests, comes a post on the quality of their volunteers:

"In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people who email us about volunteer opportunities generally seem enthusiastic about GiveWell’s mission, and motivated by a shared belief in our goals to give up their free time to help us. Yet, the majority of these people never complete useful work for us.

We ask new volunteers to first complete a test assignment that takes about 2-4 hours. The assignment involves fixing the formatting of our list of sources on two practice pages and allows us to get a sense of their attention to detail and commitment to volunteer hours. Of the 34 people who emailed us expressing an interest in volunteering between September 2010 (when we started keeping track) and May 2011, only 7 have completed the test assignment and gone on to complete valuable work for us.

Of the 34, 10 never responded to my email outlining what GiveWell volunteers do and asking them if they’d like me to send the first assignment. 13 responded to this email and I sent them the first assignment, but they didn’t complete it. The final 4 completed the test assignment, but didn’t send back the next (real) assignment I sent.

It seems rather surprising that almost 80% of people who take the initiative to seek us out and ask for unpaid work fail to complete a single assignment. But maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Writing an email is quick and exciting; spending a few hours fixing punctuation is not."

(The dropout rate is probably not due to the perceived low utility of the work - GiveWell seems to be up-front that the test assignment is a test.)

I draw a few lessons from this:

• there is likely low-hanging fruit for volunteers in charities or communities in the area of sustained tedious tasks; collecting anecdotes, reports, links, that sort of thing come to mind as LW examples
• additional incentives like jsalvatier's contests may be necessary to draw out community volunteer resources
• tricking volunteers into work might be a fruitful approach - perhaps asking for explicit pointers to research or other help might not work, but presenting a half-complete version will elicit useful responses one can mine. (A more productive kind of trolling.)

Mike Darwin has posted some financial history of Alcor in a post, "The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 5". While there were some errors (see the comments), Darwin has apparently corrected them.

It makes interesting reading in general. It's not a straight analysis of filings like Brandon's "SIAI - An Examination", but more of a financial history (eg. the graph of revenues vs expenses etc.)

atucker wants to save the world.
ciphergoth wants to save the world.
Dorikka wants to save the world.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky wants to save the world.
I want to save the world.
Kaj_Sotala wants to save the world.
lincolnquirk wants to save the world.
Louie wants to save the world.
paulfchristiano wants to save the world.
Psy-Kosh wants to save the world.

Clearly the list I've given is incomplete. I imagine most members of the Singularity Institute belong here; otherwise their motives are pretty baffling. But equally clearly, the list will not include everyone.

What's my point? My point is that these people should be cooperating. But we can't cooperate unless we know who we are. If you feel your name belongs on this list then add a top-level comment to this thread, and feel free to add any information about what this means to you personally or what plans you have. Or it's enough just to say, "I want to save the world".

This time, no-one's signing up for anything. I'm just doing this to let you know that you're not alone. But maybe some of us can find somewhere to talk that's a little quieter.

I recently finished up an essay examining the Girl Scouts, their cookies, and their finances with reference to whether they are inefficient or corrupt.

What is the relevance to LW? (The essay is aimed at a general audience & assumes no knowledge of LW material, though it links heavily to LW in justifying why one should make predictions - such as about Girl Scout finances - before looking at data.)

Well, on occasion, people ask questions about SIAI that they could have answered by themselves, such as by looking through SIAI financial filings. This kind of annoys me. This essay serves as a demonstration how one could investigate a charity on one's own, without simply trusting GiveWell's recommendations (good though they surely are).

Reading SIAI's filings may be a future essay; until then, it is left as an exercise for the reader... (EDIT: One such reading is BrandonReinhart's extremely thorough SIAI Fundraising Article; highly recommended.)

This post is prompted by a short discussion with Wei Dai. He says:

Perhaps we should get other causes to participate/recruit on LW? Actually, why aren't they here already? We have a bunch of individuals with non-SIAI interests, but no causes other than SIAI, despite Eliezer repeatedly saying that they would be welcome.

He has a good point!

Here's my plug, for the cause I spend lots of my time and energy on, Wikimedia/Wikipedia:

Wikipedia/Wikimedia is more analogous to a software project than an ordinary charity - your money is useful and most welcomed, but the real contribution is your knowledge.

Or, more generally: create educational material under a free content licence. If it's CC-by-sa, CC-by or public domain, it can interbreed and propagate.

(Then we need to fix the things wrong with the editor experience on Wikipedia ... though the Wikimedia Foundation is paying serious attention to that as well of late. In the meantime, if you find Wikipedia too personally annoying to participate in directly, writing your own site and CC-by-sa'ing it still helps a lot.)

What good causes can you think of that are relevant to LessWrong and its community, that leverage effectiveness through rationality? (I'm thinking beyond just legally-blessed charities, right down to the "small circle of conspirators" level of trying together to get something done.) As well as SIAI, LW has previously had plugs for GiveWell. What do you spend your time, effort and/or money on?

Artificial general intelligence researcher Ben Goertzel answered my question on charitable giving and gave his permission to publish it here. I think the opinion of highly educated experts who have read most of the available material is important to estimate the public and academic perception of risks from AI and the effectiveness with which the risks are communicated by LessWrong and the SIAI.

Alexander Kruel asked:

What would you do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

Ben Goertzel replied:

Unsurprisingly, my answer is that I would donate the $100,000 to the OpenCog project which I co-founded and with which I'm currently heavily involved.  This doesn't mean that I think OpenCog should get 100% of everybody's funding; but given my own state of knowledge, I'm very clearly aware that OpenCog could make great use of $100K for research working toward beneficial AGI and a positive Singularity. If I had $100M rather than $100K to give away, I would have to do more research into which other charities were most deserving, rather than giving it all to OpenCog!

What can one learn from this?

• The SIAI is not the only option to work towards a positive Singularity
• The SIAI should try to cooperate more closely with other AGI projects to potentially have a positive impact.

I'm planning to contact and ask various experts, who are aware of risks from AI, the same question. 

Mathematician and climate activist John Baez finally commented on charitable giving. I think the opinion of highly educated experts who are not closely associated with LessWrong or the SIAI but have read most of the available material is important to estimate the public and academic perception of risks from AI and the effectiveness with which the risks are communicated by LessWrong and the SIAI. 

Desertopa asked:

[...] if I asked what you would do with $100,000 if it were given to you on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your choice?

John Baez replied:

[...] it’s good that you added the clause “on the condition that you donate it to a charity of your own choice”, because I was all ready with the answer in case you left that out: I’d have said “I’ll save the money for my retirement”. Given the shaky state of California’s economy, I don’t trust the U.C. pension system very much anymore.

Since I haven’t ever been in the position to donate lots of money to a charity, I haven’t thought much about your question. I want to tackle it when I rewrite my will, but I haven’t yet. So, I don’t have an answer ready.

If you held a gun against my head and forced me to answer without further thought, I’d probably say Médecins Sans Frontières, because I’m pretty risk-averse. They seem to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, they seem financially transparent, and I think it’s pretty easy to argue that they’re doing something good (as opposed to squandering money, or doing something actively bad).

Of course, anyone associated with Less Wrong would ask if I’m really maximizing expected utility. Couldn’t a contribution to some place like the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence, despite a lower chance of doing good, actually have a chance to do so much more good that it’d pay to send the cash there instead?

And I’d have to say:

1) Yes, there probably are such places, but it would take me a while to find the one that I trusted, and I haven’t put in the work. When you’re risk-averse and limited in the time you have to make decisions, you tend to put off weighing options that have a very low chance of success but a very high return if they succeed. This is sensible so I don’t feel bad about it.

2) Just to amplify point 1) a bit: you shouldn’t always maximize expected utility if you only live once. Expected values — in other words, averages — are very important when you make the same small bet over and over again. When the stakes get higher and you aren’t in a position to repeat the bet over and over, it may be wise to be risk averse.

3) If you let me put the $100,000 into my retirement account instead of a charity, that’s what I’d do, and I wouldn’t even feel guilty about it. I actually think that the increased security would free me up to do more risky but potentially very good things!

Hmm, here’s a better idea:

Could I get someone to create an institute, register it as a charity, and get the institute to hire me?

What can one learn from this?

• That people value financial transparency.
• That people value openness and trustworthiness.
• Explain that openness isn't necessarily good.
• Address the good reasons for SIAI not to publish AGI progress. 
• Dealing with risk aversion.
• Explain why one would decide to contribute to the SIAI under uncertainty.
• Why it is important to consider charitable giving in the first place.

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.