In my opinion that’s a small enough amount of money that if, for example, you already have a strong sense of something like EA principles and want to give in an EA manner, then you’re probably well served by following your intuition that’s been informed by EA values. I say this because I think most of the value of small donations lies in taking risks on high variance projects that are less likely to receive funding from major sources, and so most of the value you can extract with your donation lies in the hard-to-quantify things you know and believe that lead you to think a particular project or organization is worth donating to.
I think of this as something like creating an ecosystem where people maximize variance by maximizing their charitable “alpha” make it more likely that good things get funded that are outside the risk tolerance of large funding sources and on net results in more good than a more conservative approach (here my model assumes the main cost of giving to projects and orgs that don’t deliver is opportunity cost and that they end up being net neutral rather than negative otherwise).
In my opinion that’s a small enough amount of money that if, for example, you already have a strong sense of something like EA principles and want to give in an EA manner, then you’re probably well served by following your intuition that’s been informed by EA values. I say this because I think most of the value of small donations lies in taking risks on high variance projects that are less likely to receive funding from major sources, and so most of the value you can extract with your donation lies in the hard-to-quantify things you know and believe that lead you to think a particular project or organization is worth donating to.
I think of this as something like creating an ecosystem where people maximize variance by maximizing their charitable “alpha” make it more likely that good things get funded that are outside the risk tolerance of large funding sources and on net results in more good than a more conservative approach (here my model assumes the main cost of giving to projects and orgs that don’t deliver is opportunity cost and that they end up being net neutral rather than negative otherwise).