I wrote much more about this point but decided to cut it down substantially since it was already disproportionately large compared to it’s value to my overall rhetorical goals.
But here’s some other things I wrote that didn’t make it into the final draft of #8:
“I do agree that this helps you donate more dollars that you can credibly say came from you. But does it reliably increase total impact? It seems unlikely. For instance, imagine donating to a highly rated GiveWell charity that is vaccinating people against a communicable disease in Africa. The vaccines will be cheaper in the future and if you invest well, your money should be worth more in the future too. More money, cheaper vaccines—impact properly increased, right? But preventing the spread of that disease earlier with less money could easily have prevented more total occurrences of that disease. Most problems like disease, lack of education, poverty, environmental damage, or existential risk compound quickly while you sit on the sidelines. Does the particular disease or other problem you want to combat really spread slow enough that you can overtake it with the power of compounding interest? You should do the calculation yourself, but most of the problems I’m aware of become harder to solve faster than that. And this is definitely a bad strategy if the charity you’re supporting is actually working on long-term solutions to the problems they’re combating and not just producing a series of (noble but ultimately endless) band-aid outcomes. Solving the problem is entirely different than managing outcomes indefinitely and can drastically shift the balance in favor of giving less sooner rather than more later.”
I also wrote a lot of poorly phased notes (that I wasn’t entirely happy with) to the effect that if you still thought this was a great idea… so much so that you actually planned to do it, you should definitely not execute it silently without communicating your plan to the non-profit you’re expecting to support. My guess is that most heads of non-profits would “shriek with horror” (at least on the inside) at the thought of you really doing something like this and would patiently counsel you in the calmest tones they could manage that you should not do it and instead give sooner. I don’t personally run any non-profits. This is all only partially-informed speculation on my part. I could have gotten something wrong here but all the ways to analyze it seem to keep pointing in the same direction even if none of the arguments are rigorous or completely specified with numbers from real situations.
I was also going to point out that lots of the largest and even several smaller scale non-profits have endowments like the kind I mention. I agree with you that too many non-profits are geared towards the near-term without any sense of perspective for what they could accomplish globally if they weren’t fixated that way. But I guess I’m assuming that you threw out any non-profits that short-sighted back in step 2.
I wrote much more about this point but decided to cut it down substantially since it was already disproportionately large compared to it’s value to my overall rhetorical goals.
But here’s some other things I wrote that didn’t make it into the final draft of #8:
“I do agree that this helps you donate more dollars that you can credibly say came from you. But does it reliably increase total impact? It seems unlikely. For instance, imagine donating to a highly rated GiveWell charity that is vaccinating people against a communicable disease in Africa. The vaccines will be cheaper in the future and if you invest well, your money should be worth more in the future too. More money, cheaper vaccines—impact properly increased, right? But preventing the spread of that disease earlier with less money could easily have prevented more total occurrences of that disease. Most problems like disease, lack of education, poverty, environmental damage, or existential risk compound quickly while you sit on the sidelines. Does the particular disease or other problem you want to combat really spread slow enough that you can overtake it with the power of compounding interest? You should do the calculation yourself, but most of the problems I’m aware of become harder to solve faster than that. And this is definitely a bad strategy if the charity you’re supporting is actually working on long-term solutions to the problems they’re combating and not just producing a series of (noble but ultimately endless) band-aid outcomes. Solving the problem is entirely different than managing outcomes indefinitely and can drastically shift the balance in favor of giving less sooner rather than more later.”
I also wrote a lot of poorly phased notes (that I wasn’t entirely happy with) to the effect that if you still thought this was a great idea… so much so that you actually planned to do it, you should definitely not execute it silently without communicating your plan to the non-profit you’re expecting to support. My guess is that most heads of non-profits would “shriek with horror” (at least on the inside) at the thought of you really doing something like this and would patiently counsel you in the calmest tones they could manage that you should not do it and instead give sooner. I don’t personally run any non-profits. This is all only partially-informed speculation on my part. I could have gotten something wrong here but all the ways to analyze it seem to keep pointing in the same direction even if none of the arguments are rigorous or completely specified with numbers from real situations.
I was also going to point out that lots of the largest and even several smaller scale non-profits have endowments like the kind I mention. I agree with you that too many non-profits are geared towards the near-term without any sense of perspective for what they could accomplish globally if they weren’t fixated that way. But I guess I’m assuming that you threw out any non-profits that short-sighted back in step 2.