Enjoyed most of this, some worries about how far you’re getting with point 8 (on giving now rather than later).
Give now (rather than later) - I’ve seen fascinating arguments that it might be possible to do more good by investing your money in the stock market for a long period of time and then giving all the proceeds to charity later. It’s an interesting strategy but it has a number of limitations. To name just two: 1) Not contributing to charity each year prevents you from taking advantage of the best tax planning strategy available to you. That tax-break is free money. You should take free money.
If you are worried about this you could start a donor advised fund for yourself.
2) Non-profit organizations can have endowments and those endowments can invest in securities just like individuals. So if long term-investment in the stock market were really a superior strategy, the charity you’re intending to give your money to could do the exact same thing. They could tuck all your annual contributions away in a big fat, tax-free fund to earn market returns until they were ready to unleash a massive bundle of money just like you would have. If they aren’t doing this already, it’s probably because the problem they’re trying to solve is compounding faster than the stock market compounds interest.
These assumptions about the motivations of people running non-profits seem too rosy. Most organizations seem to have a heavy bias toward the near. Maybe the best don’t, but I’d like to see more evidence.
Diseases spread, poverty is passed down, existential risk increases.
There is a very relevant point here, but, unfortunately, we aren’t given enough evidence to decide whether this outweighs the reasons to wait.
Do we want x-risk explicitly mentioned without explanation if this is for the contest?
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.
Enjoyed most of this, some worries about how far you’re getting with point 8 (on giving now rather than later).
If you are worried about this you could start a donor advised fund for yourself.
These assumptions about the motivations of people running non-profits seem too rosy. Most organizations seem to have a heavy bias toward the near. Maybe the best don’t, but I’d like to see more evidence.
There is a very relevant point here, but, unfortunately, we aren’t given enough evidence to decide whether this outweighs the reasons to wait.
Do we want x-risk explicitly mentioned without explanation if this is for the contest?
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.