I’m Michael Dickens. I do independent research as well as consulting for Arb Research, with a focus on quantitative modeling for nonprofits. Previously, I worked as a software developer at Affirm.
On this website, I write about topics that interest me, with a bias toward topics that I think are important.
I intend to donate (at least) 20% of my lifetime income to effective charities. I publish my donations on my Donations page.
I have also written some open source programs on GitHub, including the world’s fastest keyboard layout optimizer.
Contact
Email: web & mdickens.me (and by & I mean @)
Top Posts
If you want to get up to speed on my writings, I’ve collected two lists of some of my best posts.
My favorite non-mathy posts, in chronological order:
- My Cause Selection 2015 in which I decide where to donate my money in 2015.
- GiveWell’s Charity Recommendations Require Taking a Controversial Stance on Population Ethics in which I argue exactly what the title says.
- The Risk of Concentrating Wealth in a Single Asset about how individual stocks are 2–4x as risky as the market, and if you hold most of your wealth in a single asset, you can get huge benefits by diversifying.
- A Comparison of Donor-Advised Fund Providers in which I review all the major donor-advised fund providers and offer my recommendations.
- Obvious Investing Facts where I list some obvious but under-appreciated investing facts.
- Outlive: A Critical Review in which I review the scientific literature to evaluate some of the factual claims made by the book Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.
- Where I Am Donating In 2024 where I explain my cause prioritization, write (very) shallow evaluations of a few dozen charities, and give my top charity picks.
And my favorite mathy posts:
- A Complete Quantitative Model for Cause Selection in which I build a complicated Bayesian quantitative model for comparing causes.
- All Expected Utility Distributions Have One of Two Big Problems about how it is impossible, even in theory, to have a sensible prior distribution over the expected utility of actions.
- Estimating the Philanthropic Discount Rate on the reasons why a philanthropist might discount the future, and how much those reasons matter.
- Asset Allocation and Leverage for Altruists with Constraints on how philanthropists can improve their investment portfolios by (1) adding leverage and (2) decreasing correlation with other philanthropists’ investments.
- Investors Can Simulate Leverage via Concentrated Stock Selection in which I show that concentrated factor portfolios (mostly) behave like leveraged, less-concentrated portfolios.
- Should Earners-to-Give Work at Startups Instead of Big Companies? about how earners-to-give can think about the risk and return of working at a startup.