I’m Michael Dickens. I do independent research as well as some consulting for nonprofits. (If you want to read my research, you’ve come to the right place!) 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, these are some of my best posts.
My favorite non-mathy posts, in reverse chronological order:
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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.
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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.
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Obvious Investing Facts where I list some obvious but under-appreciated investing facts.
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A Comparison of Donor-Advised Fund Providers in which I review all the major donor-advised fund providers and offer my recommendations.
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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.
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GiveWell’s Charity Recommendations Require Taking a Controversial Stance on Population Ethics in which I argue exactly what the title says.
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My Cause Selection 2015 in which I decide where to donate my money in 2015.
And my favorite mathy posts:
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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.
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Investors Can Simulate Leverage via Concentrated Stock Selection in which I show that concentrated factor portfolios (mostly) behave like leveraged, less-concentrated portfolios.
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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.
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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.
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A Complete Quantitative Model for Cause Selection in which I build a Bayesian quantitative model for comparing causes.