Big Donations

December 2023: $10,000 to the Global Priorities Institute

See below.

March 2022: $20,000 to the Global Priorities Institute

See below.

April 2021: $30,000 to the Global Priorities Institute

I didn’t put a lot of thought into where to donate, but I put a little more thought than “donate to the same place I donated before”, as I had the previous couple of years. My reasoning went something like this:

• I have a lot of uncertainty about the best marginal use of money. Animal welfare/moral circle expansion? AI safety? Cause prioritization research?
• At the root of this uncertainty, I have some questions that are very difficult to answer—questions about the nature of making long-term predictions, or about how to value the present vs. the future in practice.
• The Global Priorities Institute is trying to answer some of these questions.

My main concern is that it’s not obvious that working on these questions will produce enough progress to justify the effort. Nonetheless, given how uncertain we are about key fundamental problems, it seems worthwhile to work on those problems.

December 2020: $30,000 to the Good Food Institute

I gave to the Good Food Institute this year because that’s where I donated the previous year.

May 2019: $30,000 to the Good Food Institute

I did not spent much time considering where to donate this year. I gave to the Good Food Institute rather than Sentience Institute because I felt that I’d need to spend more time evaluating the latter’s research progress and success to feel comfortable donating to it.

June 2018: $30,000 to the Sentience Institute

I wanted to see more work on longtermist causes other than existential risk, including non-human-centric causes. Sentience Institute was a new organization doing this sort of work and run by smart people.

February 2017: $46,400 to the Good Food Institute

http://mdickens.me/2016/10/31/where_i_am_donating_in_2016/

October 2015: $20,000 to Raising for Effective Giving

This year I spent a lot more time than usual considering where to donate, and I settled on Raising for Effective Giving. I wrote up the details of my process; see the linked article for how I came to this decision.

May 2015: $3000 to Animal Charity Evaluators

2014 was the first year where I had earned more than a few hundred dollars in income, so I felt comfortable donating a larger amount of money in 2015. (Previous donations were really my parents’ money.)

Once again, Stanford EA decided to collectively donate to a charity. We had a lot of internal disagreements, but I believe these points all represented the majority view:

• Elon Musk recently made a $10 million grant to far-future charities, so they probably have limited room for more funding.
• Effective factory farming charities are probably more impactful than GiveWell top charities.
• There is a lot of uncertainty around highly speculative charities and most of us do not feel comfortable donating to them.

The two most popular choices were The Humane League and Animal Charity Evaluators. I felt highly uncertain between these two, but weakly favored THL. I did not see that ACE had a strong case that additional money donated to them would improve the quality of their recommendations.

We came to a consensus on our four top choices (THL, ACE, SCI, and a four-way split between MIRI/FHI/FLI/CSER) and voted between them. I voted for THL; ACE got the most votes. I felt sufficiently uncertain about my preference for THL that I decided to follow the group decision and donate to ACE.

May 2014: $500 to The Humane League

Stanford Effective Altruism partnered with the Arrillaga-Andreesen Foundation; we were to make a grant to some charity, which the foundation would match up to $2000. We decided that we wanted to give to a charity with reasonable evidence of effectiveness, and we were fairly confident in ACE’s recommendation of The Humane League, so we decided to choose it as our grantee. We collectively raised $5000, to which I contributed $500.

2011-2013: Intermission

During this period I discovered GiveWell and considered donating to their top charities. Then I found Brian Tomasik’s essay arguing that we should donate to vegetarian advocacy (at the time he endorsed this as the most effective cause area). I thought that this might be more effective than GiveWell top charities but felt uncomfortable with the lack of evidence supporting its effectiveness. I did not donate any money during this period.

I joined Stanford Effective Altruism in 2012 (at the time called Stanford THINK). I did not donate any money until later but this gave me a platform for in-person discussion about effective charity.

2009-2010: Various donations

During this period I had the intuition that it was important to donate to global poverty and to find effective charities but I gave only cursory thought to what makes a charity effective. I made a few small donations (up to $200) to charities that I thought were reasonably effective.