Some people have observed that small and large donors follow different giving patterns. Small donors who give out of their salary—that is, most people—tend to donate money more or less as soon as they earn it (usually within a year). Large donors—e.g., extremely wealthy people and foundations—tend to slowly distribute their money and hold on to most of it¹. For example, large foundations typically donate little more than the legally required 5% of assets each year. Why do they behave differently?

I don’t believe this difference is surprising, and actually it’s not really even a difference.

This is a collection of writings on where people are donating. It only includes writings that I am aware exist (obviously) and that are written by effectiveness-minded people.

My descriptions are paraphrased from the linked writings as much as possible. The writing in this post includes combinations of my own and the linked writers’ words. My summaries often do not do the original writers justice, so I recommend reading all of the linked articles if you are interested.

Summary: The stock market can be modeled as Omega in Newcomb’s problem. On average, an asset will only outperform if the market predicts that you won’t buy it. So you cannot say “if I had bought that, I would have made a lot of money”, just as in Newcomb’s problem you can’t say “if I had taken both boxes, I would have gotten more money than if I only took one”.

Summary: All expected value distributions must either (1) have a mean of infinity, or (2) have such thin tails that you cannot ever reasonably expect to see extreme values. When we’re estimating the utility distribution of an intervention, both of these options are bad.

I have removed Disqus and replaced it with built-in static comments. Disqus comments are disabled, but still visible on any old posts¹. New posts going forward will only use the new static comment system.

I had been wanting to switch off Disqus for a while. It has a few disadvantages:

1. I have no control over comments except for the moderation tools Disqus provides.
2. I have no control over how comments are displayed.
3. I don’t know what Disqus is doing or might do with commenters’ personal information.

The new comment system does exactly what I want it to do and nothing more.

Edited to add: If anyone’s interested, I’m using the Jekyll Static Comments plugin by Matt Palmer, with a few personal modifications.

Notes

Posted on Sep 17, 2017

Summary: Large donors may create better incentives for both charities and small donors if, rather than providing fixed funding to a charity, they offer to match all donations to that charity over a relatively long time horizon.

Summary: Investment advisors typically recommend that you put somewhere between 50% and 75% of your stock investments into US stocks and the rest into international markets. Most individual investors have 70% or more of their stock money in the US or their home country, a phenomenon that’s aptly called home country bias. But there are reasons to believe that even 50% is too much, and many US investors might prefer to hold more like 0-30% of their stock investments in the United States.¹²

Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor and this is not investment advice.

Ever since I’ve been writing essays, I have always accumulated many more essay ideas than I end up actually writing. I frequently have an idea, write a paragraph or two, and then realize I have nothing left to say. Rather than leaving these unpublished, I am trying an experiment. This post contains a compilation of some of these ideas that were too short for essays.

In this issue, we discuss:

• putting your money where your mouth is
• the linguistics of swear words
• cause prioritization
• religion
• more cause prioritization, because that’s obviously been my favorite topic recently

Summary: The Open Philanthropy Project (Open Phil) aims to follow what it calls hits-based giving, which means it makes risky bets and many of its grants may end up failing. I agree with this idea and I believe that donors should generally be less risk averse. Good Ventures, the foundation that financially backs Open Phil, behaves more conservatively than a “hits-based” approach would predict, and it probably ought to take greater risks in the interest of doing more good.

Part of a series for My Cause Selection 2016. For background, see my writings on cause selection for 2015 and my series on quantitative models.

Introduction

In my previous essay, I explained why I am prioritizing animal advocacy as a cause area. In this essay, I decide where to donate. I share some general considerations, briefly discuss some promising organizations I did not prioritize, and then list my top candidates for donation and explain why I considered them. I conclude with a final decision about where to donate.

This year, I plan on donating $20,000 to the Good Food Institute (GFI), which primarily works to foster the development of animal product alternatives through supporting innovation and promoting research. I believe it has an extraordinarily large expected effect on reducing animal consumption and contributing to improving societal values.

My writeup last year persuaded people to donate a total of about $40,000 to my favorite charities; if I move a similar amount this year, I believe GFI will still have substantial room for more funding even after that.

I will donate a few weeks after publishing this, so you have some time to persuade me if you believe I should make a different decision. Another donor plans to contribute an additional $60,000 AUD (~$45,000 USD) to GFI and is also open to persuasion.

This essay builds on last year’s document. Usually, unless I say differently here or in one of my previous writings, I still endorse most of the claims I made last year. Last year, I discussed my fundamental values and my beliefs about broad-level causes plus a handful of organizations, so I will not retread this ground.