The common claim: Unlike more speculative interventions, GiveWell top charities have really strong evidence that they do good.
The problem: Thanks to flow-through effects, GiveWell top charities could be much better than they look or they could be actively harmful, and we have no idea how big their actual impact is or if it’s even net positive.
Continue readingI have received some interest from a few people in donating to REG, and the main concern I’ve heard has been about whether REG could effectively use additional funding. I spent some more time learning about this. My broad conclusion is roughly the same as I wrote previously: REG can probably make good use of an additional $100,000 or so, and perhaps more but with less confidence.
Tobias from REG claims that about 70% of high-earning poker players have heard of REG, although many of those have had only limited engagement. He claims that they have had the most success convincing players to join through personal contact, and REG has not had contact with many of the players who have heard of it. This gives some reason to be optimistic that REG can expand substantially among high-earning poker players, although I would not be surprised if it started hitting rapidly diminishing returns once it grows to about 2x its current size.
To date, REG has not spent much effort on marketing to non-high-earning poker players. This field is much larger, but targeting lower-earning players should be less efficient because each individual player donates less money. To get a better sense of how important this is, I would have to know what the income distribution looks like for poker players, and getting this information is nontrivial.
REG would like to hire a new marketing person with experience in the poker world. They would probably be considerably better at marketing than any of the current REG employees. For this reason, additional funds to REG may actually be more effective than past funds, although this is difficult to predict in advance.
Continue readingIn my recent post on cause selection, I constructed a model where I broke down by category all the charities REG has raised money for and gave each category a weight based on how much good I thought it did. I put a weight of 1 on my favorite object-level charity (MIRI) and gave other categories weights proportional to that. I put GiveWell-recommended charities at a weight of 0.1–that means I’m about indifferent between a donation of $1 to MIRI and $10 to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF).
Buck criticized my model, claiming that my top charity, MIRI, is more than ten times better than AMF and I’m being too conservative. But I believe that this degree of conservatism is appropriate, and a substantially larger ratio would be epistemically immodest.
Continue readingContent note: Proofs involving computation and Turing machines. Whether you understand the halting problem is probably a good predictor of whether this post will make sense to you.
I use the terms “program” and “Turing machine” interchangeably.
Continue readingDisclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice.
Effective altruists often debate the question of whether to give now or later. One common approach is to give a regular donation each year. This approach makes a lot of sense: here Holden Karnofsky suggests a few reasons why we should give regularly.
But one problem arises with the “give regularly” strategy. If you’re young, and especially if you’re still in school, you probably aren’t earning much money right now, so you can’t donate much. You will earn a lot more money five or ten years from now, which means you’ll also be donating a lot more. If you’re currently a student and you follow the “donate however much I can afford every year” strategy, you end up leaning heavily toward giving more later.
This mirrors the problem described by Ayres and Nalebuff in Lifecycle Investing: if you’re saving for retirement, you end up saving a lot more money later in life. They recommend that most people leverage investments when they’re young and hold more bonds when they’re older in order to spread risk more evenly across their investing lifetimes (or, as they put it, to improve temporal diversification).
We can apply a similar principle to donations. If you don’t earn much now but expect to earn substantially more in the future, you can “leverage” your donations by donating more than you normally would given your income.
It’s not obvious how to do this. There are three basic methods I can see: taking out loans, foregoing savings, and donating trust fund savings. None of these is perfect, but they’re worth considering.
Continue readingCross-posted to the EA Forum. If you want to leave a comment, you can post it there.
Last edited 2015-09-24.
In this essay, I provide my reasoning about the arguments for and against different causes and try to identify which one does the most good. I give some general considerations on cause selection and then lay out a list of causes followed by a list of organizations. I break up considerations on these causes and organizations into five categories: Size of Impact; Strength of Evidence; Tractability; Neglectedness/Room for More Funding; Learning Value. This roughly mirrors the traditional Importance; Tractability; Neglectedness criteria. I identify which cause areas look most promising. Then I examine a list of organizations working in these cause areas and narrow down to a few finalists. In the last section, I directly compare these finalists against each other and identify which organization looks strongest.
You can skip to Conclusions to see summaries of why I prioritize the finalists I chose, why I did not consider any of the other charities as finalists, and my decision about who to fund.
I chose these three finalists:
Based on everything I considered, REG looks like the strongest charity because it produces a large donation multiplier and it directs donations to both MIRI and ACE (as well as other effective charities).
Continue readingCross-posted to the EA Forum.
Note: When I speak of extinction risk in this essay, it refers not just to complete extinction but to any event that collapses civilization to the point where we cannot achieve highly good outcomes for the far future.
There are two major interventions for shaping the far future: reducing human extinction risk and spreading good values. Although we don’t really know how to reduce human extinction, the problem itself is fairly clear and has seen a lot of discussion among effective altruists. Values spreading is less clear.
A lot of EA activities could be classified as values spreading, but of very different sorts. Meta-organizations like Giving What We Can and Charity Science try to encourage people to value charity more highly; animal charities like The Humane League and Animal Ethics try to get people to assign greater weight to non-human animals. Many supporters of animal welfare interventions believe that these interventions have a large positive effect on the far future via spreading values that cause people to behave in ways that make the world better.
I believe that reducing extinction risk has a higher expected value than spreading good values, and there are a number of concerns with values spreading that make me reluctant to support it. This essay lays out my reasoning.
Personal note: In 2014 I directed my entire donations budget to The Humane League, and in 2015 I directed it to Animal Charity Evaluators. At the time, I generally agreed with the arguments that values spreading is the most important intervention. But recently I have considered this claim more carefully and now I am more skeptical, for the reasons outlined below.
Continue readingIf humans become extinct, wild animal suffering will continue indefinitely on earth (unless all other animals go extinct as well, which is unlikely but possible). Wild animals’ lives are likely not worth living, so this would be bad, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen.
Preventing human extinction obviously means that humans will continue to exist, but this direct effect is trivial compared to the effects described below.
Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be bad:
Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be good:
Emotional disclosure: I’m biased toward optimism here because I don’t like the idea of humans becoming extinct, and I definitely don’t like the idea that this could be the best outcome in expectation.
Even people who are pessimistic about wild animal suffering generally assume that preventing human extinction is good, but I do not often see this justified. Let’s consider some arguments for and against.
Continue readingCross-posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.
TL;DR: Go sign up for Wealthfront right now and transfer all your savings into it. If you’re young and/or you plan on donating most of your savings, choose the highest risk tolerance Wealthfront allows.
You probably want to save money for retirement, or some future large purchase like a house. Many effective altruists have money that they want to donate eventually, but want to hold onto it for now. What should you do with that money while you’re keeping it?
The simplest option would be to keep all your money in a savings account at your bank. This way you’re guaranteed not to lose your money, but savings accounts earn hardly any interest. If you’re willing to put your money into some riskier investments, you will probably end up with a lot more money than when you started.
The two most important investment vehicles are stocks and bonds. You can buy these on your own, but you don’t need to.
There are services like Wealthfront, called robo-advisors, that manage your money for you automatically. You give the robo-advisor some basic facts about yourself such as your age and how much risk you can tolerate, and it figures out a good way to allocate your money. You deposit your savings and the robo-advisor does the rest–you never have to worry about your savings again. A good robo-advisor invests your money to get the best possible returns for your risk tolerance.
Both individual and professional investors rarely outperform the market in the long run, so a robo-advisor like Wealthfront will probably manage your money better than either you or a professional would. Even better, Wealthfront has low fees–far lower than anything you’d get from a human money manager–so you get to keep more of your money.
When you sign up for Wealthfront, it will give you a short quiz to determine how much risk it thinks you’re willing to take on. The more risk you accept, the higher expected return you can get. Whatever this quiz tells you, it might be smart for you to choose the most aggressive, highest-risk allocation. As Carl Shulman explains in “Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers”, effective altruists can afford to take on more risk than most people. To borrow his example, your tenth Ferrari isn’t as valuable as your first, but with your tenth vaccine, you can vaccinate a tenth kid and do just as much good as with your first vaccine. Most investors are highly risk-averse: not losing money is much more important to them than gaining money. But as effective altruists, we can afford to take risky bets because if we win big, we can do massively more good in the world.
For the curious, Colby Davis’s A Guide to Rational Investing explains in more detail why investing on your own or with a (human) advisor is a usually bad idea, and why it’s possible to do better than simply buying a total-market index fund. Wealthfront is likely to outperform a total-market index fund because it puts some of your money into emerging markets, which probably outperform the U.S. market in the long run.
Betterment is another popular robo-advisor that offers a similar service to Wealthfront. I slightly prefer Wealthfront, but if you already use Betterment and you don’t want to switch, that’s probably fine. It would be counterproductive to get into a debate about the minor points in favor of one or the other–if you prefer to use Betterment, by all means do so. The main benefits to be had here come from putting your money into a good robo-advisor. After that, it doesn’t matter much which one you pick.
There are a few other robo-advisors on the market which might be just as good. I haven’t spent much time looking into any others, but I feel comfortable recommending either Betterment or Wealthfront.
(If you don’t want to do this, you don’t need to read this section.)
Actually, if you choose a good asset allocation and stick with it, you can probably get better results managing your own assets than using a robo-advisor. This approach requires more dedication, and you need to have a strong stomach to stick with your strategy even when it performs badly. But if that sounds like you, you might want to pursue this approach instead.
For nearly risk-neutral investors, even Wealthfront’s highest-risk, highest-return allocation still leaves a lot of room to squeeze out more returns. You could earn considerably more money by putting a larger percentage of your portfolio into high-return assets, and the best way to do this is to manually manage your investments.
This means buying a basket of index funds with a high weighting in asset classes that have historically outperformed the broad market, which could include small-capitalization stocks, value stocks, and emerging market stocks. You should NOT simply buy a total U.S. or total world index fund. This will both perform worse than Wealthfront (because it is not weighted toward high-return asset classes) and have higher risk (because it is less diversified). It might sound like a total world index fund is maximally diversified, and in one sense it is because it holds stocks from every part of the world. But Wealthfront’s asset allocation has better diversification properties because it holds a higher weighting in asset classes that tend to be less correlated with each other.
I plan on writing a future post with some recommendations for nearly risk-neutral investors who want to manage their own investments. For anyone who wants to learn more now, I recommend William Bernstein’s The Intelligent Asset Allocator, which lays out which asset classes perform best and how to find a good allocation.
No, not really. Most people would be better off if they used a robo-advisor. But it’s particularly important that effective altruists are able to make money on their investments, because it means they will have more money to donate.
Disclaimers: I am not affiliated with Wealthfront; I just think robo-advisors are awesome. I am not a financial advisor and you should use your own judgment when making significant financial decisions.
Free will is an illusion [1]. What does this say about moral responsibility?
If the purpose of morality is to maximize the happiness of sentient beings, as I often claim, then whether free will exists is irrelevant. In fact, whether free will exists does not matter as long as morality focuses on the consequences of actions, rather than their motives.
The traditional argument goes: if free will is an illusion, then we are not in control of our own actions, which means we cannot be held responsible for them. So it doesn’t matter what actions we take, right? We can run around killing people, right? Well, no. Our actions still matter just as much as they ever did: they affect the outside world whether they are the product of free will or the result of deterministic processes. Others are still affected by our actions. We still feel emotions, even if those emotions arise deterministically.
Continue reading