Anonymous asked: Hi Kelsey, I'm pretty new to EA/rationality and am a little bit confused as to the principles of EA. Because it seems like utilitarianism, which given a fixed sum, would prioritize cost-efficiency, leads to the conclusion that nobody should give money to any charities other than malaria nets (including when there are crises such as ICE separating families), because any amount of money donated to the crisis would be more cost-effective if used to buy malaria nets instead. Any thoughts?

Hey!

So a thing to keep in mind here is that ‘what is the most effective thing I, individually, can do, holding the whole rest of the world constant’ is an important question, and ‘what is the most effective thing all effective altruists working together can do, holding the whole rest of the world constant’ is an important question, and ‘if we succeed at convincing millions of people to use this as their model of activism, what’s the most effective thing we can do?’ is an important question. And they sort of require very different thinking, and if you try to apply the conclusions from one to a different one then you’re going to get very confusing results.

So on the individual level, assuming that the only resources you get to allocate are the ones you have yourself, then yes, you should give your money to the charity which is currently turning money into value at the best rate. Unless you are secretly Jeff Bezos (hi! I think you should give all your money away!), you’re not going to give enough money to fill that charity’s ‘room for more funding’, which is the phrase GiveWell uses for ‘the amount of money that charity knows what to do with’.

(Speaking more precisely, you would change your donation target at the point at which the gains on the margin from additional donations to that charity decrease enough that some other charity has better gains on the margin - that is, until an additional dollar to Charity A will only buy 8utility and it’s now a worse giving opportunity than Charity B, which buys 9.)

As an individual who isn’t super wealthy, this won’t come up, because many charities that GiveWell and OpenPhil evaluate have pretty flat marginal utility of money in the range of $10,000 - the value to them of $1000 doesn’t change very much if you give them $10,000 first. It can still come up if you are funding really small, promising opportunities with very low budgets - WASR is an EA org that has had a really tiny budget until recently, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they had significant changes in the marginal value of money even over relatively small amounts of money.

But for the most part, as an individual donor, yeah, you just figure out where your money goes the farthest and then give that as much money as you’re willing and able to give.

But then we ask ‘what is the most effective thing all effective altruists working together can do, holding the whole rest of the world constant’. And effective altruists do actually move enough money to be game-changing in many cause areas. I can’t find GiveWell’s 2017 money-moved (might not be out yet) but their 2016 money-moved is here: it’s around a hundred million dollars. That’s enough money that spending it all on malaria nets is probably less effective than spending some of it on other charities that might be competitive in value to the Against Malaria Foundation, and to high-uncertainty exploratory grants in other areas. There are other benefits to diversification - getting involved with the nonprofits working in a space can get you access to information you couldn’t have learned other ways, people with skills you didn’t have otherwise, and generally new ideas/worldviews/ability to hear about really good giving opportunities which you wouldn’t otherwise have. At some scale, it makes sense to focus some energy on that.



And then you get to ‘if millions or tens of millions of people were involved in effective altruism, what should we be doing?’. And at that scale, you are talking about enough money - tens of billions of dollars - that you can meet the funding gaps of every charity with great impact/dollar, do lots of exploratory grants in new spaces, fund the creation of new charities, and also make use of the fact you have tons of people. Right now I’m not super involved in offline activism, but if there were millions of people who were basically aligned on values and priorities then it’d be possible to accomplish a ton with protests and walk-offs and other events. (I would love to have helped with a protest against ICE, a protest while I was at Stanford against Stanford’s $22billion endowment, and a protest for my friends at Google against Google’s working with the U.S. military, and protests against ag-gag laws and other sketchy lobbying by the factory farming industry, but these things all work much better with a hundred thousand people than with like 200 many of whom have social anxiety).

It sounds like part of your question is ‘if everyone was doing this, wouldn’t lots of good and valuable charities be bankrupt just because they aren’t the most good or most valuable?’. And I think the answer is ‘no - if everyone were doing this, we’d have enough money to have fully funded charities in lots of areas we’re currently ignoring, and to support the founding of new charities which have the potential to be impactful’.

We’re not going to get everyone to do this. And there are actually significant costs of scaling up effective altruism - in particular, people are worried that if we grow too quickly the ideas will get diluted or distorted or our ability to invest in promising things that sound deeply weird will be reduced. But I still think it’s helpful to think at all of these scales while considering what the ideas of EA mean.