The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

I'm guessing no one posted it because there was a whole section in the original article on GiveWell.

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.

Is cancer rolled into those age related disease numbers? Heart disease?

If so, do you happen to know how it breaks out? Cancer and heart disease get quite a lot of medical and funding attention (which doesn't necessarily mean they get enough).

Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering.

The problems facing the wealthy elites are not the problems most people face.

SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer. Do they have any successes or measures of efficiency? It seems like science fiction pie in the sky research by a small group of true believers.

Americans gave $358 billion in philanthropy last year.

https://philanthropy.com/interactives/giving-usa-2015

A trillion dollars every 3 years. Simply trying to make every dollar more effective would go a long way. We probably need fewer, but more effective charities, for example. Identify the best ways to fund medical research.

What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage. The aggregate joy of society will go down if SENS is successful.

> Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day

People die. In other news water is wet.

Now, I'm all for making people live longer, with quality of life

> and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others

Because doctors prop up the sick (often with family support) and artificially extend their life while costing a lot of money in 'treatments' for unrecoverable conditions.

There is a long history of people suggesting various solutions to aging. The SENS Research Foundation has little to suggest it's better than any of the other wastes of cash.

Step 1: Drugs, invasive procedures, and diet are completely off the table as viable solutions.

Step 2: ? (Nanite/Magic)

Because we really don't have many other options right now.

PS: A lesser goal involving tradeoffs may be possible with drugs, but flow out slow aging so you keep a 25 year old body for longer that's not going to happen from drugs.

Could death have evolved by natural selection as a method of favouring the new generation's adaptations over the old? Is a society collectively fitter when there is less resource competition between old and new generations, and new mutations have a better chance at a fair trial - a way of jumping out of local maxima?

Joe, this is Derek, the author of the piece linked above. I think you make a good point. When I first heard Will explain "earning to give," a part of me considered it off-putting and radical, but I've come to see it as an expansive view of doing good, because I think there are a lot of people who (a) wouldn't be good at charitable work or (b) would be good at charitable work but are better at - and enjoy! - other work. For these people, it's inspiring to think they can make a huge difference, too.

There is always the question: What happens if you discourage too many wonderful, smart people from working at charities? And here, Will's answer would be, I think, that if that starts happening, then we should reevaluate the advice. But for now, I think, the earning to give philosophy carries tremendous upside for getting more people to think of themselves as essential contributors to charitable causes, no matter where they work.

This depends on your skill set. What job is a civil engineer going to take where she could earn enough surplus income to be more effectively altruistic than the direct impact or their work?

On a different scale, could Toyota have done more good in a neighborhood by donating the money equivalent of its staff's pay here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-...

While you are correct, speaking negatively towards direct service probably isn't the best choice either. If everybody just donated cash instead of doing the work directly, there would be nobody to do the work. And if we start categorizing people by who is should make money vs. who should do the work, we are heading down a path of strengthening an unfair class system.

There are enough people who do nothing at all that when people want to offer service to others of any kind, I'd just say thank you for their service, no matter what it is or whether it is truly efficient.

I have found this slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_work

You've redefined a word. There's nothing selfish about doing something selfless because it's not being done in the 'optimum' way (as defined by you). It might be inefficient, but it's not selfish.

Regardless of your linguistic tricks, would they even have the motivation to make money on wall street? Would your 'optimum' plan even work with their personality? Is it actually optimal or merely fantasy?

You'd be better off thinking "how generous of them to be doing something" instead of having your intellectually questionable revelation.

On the subject of the long history of humans arguing over the meaning of words, this pg essay tackles the subject well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Charity grunt work brings forward compassion, acceptance, frugality and other qualities that wouldn't arise from working in finance. If you don't see the problem up close you won't want to donate 90% of your income. Furthermore, smart people with the conviction to solve the problem and the guts to get their hands dirty eventually accomplish great things. Norman Borlaug comes to mind.

> Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead?

Hrm... I seem to recall large numbers of protestors recently whose general point was that working on Wall St was in itself, not a morally positive or neutral proposition. Is it morally defensible to screw people over to help different people?

The other problems with positions like yours is that you get a lot of juice out of conflating a particular academic definition of selfish with the general public definition; a lingual bait-and-switch.

If everybody would work at their profession to donate who would do the rebuilding?

I'm a cynic on this subject, but my first thought when I see a young or youngish person do something like joining the Peace Corps is that they're resume-padding. A lot of that is because pretty much everyone I know who's done some kind of long-term charity work clearly was doing that (went off to the third world because they didn't get the internship/job they were applying for, or are angling to get into DC/politics or somesuch).

This is a really common argument that people make, but I think it's missing some essential externalities. I've worked in the nonprofit space for ~7 years now, and this is the most common over-cocktails argument folks tend to make.

First of all, and most importantly, most people do not give very much of their income away. And as you accumulate more money, your rate of giving tends to decrease. There are counter examples, thankfully (!), but this tends to be the trend.

There are also very important questions about the counter force of the labor you engage in to earn money. "Wall Street" type jobs make a great example here: say you earn $1M in a year by, say, funding expansive oil palm plantation development in southeast asian peat swamps. You may end up giving away a generous (!) 10% of your after-tax earnings, but you probably won't make up for the negative impact that you, or your money, had.

This particular externality is huge when you think about how investment works. For instance, all the major charitable foundations have large endowments that are tied up in various capital markets. Almost all of these foundations only give away their legally-mandated 5% payout amount. All the while, their complex financial machinery is generating, on average, returns in excess, or close to, 5%. So 95% of their money is actually working to make more money through the whole expansive and environmentally destructive capitalism thing[1].

Working at a soup kitchen full-time when you posses important skills does seem silly, though[2]. Like everything, I think there's a balance here. For instance, if you're highly skilled, donating a percentage of your time to volunteer or work at a lower-than-market-or-just-market salary at a nonprofit you believe in can have a tremendously important impact.

1. Not all foundations do this. A notable exception is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which I believe has a long-term goal of giving away all of their assets in some finite time period. A mixture of private investment in areas of interest can also help, e.g. what Omidyar Network does a lot of (http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/tech-philanthropy/2014/3/2...)

> This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead?

I wouldn't go as far as "selfish"; it's suboptimal, but sometimes there's value in the experience for the person doing it. It depends on what you're seeking to get. I've seen it suggested to do some small fraction of direct charitable work for the experience, but then to do the most good, work and donate.

For my part, for instance, I donate a moderate amount to causes I find personally interesting (amateur space travel, Free Software projects, etc), but a much larger amount to projects with much larger potential impact to people's lives, such as SENS or (in the future) MIRI. The former I do because I find it fun and motivating; the latter I do because it's efficient and does more good.

I agree that there are more and less efficient ways to do good, but not everyone can make it finance, and nobody should feel bad about not putting in 80-hour weeks in soul-crushing work. Many people would feel miserable in that type of environment.

Here's a good essay by someone that stopped earning to give, on a site that broadly encourages it as a strategy: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-i-stopped-earning-to-give...

There are a few problems with this:

First, not everyone who goes to an elite university can get a job on Wall Street. Though these jobs are largely populated by graduates of elite universities, they are still very hard to get.

Second, people are more efficacious at things they want to be doing. Many people don't want to be in a high pressure job with long work hours and are more satisfied doing work that they find personally meaningful, rather than meaningful because of all the nice ways they can spend money on others.

Third, implicit in your response is the idea that there is some moral imperative to act as selflessly as possible. Why? No one chose to be born, so why does the accident of their birth impel them to act a certain way? Further, it is not even clear to me that improving human life is that important. Humans are petty. We are mean to each other, we harm the environment, etc. Different people value different things. You seem to value improving others lives materially. Others have different values and priorities, and that is fine as well.

Fourth, peoples lives have higher order consequences than just their immediate actions. Someone can touch a lot of lives through the money they spend but they may not have as much impact as a nurse who sits down with her patients and their families and comforts them when they're scared. Or the barber that I go to who always makes my entire day better (and thus my interactions with others better) by how cheerful he is.

but what if its the most impactful?

To me it seems selfish to feed 100 people by donating time at a kitchen, instead of working more hours and donating to a charity that might feed 200.

It's as if I want the personal gratification of helping a human being in person as opposed to helping N times as many equally real human beings who I will never meet.

There's generally two things people want to accomplish out of charitable giving - making the world a better place, and the "warm fuzzies" of helping out.

The fact that getting the warm fuzzies isn't a particularly good way of making the world better doesn't mean that you can't get the fuzzies, too. It just means that there's a tradeoff involved, which means you want to make the best tradeoff you can between the two.

Go ahead and volunteer at the soup kitchen while you make $500, or even $5000 per hour. I particularly encourage it if you find it emotionally rewarding or motivating for the nitty-gritty work of making the world better.

I wonder how many of the critics of ineffective altruists actually give more to society than the overqualified soup kitchen volunteers...

Some general comments I have on the article (which I thought in general was very good):

- At 80,000 Hours (the social impact career advice service I cofounded) we don't advise that many people to aim to earn to give in the long-term; less than a third of the people who have changed their plans on the basis of our advice have done so in the past, and the proportion will be less in the long-term.

- Most commonly, the people who do this are those who really wanted to work in lucrative career X anyway, but were thinking of doing something else. E.g. Matt Gibb really wanted to do startups, but thought he should instead do something 'more ethical'; our advice made him realise he could do both. He's pledging 30% of his equity at LendLayer. (interview here: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/)

- Another common strategy (which we do recommend) is to gain skills in a for-profit company before then moving to something with greater direct impact afterwards. While you're working for that for-profit, you may as well be donating a lot too!

- if you think this is cool and are an entrepreneur, you might want to take the Founders Pledge (http://thefounderspledge.org/about/)

- if you think this is cool and can't or don't want to take the Founders Pledge, you might want to take the Giving What We Can pledge (disclaimer: i cofounded GWWC) https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/become-member

- If you think this is cool and aren't sure what you should do with your life, then we can advise you at 80,000 Hours (https://80000hours.org/). We're currently in Mountain View for the summer.

Some of the charities mentioned are clearly advocating for policy change (lifting copyright and restructured tax schemes), and I think that generally all charities must decide how to relate to the current structure of the world because whatever the ill you are campaigning against preventive measure are most effective at preventing suffering. So one question is if you see any natural limit for when something goes from a charity to a political campaign and vice versa. For instance, imagine the bizarre scenario where a presidential candidate pledges a significant increase to foreign humanitarian aid by taking from the foreign military aid budget. Will make that candidacy a worthwhile charity (supposing the bizarro candidate has reasonable probability of winning)?

An unrelated question is: why do you think there are so few investment opportunities that are truly concerned with being ethical? The GiveWell founders seems like they could have made an investment fund dedicated to growing local companies in the poorer parts of the world. Direct cash transfers are among the best ways of helping the poor, but stable financing with modest return expectations seems like it could be pretty good too, with the benefit of slightly growing the capital available to help. Or you could imagine getting a significant amount of shares in Shell and turn up at shareholders meetings and make them repair their pipelines properly and such things.

It seems reasonable that if a person wants to donate to charity, that person might also want to expend some mental energy to optimize the way in which she does so.

For example, if I know that I can afford to give only $5 to charity, it does not seem particularly like a "dick measuring contest" to hope that, with a little thought, I might be able to make that $5 go further. Imagine that I can either give the $5 to a charity with an 80% overhead, or I can give the $5 to a charity with a 20% overhead. All else equal (i.e., assuming the two charities do approximately the same good with their non-overhead dollars, by whatever metric I wish to apply, including some abstract sense of personal fulfillment), my $5 seems self-evidently better spent on the 20%-overhead than on the 80%-overhead charity.

Consider the zoo for which you're a donor; if you could spend a few minutes on some activity that would double the amount of money you could give to the zoo each year without otherwise costing you any money, would you not do it? In other words: do you actually care about the outcomes of your charitable work, or are you just doing it because there is some minimum level of action at which you feel good, irrespective of the outcome?

I agree with your overall frustration but metrics are important. How much does that 'something' matter to you? How often is it repeated? Is the problem, that matters to you, getting solved effectively or is the problem getting worse?

For example, if I want to feed the homeless and I volunteer to do that but the problem is metrically getting worse, there is a greater conflict at large. The house is burning and you're only throwing a handful of water at the problem.

Context and effectiveness are important.

  Skip the measurement and do something real.

No. If you care whether a donation to a particular charity will be either helpful or wasteful, then you need measurement.

This is the worst kind of anti-intellectual nonsense. Do something real? What does that even mean? Are malaria nets not real to you?

Instead of waving off the serious efforts of a large group of people to figure out how to do the most good in the world as "dick measuring", I would encourage you to consider why you find the idea of comparing different forms of altruism so abhorrent that you refuse to even consider it as anything other than a source of cheap jibes.

Perhaps you consider the lives of people in your community to be more valuable than others. Perhaps you are less concerned with the good you do than how good it makes you feel. Perhaps you believe that charity is only meaningful if aligned with some higher power.

All of those would be meaningful arguments, but instead all you've given is an invective against thinking. Why? What good could that possibly do?

> Charity is about the donor as much as the recipient. Skip the pseudo-scientific horseshit and do something that matters to you.

If what matters to me is doing enough homework to feel confident in the choice I make, who are you to say that's "horseshit"? We're both trying to get out there and help people in the way that satisfies us best; you're the one making it a dick-waving contest.

Its fine to do those things (and I tutor kids too), but you should hardly get to claim that you're doing charity if you're knowingly and willingly doing far less good than you could be doing.

* Technical experts won't necessarily be good at teaching people to use technology, or helping to set up infrastructure in third world countries.

* Other people (eg. teachers) will be better-placed to teach technical expertise to people in the third world.

* Technology isn't necessarily the most valuable thing to people in the third world - often they need simple things like corrugated steel roofs, anti-parasitics drugs and malaria nets.

* Technical experts are the best people at creating technology (tautologically) and they'll be more productive at that than they would be at any other task (and more productive any anyone else would be at creating technology).

So the elegant, effective solution is to have technical experts apply their technical expertise where it's most needed, get paid as much as possible (while doing useful work) and donate a significant portion of their earnings to fund education and development experts (who would otherwise be doing something less valuable) to go to where they're needed and help poor people in whatever way they need help.

Sending technologists to the third world will do about as much good as sending academics to the farms. May it would be spiritually enriching for the technologists, but a lot of technology will go unbuilt and a lot of poor people will miss out on deworming pills because that money went to fund plane tickets.

I think that startups where the users are principally people in poor countries is a very promising area for socially minded people to work in.

Startups usually (but not always) generate value for their users in the form of consumer surplus. Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, $1 of consumer surplus in poor countries is worth 10x or more than $1 of consumer surplus in rich countries.

Some examples: Wave (YC alum) is making sending remittances cheaper (taking only 3% rather than 10% like Western Union). $0.4 trillion in remittances are sent every year. Segovia is making benefit payments in India more efficient, so that only 10% in lost in transactions rather than 50% as is currently the case. Both of these in my view have massive social value (and are run by people in the effective altruism community).

> You just need to find a destination for your donation.

The effective altruism counterpoint is that the same £400 is just about the amount necessary to save a life from malaria or schistosomiasis. Usually a child. The last number I saw was that ~$800 to one of GiveWell's top charities can be expected to save a life.

The "how to make global donations" problem is hard, but it's important, and we're fortunate that great work and research has been done. Let's use it to put our charitable donations to their best use!

My only question for the Gates Foundation is this: Didn't Mr. Gates make a vast amount of his incredible wealth using questionable and indeed: illegal business practices? There's the right place at the right time aspect of Mr. Gates' situation, but there's also bullish nature of it.

Can Mr. Gates now be seen on the moral high road, simply because of the way he's redistributing the wealth he attained (again: sometimes illegally) to those very less fortunate? Do we just say, "Shit Outta Luck" to his competitors?

I don't want these questions to be rhetorical, I'm actually very much interested in other people's opinions and point of view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

A common fallacy is that the donors know best.

It would be wise to consult the works of William Easterly [1] e.g. The White Man's Burden [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly

[2] http://www.davidmays.org/BN/EasWhit.html

Right, because the human race has a really good track record of allowing the benefits of technological productivity increases to impact the poor in a positive way.