Blue-collar effective altruism
I started out this morning, asking my chosen LLM, well ... this:
The philosophy and subject of "effective altruism" has become some kind of controversial subject, relating to billionaires justifying cut-throat approaches to earning more billions that they can then donate to the "right" causes after they get tired of their corporate overlordship. Hmm ... that was more rant-y than I intended. My point and my question is just, what are quick and easy, reliable, effective ways of figuring out which causes, organizations, open-source projects, non-profits, NGOs, etc, are A) most deserving, and B) most in need. Eg, I have $5/month to donate to a cause ... how do I quickly determine whether that money should go to Wikipedia, Tor, or F-Droid ... or some other org that I've completely overlooked?
My LLM, like most of them, loves the sound of its own voice, so I'll spare you the full response. It did give me some good meta-charity links to explore--
But then it spent much of the rest of its answer subtly shaming me away from OpenSource projects and towards charities directly focused on helping people in need. I haven't yet decided how I feel about that.
But regardless, I wanted to also ask real live human beings about this.
Note that I do not want a debate about just how bad is "effective altruism" as understood by the billionaire class, and/or the progressive Left. I am not (yet) willing to relinquish that term to the Bill Gates of the world.
What I do want to talk about, is what that term really should mean (according to me); how do I best decide who to donate money to?
I'm prepared to set up an extra $20/month or $50/month, or some other small chunk of spare change, to support causes I believe in ... but I want to figure out, objectively, which of those causes actually need the money the most, and/or which of those causes are going to put my money to the best use -- as I define it (which is, obviously, a subjective metric ... but still, the metric I care about).
As a brief follow-up on my hypothetical to the LLM ... as much as I use it, I am always immediately inclined to want to donate to Wikipedia, but a bit of digging quickly shows that they're basically doing fine ... meanwhile, if that's the kind of thing you want to donate money to, the Internet Archive is waaay more desperately in need of an extra $5/month from people like me. So I'm looking for ways of finding, you know that guy.
GiveWell is fine if global public health is what you care about. It’s what I use. It’s old school EA before people got distracted by animal welfare and AI.
If you don’t care who in the world benefits because all people are equal (all strangers are the same), public health in Africa is going to win for cost-efficiency reasons. A lot of people can be helped for relatively little money. It can save lives. What local organization could do that cheaply?
But the benefits are rather abstract. When people benefit from not getting a disease, they won’t know it. It’s a line on a graph going down, and your contribution is too small to see on the graph, but you can do a calculation to get a rough idea of lives saved. So, it’s a matter of trusting the science. Which I do, but… it’s a rather abstract reason to spend your money.
If you want something a bit less abstract, you could try GiveDirectly. This is just giving money to people in need. A nice thing about it is that people will definitely know they got the money, and it empowers them to spend it on what they like. There are studies showing they mostly spend it on beneficial things. It’s not as efficient as public health, but it’s a good baseline. GiveDirectly also lets you choose to donate to help people in the US if that’s what you prefer.
Neither of these is helping a particular cause, though. I’m interested in that too, but don’t have anything to recommend.
What do you care about? And what is in your community.
There's no perfect donation. Animal shelters need help. Programs that help queer kids need help. Programs that help people coming out of prison need help. Programs that help families of cancer patients need help.
There's all sorts of areas. If we all help where we care, we can spread the money. Plus if you donate locally, you can see the work they're doing and get to know the people doing it.
Define "best" and "most deserving"
Once you have done that then the rest is easy.
My heuristic is 1. Needs it the most and 2. Reaches the most people
So while I do donate to the animal shelter and also lots of lgbt orgs, my local food pantry gets it first.
If its tech I want to donate to I donate to things like Kagi all the time, but internet archive gets money first.
My issue with effective altruism (as a philosophy, sidestepping the controversies) is that it overindexes on certain types of suffering at the expense of everything else. For example (to oversimplify for demonstrative purposes), if donating $100 were to reduce suffering in Africa by 100 units (by saving 100 lives), while the same donation to a local LGBT shelter were to reduce suffering by 1 unit (by saving a single life), that doesn't (imo) mean people should exclusively donate to the former; it just means that people should donate to the former more frequently (maybe 100 times more often). Although to be fair to the effective altruists, I suppose they would argue that traditional charity work focuses too much on the tails of the distribution as it were.
Regardless, someone has to donate to the animal shelter, the woman's shelter, your favorite github project, etc, if you want their work to continue. I suppose if I were you, I would focus on the organizations you care about that need money the most, rather than just the causes that are most cost effective.
I think there can be good reasons to get personally involved in local causes, such as being better connected to a local community you care about. There is more to life than being an absentee source of funding.
The way I plan to resolve that is by having a budget for disinterested global giving (helping people on the basis that everyone is equal) and doing other things, too.
I've settled on donating to causes I care about. the marginal gain of picking the right/best charity is dwarfed by the benefit of picking something and sticking to it. I donate to a local pregnancy loss charity, my local kids hospital, tree planting, EFF, kids in Africa, and the Vlogbrother annual Project 4 awesome. I often feel guilty for not donating more, but I also buy higher cost goods from businesses with sustainable practices.