Anonymous asked:
Yep! This year, I decided to give most of my donations ($15,000) to the Good Food Institute (reviews here, here).
I mostly thought about animal charities. My reasoning for this was
- Even if you value animals only a tiny fraction as much as humans, animal charities still look way more cost-effective than Givewell top charities.
- It’s true the effects of animal charities are pretty uncertain. But I think there are a lot of reasons to be uncertain about Givewell top charities too. Decreasing poverty is great in the short term, but it also causes people to eat more meat, contribute more to climate change, etc.
- I find it really hard to evaluate existential risk charities: when I think about them it involves a lot of speculative arguments and generally comes down to “do I trust this guy or this guy more?”
Within the space of animal charities, I think the most effective interventions are corporate campaigns and supporting ethical meat alternatives. Between these two, it seems like the latter maybe has more room for funding given how much money Open Phil has given to cage-free advocacy in the past year. (They’ve also given a grant to GFI, but have given much more to cage-free advocacy stuff.)
Something that I found helpful while thinking about all of this was playing around with this app. The numbers certainly shouldn’t be taken too literally, but it can give you a good sense of how your opinion on different questions can change the EV of donations to different charities.
I also made a small donation ($1000) to SCI. I wanted to have a donation this year that’s easier to talk about with non-EAs who might be freaked out if I start talking about animal charities. And I do think Givewell does really good work with their top charity research and SCI is doing valuable things.