Quick takes

Welcome to the effective giving subforum! This is a dedicated space for discussions about effective giving.  Get involved: * ❤️  Donate via Giving What We Can * Join the discussion * Share where you're donating this giving season — and why! * Start a new thread in this subforum[1] * Ask questions about donation decisions * Discuss strategic considerations about giving * Explore other opportunities for donating or raising money * Explore updated giving recommendations from GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, Giving What We Can, and Happier Lives Institute * Book an effective giving talk at your workplace * Give the Forum team feedback about this beta subforum * Reach us at forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org  or comment on this post. 1. ^ Threads can be casual! This will only appear in this subforum or for people who've joined the subforum. 

The Happier Lives Institute have helped many people (including me) open their eyes to Subjective Wellbeing and perhaps even update us to the potential value of SWB. The recent heavy discussion (60+ comments) on their fundraising thread disheartened me. Although I agree with much of the criticism against them, the hammering they took felt at best rough and perhaps even unfair. I'm not sure exactly why I felt this way, but here are a few ideas. * (High certainty) HLI have openly published their research and ideas, posted almost everything on the forum and engaged deeply with criticism which is amazing - more than perhaps any other org I have seen. This may (uncertain) have hurt them more than it has helped them. * (High certainty) When other orgs are criticised or asked questions, they often don't reply at all, or get surprisingly little criticism for what I and many EAs might consider poor epistemics and defensiveness in their posts (for charity I'm not going to link to the handful I can think of). Why does HLI get such a hard time while others get a pass? Especially when HLI's funding is less than many of orgs that have not been scrutinised as much. * (Low certainty) The degree of scrutiny and analysis of some development orgs in general like HLI seems to exceed that of AI orgs, Funding orgs and Community building orgs. This scrutiny has been intense- more than one amazing statistician has picked apart their analysis. This expert-level scrutiny is fantastic, I just wish it could be applied to other orgs as well. Very few EA orgs (at least that have been posted on the forum) produce full papers with publishable level deep statistical analysis like HLI have at least attempted to do. Does there need to be a "scrutiny rebalancing" of sorts. I would rather other orgs got more scrutiny, rather than development orgs getting less. Other orgs might see threads like the HLI funding thread hammering and compare it with other threads where orgs are criticised and don't eng

Frugality did not reduce my productivity but made my social life harder In the early years of my EA journey, I tried to live on a small budget so I could donate more. I learned that I could be productive on a small budget. There were times I worked on an old laptop. Some actions might have taken a few seconds longer, and I did not have much screen space. It was fine. What matters most about productivity is to do the right things, not to do the things slightly faster. I exercise to keep my mind fresh. I don't go to the gym or take sports classes. I just do a bodyweight workout at home. Completely free. I also cook my own meals. I can only spend so many hours working behind a computer screen. Ordering food delivery or buying pre-prepared food does not save me time. The biggest problem with frugality is socializing. To meet people, I need to travel and participate in the activities that they do. Sometimes it may be better to not be too frugal. For example, my team works in the office one day per week. We have lunch in a restaurant - which is quite expensive where I live. When I joined the team, I brought my own food and ate it alone in the office. I felt unhappy about this. After a while, I decided to join and spend a lot of money on the "unnecessary luxury" of not socially excluding myself.

Published: Who gives? Characteristics of those who have taken the Giving What We Can pledge The paper I worked on with Matti Wilks for my thesis was published! Lizka successfully did her job and convinced me to share it on the forum.  I'm sharing this here, but I probably won't engage with it (or comments about it) too seriously as a heads up --- this was a project I worked on a few years ago and it's not super relevant to me anymore.

I thought we could do a thread for Giving What We Can pledgers and lessons learnt or insights since pledging!  I'll go first: I was actually really worried about how donating 10% would feel, as well as it's impact on my finances - but actually it's made me much less stressed about money - to know I can still have a great standard of living with 10% less. It's actually changed the way I see money and finances and has helped me think about how I can increase my giving in future years.

Pre-commitent: I will reply on this thread with where I decide to donate by New Years Day.  I’m planning to meet up with a friend and decide where to give my donations on New Years Eve. I often find I put my giving off so I'm using this post as a commitment device. 1. If anyone wants to join me, feel free to comment with the date you plan to donate by. 2. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to structure your thinking on where to donate? I’m planning to spend a couple of hours on this with a friend.

I'm pretty sympathetic to patient philanthropy for longtermist causes that aren't to do with nearterm Xrisks, because my view is that as long as we preserve option value for the future, they will likely be better placed to use the resources than we are, so we should just save the pool for them to use as they see fit. The example I usually give when explaining my position is thinking about polio and the iron lung. Say someone in the 1910s wanted to invest in significant iron lung production facilities to make sure polio would never be a problem in the future. 20 years later, the polio vaccine is created and all this investment is obsolete. If that money was saved it could perhaps be used to speed up the distribution of polio vaccines and help eradicate polio etc. One uncertainty I have about this though, is that I don't know how to implement this in practice (what % to give later vs give now? How do I know when I should use this pool?). Curious about any takes!

Hey team! I'd love if someone can give me a TL;DR on donation matching - it's something I always get a bit confused about in terms of like "how much more should I donate because of this". And someone asked in a slack I was in about counterfactuals, which I realised I didn't know about either - how else is the money usually used?  Also, does anyone know what the optimal % split between donating to a matching pool vs donating to the charity (am I basically trading off between how much a matching pool actually increases the pie VS the money not being donated?), and how does this change if the org is fully EA funded vs partially vs not at all etc?