>Unless you're a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit.

On what basis? Through thorough and methodical research? Or gut reaction? The research has a significant cost to it. Guts are notoriously unreliable. 

Clearly the answer is not to just "Trust Charities", because Effective Altruism claims that they are more effective than other charities. 

>(Unless by "leap of faith" you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)

In the normal capitalist economy, I go to a restaurant. I pay for the meal. The meal is immediately served to me. There is a clear connection of reciprocity. There is a clear indication that the requested service was provided. There is a clear avenue of evaluation. I just put the food in my mouth. That's where the trust comes from. You buy, receive, and evaluate the service through normal use and consumption. 

In charitable giving, there is no easy feedback. I give the money to a charity and the money essentially goes into a black void. I obtain no immediate feedback on whether the charity rendered is effective or not, because the services are not delivered to me but to somebody else. I cannot directly observe what the money is being used for. 

I mean one huge reason is logistics and uncertainty. 

First we must come to the knowledge that yes, children actually are dying, and this death can be prevented with $5000. How do we prove that? How does the average person obtain this information? Well, a charitable foundation says so. Or some famous celebrity claims it to be true. Or some study, which the vast majority of humanity has never read or even heard about, claims it to be true. 

Then we need to trust the charitable foundation to faithfully execute the plan to save the child. How do we know the plan will be faithfully executed? 

An effective altruist is committed to finding and evaluating these answers. The vast majority of humanity is not. So Effective Altruism has made a bunch of claims, but can't prove these claims in a 5 minute elevator pitch. 

In the end then you're just another charity asking for a leap of faith. Some people jump, others don't. If you're not asking for a leap of faith, you're asking for a huge mental investment to verify all the claims made.

The advantage of "reform" vs "lobby" is a potential permanent change in 10% improvement year-on-year. If the decision making is actually superior, then we can expect repeated improvements in decision making and budgeting for all subsequent years. 

>I imagine it would take at least several decades to become widespread

Comparing to the pace of change with regards to any world problems, decades-long timespans, yes ridiculously long, are about on-par with many political battles. How long did it take for example to decriminalize marijuana? After 60 years, the fight is ongoing. How long did it take to eliminate lead from gasoline? Leaded gasolines started being banned in 1925, yet it wasn't fully banned until the 1970s to 1990s in the US. 

The fact that needed reforms have a 60+ year turnaround is an indictment on the incompetence of the status quo in my opinion. If we care about long term planning, we need something more performant. 

Let's imagine a hypothetical new and improved decision making process can reduce the turnaround time from 60 years to only 10 years. What's the cost-benefit of for example, having unleaded gasoline 50 years sooner? 

Your calculator is honestly pretty depressing. You don't really get any tax benefits unless you are wealthy enough to donate large sums in the ~$20,000 to $100,000 range. 

Imagine the median American, about $50K income, takes the 10% rule in an act of extreme generosity and donates $5000. 

His tax reduction is $241, a 3% reduction. Pretty insignificant. 

At my income level of only around $100K, the optimal donation strategy would be to hold onto your money until you can eventually save to about $60K, then donate it all in a single tax year. The fact that US tax law demands you play these idiotic games makes me roll my eyes. 

I take the perspective that the United States is just tending towards the more typical behavior of presidential electoral systems. America will start acting more and more like Latin American presidential regimes, because the of the deadlock that presidential systems create. The checks and balances aren't protecting us. Instead, the checks and balances are what drive the public to elect "strongmen" who can "get things done" - often through illegal and unconstitutional measures. 

Trump for example is celebrated for "getting things done" - things that are often illegal and unconstitutional. That's the selling point. Therefore I'm not the only one who has suggested that presidential regimes are unstable. Yet as we look across the world, parliamentary systems also have their own problems with authoritarian takeovers. 

I write about what I think the solution is here.

In short, I think we can create a smarter democracy using a system called "sortition". Please take a read of the article I linked for more information. 

...

Even if sortition might be an interesting policy to you, it's not particularly clear if implementation is politically feasible. The inertia of the US political system is so vast it's hard for any money to budge it. Any financial investment will yield highly nonlinear results. Policy might not change for years, or decades, until suddenly one day policy changes. Yet just because the response to investment is extremely nonlinear doesn't therefore mean it's unwise to invest. (There's also the question if America is the wisest place to invest in. Pro-sortition movements also exist in Europe. Could pro-sortition movements be launched more easily in African and South America?)

In terms of what you can impact in terms of an idea such as sortition, your investment can be used to drive "public awareness" and "lobbying". Money can be used to persuade local governments to adopt pro-sortition policies. Or money could be spent raising public awareness of sortition - public awareness that might lead to movement growth. 

Hi Abraham, I have a suggestion on how to improve your democratic process if your membership continues to grow. 

I'm a huge fan of lottocratic processes (ie sortition) to make informed and smarter democratic decisions than mere voting. The rationale of lottocratic democracy is simple. Imagine how insane it would be that instead of using juries to decide court cases, we decided innocence or guilt based on voting. What jury duty does is facilitate democratic specialization. It allows a representative sample to perform a complex tax so that the larger whole does not have to. I write a full defense of sortition here (and full disclosure, I am a frequent advocate of the practice). 

Although the process you have created is much more democratic than the typical nonprofit, you personally retain enormous powers in setting the agenda and setting the final choices that can be allocated. It is admirable that you are putting in significant work to administer the fund; however that choice is not democratic. 

I suggest that the fund be administered by a small council of members (perhaps about 5 councilors) selected by lottery. One of the primary tasks of the small council is to elect an executive of the fund and review the executive's performance. It is far more efficient to let a small council perform this task; 5 people doing a performance review is vastly more efficient than demanding 20 people (assuming 20 participants) perform a performance review. 

If your fund manages to grow, I would suggest adding more and more councilors to the small council up to 25 councilors, to say manage 200 members. Eventually, I would even do away with voting all-together, and instead rely on the small council to make donation choices. With the same justifications as above, a small council would be far more efficient at the task. Moreover, councils are capable of deliberation, assigning roles/tasks, so that the council can make better informed decisions than voters. 

In contrast, voters need to make tradeoffs. A voter might devote more time towards working and generating more revenue for the fund, in exchange for less informed voting on what ought to be funded. Sortition mitigates these kinds of tradeoffs by increasing decision making efficiency by several factors.  

Sure, I think your proposal is a great idea. 

In my opinion you've neglected sortition's ability to vastly improve the capacity of citizens to make informed decisions. Improved capacity makes sortition the better way to select, and hold accountable, political leadership compared to elections.