DanielLC wrote:I still wouldn't expect three different charities though. Are they really that close?
I think both these concerns can be answered by
reading their article about why they want to make the split:
"We don’t believe in 'diversifying' donations to charity, for the sake of 'reducing risk' – we believe in giving in order to maximize the 'expected total good accomplished,' which – by default – means finding the best giving opportunity and allocating it 100% of one’s charitable dollars. However, we do see legitimate reasons to divide one’s donation:
If you are giving a large enough amount of money, it’s possible to hit diminishing returns by giving it all to one charity. A simple example is that if I were giving $1 billion this year, I wouldn’t give it all to AMF, because that amount would well exceed AMF’s room for more funding.
A more subtle version of this idea pertains to learning opportunities. In a sense GiveWell is like a 'large donor' with a few million dollars of anticipated money moved.
If we direct major funding to more than one charity, we will have improved access to each such charity and will have improved opportunities to track its progress and learn from it. In addition, though we don’t anticipate moving enough money to overwhelm any of the three charities’ room for more funding,
there is an argument that each marginal dollar means less to the charity in terms of improving its prominence, ability to experiment and plan, probability of turning out not to be able to scale further, etc."
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Arepo wrote:What people might do is filter Givewell's recommendations through their own value system/differing priors on the value of different approaches, and then judge which charity to give all their money to. In practice, if Givewell's numbers are a representation of their confidence, this would have a fairly similar effect to split donations.
A rational donor would do that, however, I don't think many people are ideally rational enough to actually follow through. I'm glad GiveWell asks us to consider it.
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DanielLC wrote:I suppose it's possible that GiveWell figures that they're suggestions are followed by enough people to split it. If I personally donated everything to AMF, it wouldn't make a big difference, but maybe if everyone who donates to GiveWell did, it would be different.
Yeah, it's basically a collective action thing. GiveWell writes:
"For donors who think of themselves as giving not only to help the charity in question but to help GiveWell, we encourage allocating your dollars in the same way that you would ideally like to see the broader GiveWell community allocate its dollars. If every GiveWell follower follows this principle, we’ll end up with an overall allocation that reflects a weighted average of followers’ opinions of the appropriate allocation. (By contrast, if every GiveWell follower reasons 'My personal donation won’t hit diminishing returns, so I’ll just give exclusively to my top choice,' the overall allocation is more likely to end up 'distorted.')"
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