{"items": [{"author": "Sasha", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=470631062953751", "anchor": "fb-470631062953751", "service": "fb", "text": "There's a thread on this subject at the moment on Felicifia: http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&p=5509...", "timestamp": "1338908048"}, {"author": "Todd", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/112947709146257842066", "anchor": "gp-1338909618603", "service": "gp", "text": "Meta meta charities.", "timestamp": 1338909618}, {"author": "Mac", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=470705302946327", "anchor": "fb-470705302946327", "service": "fb", "text": "The closest analogy I can think of is mutual funds in the stock market. Give them your money and they will invest it wisely. But the fact is that, as a group, individual investors buying specific stocks do better than a lot of the funds. Thus, my gut says that picking your own charities -- that you are actually passionate about -- might be the most effect use of your money. What the meta-charities are doing is being out-of-house developers for the charities they are helping.", "timestamp": "1338913903"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=470736846276506", "anchor": "fb-470736846276506", "service": "fb", "text": "@Sasha: that is an interesting discussion, though most of the people commenting have different values than I do, especially Brian. Giving What We Can and 80,000 hours seem to be very much in line with my ideas and values.", "timestamp": "1338916903"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=470742979609226", "anchor": "fb-470742979609226", "service": "fb", "text": "@Walker: there's a difference between charity evaluation and giving promotion groups. I see picking your own charities based on your own research as not very likely to do well compared to using the research of a good evaluator, if there's one who shares your values. Consider GiveWell's review of AMF [1]: there's no way I could do that detailed an evaluation of a charity on my own (and remember that they have done many evaluations of other charities to pick out AMF as a standout organization). [2]
As for giving promotion, while I could become a full time professional giving advocate I don't think I'm particularly well suited for it, while I am well suited to earning more money than average. So I probably do better to help hire other people to do it.
[1] http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF
[2] But giving to a meta-charity is picking your own charity based on your own research, which is part of why I'm skeptical of it. Charity evaluation is a hard task to do well, though I do have some practice: http://www.jefftk.com/news/charity_evaluation.html", "timestamp": "1338917435"}, {"author": "Sasha", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=470893132927544", "anchor": "fb-470893132927544", "service": "fb", "text": "Jeff, what are your values in a nutshell? (not looking to start a discussion atm, just for my reference)", "timestamp": "1338932220"}, {"author": "Brian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=471094406240750", "anchor": "fb-471094406240750", "service": "fb", "text": "There are hundreds of hedge funds / mutual funds filled with some of the smartest and greediest people on earth spending 80 hours a week to find unexploited returns, so we should expect it to be hard to beat the market by any significant margin. In contrast, few people take the same heavily optimized approach to charity, so it's not surprising if there are unexploited gains that can be uncovered by GiveWell and the like. In addition, while there's a single unit of value for capital-market transactions, different altruists have (sometimes radically) different ideas about what outcomes are most valuable. So even if, say, the cause of building art galleries in rich countries has been optimized to the point of no free lunches, maybe the cause of animal welfare has not been.", "timestamp": "1338959563"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=471402479543276", "anchor": "fb-471402479543276", "service": "fb", "text": "@Sasha: roughly, I'm a hedonistic total utilitarian who only counts the joy and suffering of humans (http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-04-30.html) . Future ones count equally, though it's very hard to evaluate whether some action helps them (http://www.jefftk.com/news/2011-10-07.html).", "timestamp": "1339008311"}, {"author": "Sasha", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=471537282863129", "anchor": "fb-471537282863129", "service": "fb", "text": "What makes you think the people on Felicifia have different values? I'd say that's as close as we come to having a 'standard' set on the forum. Brian is a negative util, but I don't think any of the other regulars are.", "timestamp": "1339025020"}, {"author": "Sasha", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=471540246196166", "anchor": "fb-471540246196166", "service": "fb", "text": "Ok, I hadn't registered the 'of humans' part. I don't think any of us would want to be that specific (and is something I would be interested in discussing sometime), but in practice it's not too different for some of us - helping animals doesn't have compound benefits, so while I'm vegetarian, I don't do anything for them that comes with a clear time or material cost.", "timestamp": "1339025486"}, {"author": "Brian", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/470622992954558?comment_id=472436296106561", "anchor": "fb-472436296106561", "service": "fb", "text": "I'm probably not a full negative utilitarian. I just act like one most of the time because I have a very high pain:pleasure exchange rate.", "timestamp": "1339163618"}]}