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You can individually choose to donate to political causes. Obviously anyone but the wealthiest can't single handedly influence large scale policy making, but lo

by seoaeu 6y ago

You can individually choose to donate to political causes. Obviously anyone but the wealthiest can't single handedly influence large scale policy making, but lobbying and advocacy can have an outsized influence. Edit: Consider that lobbying has an ROI of something like 1000x. If you can be anywhere close to that effective at directing government spending towards foreign aid, poverty reduction, public health, etc. then that could easily be more impactful than donating directly to NGOs

skybrian 6y ago
This is true, but the problem is that you rarely know if political advocacy will work until after it succeeds, and even afterwards, it may take a while to study the impact of the change. GiveWell did study some political advocacy groups, but apparently it’s just hard to know what to recommend with confidence. There is a spin-off organization (Open Philanthropy) that uses funds from rich philanthropists to do more experimental work.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  You don't need to know whether a specific advocacy effort will work, only to estimate whether the overall expected value is high enough. And we know that when advocacy succeeds it can have upsides many many times the cost put in (and there aren't that many advocacy movements) so there is at least some hint that the expected value is large. It feels kind of like a cop-out to say that you shouldn't pursue political change because you can't quantify how much good you'll do.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    Sure, you can guess at expected values, but what makes that guess interesting enough to share with others as a recommendation? Why would GiveWell's guesses about political causes be more interesting to read than anyone else's? GiveWell's job is attempting to make predictions about fairly definite questions that can be answered by doing a lot of homework. They can learn a lot about charities and read scientific studies and make predictions that they can stand behind. It's figuring out what the safe choices are, not guessing at speculative winners. But maybe a prediction market could do what you want?
  - lmm 6y ago
    We also know that advocacy movements can have downsides many times the costs put in. Estimating the expected value of political advocacy is a good idea, but I would expect the result to be negative.

by seoaeu 6y ago

skybrian 6y ago

This is true, but the problem is that you rarely know if political advocacy will work until after it succeeds, and even afterwards, it may take a while to study the impact of the change. GiveWell did study some political advocacy groups, but apparently it’s just hard to know what to recommend with confidence. There is a spin-off organization (Open Philanthropy) that uses funds from rich philanthropists to do more experimental work.

seoaeu 6y ago
You don't need to know whether a specific advocacy effort will work, only to estimate whether the overall expected value is high enough. And we know that when advocacy succeeds it can have upsides many many times the cost put in (and there aren't that many advocacy movements) so there is at least some hint that the expected value is large. It feels kind of like a cop-out to say that you shouldn't pursue political change because you can't quantify how much good you'll do.
- skybrian 6y ago
  Sure, you can guess at expected values, but what makes that guess interesting enough to share with others as a recommendation? Why would GiveWell's guesses about political causes be more interesting to read than anyone else's? GiveWell's job is attempting to make predictions about fairly definite questions that can be answered by doing a lot of homework. They can learn a lot about charities and read scientific studies and make predictions that they can stand behind. It's figuring out what the safe choices are, not guessing at speculative winners. But maybe a prediction market could do what you want?
- lmm 6y ago
  We also know that advocacy movements can have downsides many times the costs put in. Estimating the expected value of political advocacy is a good idea, but I would expect the result to be negative.