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Unfortunately, being one of the biggest charities means it's already well-funded, so additional donations won't do much good. It's not really about catering to

Unfortunately, being one of the biggest charities means it's already well-funded, so additional donations won't do much good. It's not really about catering to peoples' recommendations; if someone wants to give to the Expensive Treatments for Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies Fund, then fuck that. It's about achieving the most good. It turns out that the amount of good that different charities do, per dollar, varies by orders of magnitude; and figuring out which charities are the best ones is a hard problem. Neither you, nor I, nor your visitors should be in the business of judging charities; that's better left to groups that do that research full-time, such as GiveWell.

peeters 14y ago
> Unfortunately, being one of the biggest charities means it's already well-funded, so additional donations won't do much good. Why do you say that? There are plenty of charities whose impact scales linearly donations. Just because some charity might be getting a billion dollars a year to feed children in Africa, doesn't mean that an extra 100 dollars won't feed MORE kids in Africa. The difference is that that charity has proven its method and probably has all of the infrastructure in place already. So it's often a safer bet that your money will be doing good. Also, he didn't actually say they choose the biggest charities, he said they selected from each of the biggest charity categories.