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The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?

• JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? This is a real choice. Joining the Peace Corp or helping rebuild levys after a flood is humbling, giving and selfish, all at once. Instead work at what you can do best; then donate so others can do the real work. This is practical selflessness.
  • waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
    Joe, this is Derek, the author of the piece linked above. I think you make a good point. When I first heard Will explain "earning to give," a part of me considered it off-putting and radical, but I've come to see it as an expansive view of doing good, because I think there are a lot of people who (a) wouldn't be good at charitable work or (b) would be good at charitable work but are better at - and enjoy! - other work. For these people, it's inspiring to think they can make a huge difference, too. There is always the question: What happens if you discourage too many wonderful, smart people from working at charities? And here, Will's answer would be, I think, that if that starts happening, then we should reevaluate the advice. But for now, I think, the earning to give philosophy carries tremendous upside for getting more people to think of themselves as essential contributors to charitable causes, no matter where they work.
    • justinator 11y ago
      Here's a thought question: You are: a higher up at a very large company, whose process in some ways causes human suffering. Let's say the product, or byproduct causes cancer, and part of your job even, is to dispel the people who call your company out. Who it better for you to, (a Continue working the job, giving a very unreasonable amount of your salary to charity, which incidentally, attempts to research ways this human suffering (b Work a different job that causes significantly less suffering (all jobs exploit someone/something else, let's be honest), but also causes you to make significantly less (c Quit your career and join the Peacecorps full time, until retirement, using intelligent ways to invest in your previous earnings.
      • JoshTriplett 11y ago
        a2) Continue working the job for now, donate a substantial fraction of your income to charity, climb the ladder as rapidly as possible, and work to change the company in a direction you consider preferable if you think it's salvageable. (While there's a small set of jobs that are nearly irredeemable, such as the folks in a tobacco company or free-to-play gaming company researching how to make their product more addictive, there's a much larger set of jobs with a balance of questionable activities, with potentially some amount of influence over those activities.) Interesting thought exercise: suppose you woke up tomorrow with the position (and requisite skills and connections) of running a company most people would consider irredeemable, such as a tobacco company. Could you, within a reasonable number of years, turn them into a well-respected company that's a net positive influence on society (and not just by dismantling them and donating the results)? I'd bet I could, within 8-10 years. (A bit less for a company for which the plan doesn't involve a few components of scientific research and advancement.)
        • notahacker 11y ago
          You bet you could turn a tobacco company into something that's a net positive for society in 8-10 years? I'd like to see you try. No, really, I actually would. I'm pretty sure it would do more good for humanity than working in computer science and donating your spare income to a cause you believe is an efficient use of your disposable income, even if you're particularly well paid or hit the startup jackpot...
          • homunculus 11y ago
            I think what he was saying was if he woke up the CEO of a tobacco company and everyone he knew, all of his connections, everyone who worked at his company and, most importantly, the shareholders were on board with his plan... He could then pivot the company into something beneficial.
    • vacri 11y ago
      As a counterpoint, a friend of mine was knocked by when she volunteered for a local charity. "What qualifications do you have?" The question sounds elitist, but the point was that charities often have metric shitloads of untrained helping hands. What they need, right now, is people that know how to manage, run finances, computer networking. Advanced skillsets. I actually think the 'earning to give' mindset would really just end up as more consciential salve rather than a new way of thinking, much like people already do with minor donations. "Working on Wall St" changes the way you think. Case in point: another friend of mine was in a relationship with a hardcore Anarchist for 5 years, and came from a poorish middle-class background herself. She'd worked shitty working class jobs. She was pretty exposed to the plight of the poor and aware of poverty issues. Then she got a job in banking. A year later she got a raise of $10k, and she was negative about it, bitching about "the government taking half in tax" and it going to "useless welfare". Complaining that despite her tax load (seriously, got a raise, and all she could do was complain), she still had to help out her single-mother sister with money. Welfare was worthless, why should she have to pay so much tax? She got a bit of a shock when I said "So... what about all those other women like your sister who don't have a sister in banking?". And here in our software bubble, I have a friend who earns 50% more than the national average household income (average, not median). He talks as if he's poor - and I see similar when I read conversations here on HN. It's awfully common for a software developer to see someone else doing the same thing and making a few dollars more, to then reclassify themselves as 'poor'. The point is that where you work and who you associate with change who you are and how you behave - and, ultimately, have a good chance of removing people from the pool of 'people who care' (like my banker friend above). I guess that it's not that she didn't care, it's just that she no longer saw...
      • vacri 11y ago
        ugh, what is it with me and typos? "knocked by" => "knocked back" (too late to edit)
      • willmacaskill 11y ago
        I think that's a really important concern. At 80,000 Hours when we encourage people to earn to give we ensure they're embedded in the effective altruism community, take things like the Giving What We Can Pledge and so on - mechanisms by which to ensure that our future selves don't fail to live up to our ideals. It's also worth bearing in mind that the rate of people becoming disillusioned when they do direct work in charities also (anecdotally seems to me) to be very high. Reason is that it's often very hard, often you don't feel like you're having much of an impact. Whereas if you enjoy working in the lucrative career you're in, the 'sacrifice' of donating even 50% isn't really that great, so it's potentially easier to continue in that path. I'm genuinely really unsure which has the greater dropout rate: earning to give, or direct charity work. If I had to bet I'd say it was direct charity work.
    • willmacaskill 11y ago
      Hi Derek! Nice to see you here!| I actually already think that earning to give isn't the best path for most altruistic people who would be willing to work anywhere. This is a change of view from a few years ago. The reasons are: i) quite a few people are already very successfully earning to give and need really amazing opportunities to donate to; ii) a rising number of very wealthy people are donating most of their wealth (e.g. Giving Pledge). This means that on the margin we really need more talent to spend these donations well. What I do think is: - donating to highly effective charities (e.g. GiveWell recommendations) is a means by which anyone who's got a job in an affluent country can make a truly massive difference - earning to give should be an option that's at least on the table for altruistically minded folks - as you say, for people who would really enjoy very high-earning careers they shouldn't necessarily think "well I should do something I enjoy less because what I'm doing now doesn't have much social value." (I shudder when I see high-flying lawyers or financiers quitting and doing non-profit consulting outside their area of expertise). Via earning to give, these people really can have their cake and eat it. - some careers are dual-benefit - e.g. entrepreneurship can generate huge social value in and of itself, and also be very lucrative - for young people, the most important thing in the short term if you want to do good in the long term is to build skills, and you often build more skills in for-profits than in non-profits. While there, you should earn to give. Overall I think that at the moment maybe 10% of the altruistic people who would be happy working anywhere should aim to earn to give long-term. It depends a lot on cause, though - some areas are more money-constrained; some more talent-constrained.
  • afarrell 11y ago
    This depends on your skill set. What job is a civil engineer going to take where she could earn enough surplus income to be more effectively altruistic than the direct impact or their work? On a different scale, could Toyota have done more good in a neighborhood by donating the money equivalent of its staff's pay here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-toyota-donates-efficiency-to-new-york-charity.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-...
  • codingdave 11y ago
    While you are correct, speaking negatively towards direct service probably isn't the best choice either. If everybody just donated cash instead of doing the work directly, there would be nobody to do the work. And if we start categorizing people by who is should make money vs. who should do the work, we are heading down a path of strengthening an unfair class system. There are enough people who do nothing at all that when people want to offer service to others of any kind, I'd just say thank you for their service, no matter what it is or whether it is truly efficient.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      There are plenty of unskilled volunteers. The waste was a Stanford education, an enormous investment by our culture and by her family, to get her to the point where she ... drove a truck and handed out meals. That was arguably wasteful, self-indulgent and small-minded.
  • funkyy 11y ago
    I have found this slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_work
  • mattmanser 11y ago
    You've redefined a word. There's nothing selfish about doing something selfless because it's not being done in the 'optimum' way (as defined by you). It might be inefficient, but it's not selfish. Regardless of your linguistic tricks, would they even have the motivation to make money on wall street? Would your 'optimum' plan even work with their personality? Is it actually optimal or merely fantasy? You'd be better off thinking "how generous of them to be doing something" instead of having your intellectually questionable revelation. On the subject of the long history of humans arguing over the meaning of words, this pg essay tackles the subject well: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Oh well, you're not convinced. It is however the entire point of the OP. We might consider similar acts like eco-tourism, or disaster tourism, and so on. Where one spends enormous effort and money to visit the less-fortunate and go through the motions of helping. Arguably, to feel better about oneself. In those cases its clearly pretty selfish, and clearly better to have simply donated the money to a real charity instead.
      • mattmanser 11y ago
        Convinced? You're committed a magestic logical fallacy. Sorry you don't understand the mistake you've made and you're going to continue sneering at good people. Don't switch from volunteering to disaster tourism. There are millions of people who volunteer, and only a handful of people who travel overseas to help. What have you done recently? Do you actually donate? And did you read about the money the Red Cross can't explain? Is it really better donating money?
        • backlava 11y ago
          Your rhetorical style here is off-putting. I don't think he's committed any logical fallacy. It's perfectly possible to do charitable work selfishly. For example, if you were offered a choice between saving two lives or, for the same money, saving only one life but getting a nice packet documenting the one life saved, it's selfish to choose the latter for the purpose of making yourself feel better. Even though you're still doing good.
  • duopixel 11y ago
    Charity grunt work brings forward compassion, acceptance, frugality and other qualities that wouldn't arise from working in finance. If you don't see the problem up close you won't want to donate 90% of your income. Furthermore, smart people with the conviction to solve the problem and the guts to get their hands dirty eventually accomplish great things. Norman Borlaug comes to mind.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Its pretty clear that a person who would dedicate their young years to charity work, already have those qualities. I'm thinking she might have retains some fragments of that, as she worked at her real skills and donated significantly.
      • Fishkins 11y ago
        I agree she would she would retain some fragments of that, but she still could be substantially changed. See vacri's sibling (cousin?) post for an anecdote.
      • jackpirate 11y ago
        That's like saying: "Anyone who would want to go to the gym is already pretty fit, so they don't need to go to the gym." The emotional muscles of charity need a workout just as much as our physical muscles. If you don't exercise them, they atrophy.
    • notahacker 11y ago
      That's the bit that gets missed. Smart Stanford grads might not be initially effective at doling out food, but sometimes their smarts can do a lot more for their supply chain or donor base than their future cashflow from a conventional job.
  • vacri 11y ago
    > Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? Hrm... I seem to recall large numbers of protestors recently whose general point was that working on Wall St was in itself, not a morally positive or neutral proposition. Is it morally defensible to screw people over to help different people? The other problems with positions like yours is that you get a lot of juice out of conflating a particular academic definition of selfish with the general public definition; a lingual bait-and-switch.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Still, the point is clear. This was a terrible waste of a Stanford education. Hundreds of thousands in public, private and family funds and now she's in a low-paying feel-good job that anybody could do.
      • Retra 11y ago
        That's not a waste of education. There's no such thing as a waste of education. Maybe her experiences at Stanford reinforced her desire to do this, or strengthened her ability to make sacrifices. There's more to education than making money. For one, if she didn't have that education, you wouldn't be talking about her.
        • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
          Oh there most certainly is such a thing. Dining at a host home in the Phillippines while on a medical mission, we were introduced to the daughter of the family, as 'Dr'. Oh, what do you practice? Oh I don't practice says the daughter, as if it would be beneath her. Now, there are precious few slots in that country for medical education. Such that exist are supported by the nation and the people directly and indirectly through taxes. One of those slots was 'wasted' on this human being, who's degree was an ornament on her wall. In a country where medical treatment is a privilege of the wealthy (thus the medical mission). So pardon me if I regard education as a sacred trust, to be exercised to the best of your ability. Anything less is, at best, an affordable affectation. At worst, a moral failing and a crime against society.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    If everybody would work at their profession to donate who would do the rebuilding?
    • nkurz 11y ago
      The hope is that it would be done by the local workforce. The worry is that depending on foreign volunteers to do the manual labor is a short-term fix that creates a culture of dependency. By contrast, training skilled workers (might be) a long-term structural fix. But this essentially limits the useful on-the-ground volunteers to those able to teach skills, rather than those willing to do unskilled labor. I think this piece (plus the excellent comments) is a good summary of both sides of the argument: http://mitpsc.mit.edu/globalchallenge/?p=335 http://mitpsc.mit.edu/globalchallenge/?p=335
  • smitherfield 11y ago
    I'm a cynic on this subject, but my first thought when I see a young or youngish person do something like joining the Peace Corps is that they're resume-padding. A lot of that is because pretty much everyone I know who's done some kind of long-term charity work clearly was doing that (went off to the third world because they didn't get the internship/job they were applying for, or are angling to get into DC/politics or somesuch).
    • smitherfield 11y ago
      As long as I'm making controversial statements, you can probably extend that to people who join the military in a role that isn't likely to see combat and who don't intend to make a career of it. That's a lot less common than the Peace Corps, Teach for America etc. amongst my very non-representative social milieu (urban, East Coast, liberal), however.
  • philipn 11y ago
    This is a really common argument that people make, but I think it's missing some essential externalities. I've worked in the nonprofit space for ~7 years now, and this is the most common over-cocktails argument folks tend to make. First of all, and most importantly, most people do not give very much of their income away. And as you accumulate more money, your rate of giving tends to decrease. There are counter examples, thankfully (!), but this tends to be the trend. There are also very important questions about the counter force of the labor you engage in to earn money. "Wall Street" type jobs make a great example here: say you earn $1M in a year by, say, funding expansive oil palm plantation development in southeast asian peat swamps. You may end up giving away a generous (!) 10% of your after-tax earnings, but you probably won't make up for the negative impact that you, or your money, had. This particular externality is huge when you think about how investment works. For instance, all the major charitable foundations have large endowments that are tied up in various capital markets. Almost all of these foundations only give away their legally-mandated 5% payout amount. All the while, their complex financial machinery is generating, on average, returns in excess, or close to, 5%. So 95% of their money is actually working to make more money through the whole expansive and environmentally destructive capitalism thing[1]. Working at a soup kitchen full-time when you posses important skills does seem silly, though[2]. Like everything, I think there's a balance here. For instance, if you're highly skilled, donating a percentage of your time to volunteer or work at a lower-than-market-or-just-market salary at a nonprofit you believe in can have a tremendously important impact. 1. Not all foundations do this. A notable exception is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which I believe has a long-term goal of giving away all of their assets in some finite time period. A mixture of private investment in areas of interest can also help, e.g. what Omidyar Network does a lot of (http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/tech-philanthropy/2014/3/27/cant-get-a-grip-on-omidyar-philanthropy-youre-not-alone-so-t.html http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/tech-philanthropy/2014/3/2...)
    • merpnderp 11y ago
      How is turning boreal peat forests into palm oil plantations equal to capital extraction? Isn't it the exact opposite in that land of less value has been turned into land of more value? I think I'm missing something here.
  • JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > This resonates with me. I remember reading of a Stanford graduate who was delivering meals to indigents in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I immediately thought: how selfish. To give up a possibly lucrative employment in finance, so she could personally experience charitable work, was a net loss to that organization. Why not work on Wall Street and donate 90% of her income instead? I wouldn't go as far as "selfish"; it's suboptimal, but sometimes there's value in the experience for the person doing it. It depends on what you're seeking to get. I've seen it suggested to do some small fraction of direct charitable work for the experience, but then to do the most good, work and donate. For my part, for instance, I donate a moderate amount to causes I find personally interesting (amateur space travel, Free Software projects, etc), but a much larger amount to projects with much larger potential impact to people's lives, such as SENS or (in the future) MIRI. The former I do because I find it fun and motivating; the latter I do because it's efficient and does more good.
  • ceras 11y ago
    I agree that there are more and less efficient ways to do good, but not everyone can make it finance, and nobody should feel bad about not putting in 80-hour weeks in soul-crushing work. Many people would feel miserable in that type of environment. Here's a good essay by someone that stopped earning to give, on a site that broadly encourages it as a strategy: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-i-stopped-earning-to-give/ https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-i-stopped-earning-to-give...
  • jeffreyrogers 11y ago
    There are a few problems with this: First, not everyone who goes to an elite university can get a job on Wall Street. Though these jobs are largely populated by graduates of elite universities, they are still very hard to get. Second, people are more efficacious at things they want to be doing. Many people don't want to be in a high pressure job with long work hours and are more satisfied doing work that they find personally meaningful, rather than meaningful because of all the nice ways they can spend money on others. Third, implicit in your response is the idea that there is some moral imperative to act as selflessly as possible. Why? No one chose to be born, so why does the accident of their birth impel them to act a certain way? Further, it is not even clear to me that improving human life is that important. Humans are petty. We are mean to each other, we harm the environment, etc. Different people value different things. You seem to value improving others lives materially. Others have different values and priorities, and that is fine as well. Fourth, peoples lives have higher order consequences than just their immediate actions. Someone can touch a lot of lives through the money they spend but they may not have as much impact as a nurse who sits down with her patients and their families and comforts them when they're scared. Or the barber that I go to who always makes my entire day better (and thus my interactions with others better) by how cheerful he is.
• Havoc 11y ago
  While not directly related to the article's line of reasoning, an honourable mention goes to the Gates foundation - they're willing to take on some of the more "risky" high risk high reward projects that other charities that are accountable to the public can't risk.
  • justinator 11y ago
    My only question for the Gates Foundation is this: Didn't Mr. Gates make a vast amount of his incredible wealth using questionable and indeed: illegal business practices? There's the right place at the right time aspect of Mr. Gates' situation, but there's also bullish nature of it. Can Mr. Gates now be seen on the moral high road, simply because of the way he's redistributing the wealth he attained (again: sometimes illegally) to those very less fortunate? Do we just say, "Shit Outta Luck" to his competitors? I don't want these questions to be rhetorical, I'm actually very much interested in other people's opinions and point of view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation
    • jbhatab 11y ago
      Irrelevant. We're talking about what he is doing while on top. There are more than enough examples of people on top that are doing nearly nothing to better the world.
      • dzhiurgis 11y ago
        Steve Jobs used to claim that best charity is doing business. I (currently) think that best I can do is invest in myself, a.i. skip entertainment and study hard things.
• reasonattlm 11y ago
  Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish more people would, actually, no such thing as too much help here). Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day, and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others. Nothing else comes even close as a single presently addressable cause of terrible things in the world, and lack of money is the greatest obstacle to progress towards meaningful treatments that address the root causes of aging and thus all age-related disease.
  • baddox 11y ago
    Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.
    • kijin 11y ago
      This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives. If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.0 lives a day), versus contributing 0.2% of the cost of a project that has a 60% chance of saving 1,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.2 lives a day), I might choose the latter.
      • reasonattlm 11y ago
        The trouble is you'll never know what the actually numbers were until after the fact - the best you can do is make some educated investments at an 80/20 point. So either you learn yourself or you rely on consensus and authority, etc. You give to a middleman charity that has people who spend the time or do the work based on a theory of what should be done. You're relying on their expertise, and the expertise of those who say that, yes, you should put your money with charity A rather than charity B. But you'll never know if you could have got that 0.2% doing something else. Really, the best you should expect is that you can make a good enough choice to do good versus wasting your donation. I started supporting SENS pretty early, so I had to actually go read the primary literature and take a few years to figure out that yes, I think that this is the best fulcrum to make progress in changing the research community, building the right tech, etc. Nowadays, you can actually rely upon more distributed middle man expertise. E.g. that Peter Thiel invested millions in SENS, or that the SRF advisory board includes numerous researchers who are at the tops of their fields, names appearing in the media, all of whom endorse the SENS approach (http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board), and so on and so forth.
• deleted 11y ago
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• onoj 11y ago
  My thoughts would be: 1) sponsor the private schooling of an orphan or disadvantaged child - if they get the grades you pay direct for the school and materials. (this system exists for most orphanages in most 2nd and 3rd world countries but you can start at home.) 2) International work camps for peace - fully volunteer organization and you get to see another country in a real way and do good work while doing so. Both are 100% - 100% direct.
• deleted 11y ago
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• noname123 11y ago
  Can't believe, no one has posted this yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveWell "GiveWell is an American non-profit charity evaluator and effective altruism-focused organization.[5][6] Unlike any other charity evaluators, GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead.[6][7] GiveWell recommends several charities per year. In 2014, its top recommendations were the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and the Deworm the World Initiative."
  • theycallhimtom 11y ago
    I'm guessing no one posted it because there was a whole section in the original article on GiveWell.
    • snowai 11y ago
      Also http://www.agorafund.org http://www.agorafund.org Allows you to give to basket of charities selected based on principles from effective altruism.
      • rancar2 11y ago
        Just an FYI that the "administration fee is 5%. Additional PayPal processing fees may apply." http://www.agorafund.org/terms-of-service/ http://www.agorafund.org/terms-of-service/
• foolinaround 11y ago
  one angle not addressed is there could be a social contract and relationship between the donor and the recipient. This currently assumes a single transaction, but what if the recipient had a way to pay it back and/or pay it forward? If the donor had the opportunity to view the results of the donation, the satisfaction from it and the relationship obtained makes the sacrifice worth it. If there was a system that helped to track it with the various privacy and other concerns, that would be so awesome!
• TerryADavis 11y ago
  Entertain God. Fuck the niggers. Numbers 11 New International Version (NIV) Fire From the Lord 11 Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the Lord, and when he heard them his anger was aroused. Then fire from the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp. 2 When the people cried out to Moses, he prayed to the Lord and the fire died down. 3 So that place was called Taberah,[a] because fire from the Lord had burned among them. Quail From the Lord 4 The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! 5 We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. 6 But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” 7 The manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin. 8 The people went around gathering it, and then ground it in a hand mill or crushed it in a mortar. They cooked it in a pot or made it into loaves. And it tasted like something made with olive oil. 9 When the dew settled on the camp at night, the manna also came down. 10 Moses heard the people of every family wailing at the entrance to their tents. The Lord became exceedingly angry, and Moses was troubled. 11 He asked the Lord, “Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? 12 Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land you promised on oath to their ancestors? 13 Where can I get meat for all these people? They keep wailing to me, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ 14 I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me. 15 If this is how you are going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me—if I have found favor in your eyes—and do not let me face my own ruin.” 16 The Lord said to Moses: “Bring me seventy of Israel’s elders who are known to you as leaders and officials among the people. Have them come to the tent of meeting, that they may stand there with you. 17 I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the power of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them. They will share the burden of the people with you so that you will not have to carry it alone. 18 “Tell the people: ‘Consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow, when you will eat meat. The Lord heard you when you wailed, “If only we had meat to eat! We were better off in Egypt!” Now the Lord will give you meat, and you will eat it. 19 You will not eat it for just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, 20 but for a whole month—until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it—because you have rejected the Lord, who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?”’” 21 But Moses said, “Here I am among six hundred thousand men on foot, and you say, ‘I will give them meat to eat for a whole month!’ 22 Would they have enough if flocks and herds were slaughtered for them? Would they have enough if all the fish in the sea were caught for them?” 23 The Lord answered Moses, “Is the Lord’s arm too short? Now you will see whether or not what I say will come true for you.” 24 So Moses went out and told the people what the Lord had said. He brought together seventy of their elders and had them stand around the tent. 25 Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke with him, and he took some of the power of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. When the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied—but did not do so again. 26 However, two men, whose names were Eldad and Medad, had remained in the camp. They were listed among the elders, but did not go out to the tent. Yet the Spirit also rested on them, and they prophesied in the camp. 27 A young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” 28 Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses’ aide since youth, spoke up and said, “Moses, my lord, stop them!” 29 But Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” 30 Then Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp. 31 Now a wind went out from the Lord and drove quail in from the sea. It scattered them up to two cubits[b] deep all around the camp, as far as a day’s walk in any direction. 32 All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than ten homers.[c] Then they spread them out all around the camp. 33 But while the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed, the anger of the Lord burned against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague. 34 Therefore the place was named Kibroth Hattaavah,[d] because there they buried the people who had craved other food. 35 From Kibroth Hattaavah the people traveled to Hazeroth and stayed there.
• vmorgulis 11y ago
  Red Hook Initiative Center did a wifi mesh network. http://rhicenter.org/author/tony/ http://rhicenter.org/author/tony/ I like this kind of ideas.
• marincounty 11y ago
  I use the free preview at www.guidestar.org. I then download the 1040's that are available. I go over the balance sheet. I look at the BOD. I scrutinize every page in that download. I try to guesstimate how much funding goes to the founders, and administration. I then look at who's making the most money, including expenses, at the nonprofit. I have found too many people use nonprofits to support a comfortable lifestyle, and the cause comes second to their comfort. I have found, in too many cases, one person(many times--a husband, and wife) makes a lot of money, and the nonprofit doesn't seem to do much! This works for smaller nonprofits. As to the larger nonprofits--many make me sick. That money could go to other causes. Off the top of my head these are the large nonprofits that need a through forensic review before donating to: (1) Goodwill (2) Cars for kids (when I reviewed this organization, they had one home in the Sierra foothills for, I believe--12 children, and most of their money was spent on advertising.) (3) St. Jude (correct me if I'm mistaken, but I heard they have enough money to survive for the next 100 years, and that's accounting for inflation, and growth?) I love nonprofits. I just want to make sure that cause gets the money, or expertise. I'm tired of the scams.
• JesperRavn 11y ago
  For every dollar you earn, around 35% will be taken by the government and used for things most of which could be classified as "charitable". Just because you don't get a choice about taxation, doesn't mean that the choice to earn more money it isn't an effective form of altruism. And just because the government budget is huge, doesn't mean there isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence in the long run between how much the government taxes, and how much it can spend. (EDIT: and for actual charity, I go with Malaria. Dying sucks).
• Spooky23 11y ago
  Charity is about the donor as much as the recipient. Skip the pseudo-scientific horseshit and do something that matters to you. Personally, I tutor a couple of kids in math every once in awhile, donate to a couple of religious organizations, a zoo, a local social services org, and a few museums. I find it fulfilling. One of my best friends is devoted to a particular state park -- he does trail cleanup something like 18 weekends a year. Going down some philosophical rabbit hole where your life is essentially a dick measuring contest to figure out who is most selfless doesn't really do it for me. Skip the measurement and do something real.
  • kwantam 11y ago
    It seems reasonable that if a person wants to donate to charity, that person might also want to expend some mental energy to optimize the way in which she does so. For example, if I know that I can afford to give only $5 to charity, it does not seem particularly like a "dick measuring contest" to hope that, with a little thought, I might be able to make that $5 go further. Imagine that I can either give the $5 to a charity with an 80% overhead, or I can give the $5 to a charity with a 20% overhead. All else equal (i.e., assuming the two charities do approximately the same good with their non-overhead dollars, by whatever metric I wish to apply, including some abstract sense of personal fulfillment), my $5 seems self-evidently better spent on the 20%-overhead than on the 80%-overhead charity. Consider the zoo for which you're a donor; if you could spend a few minutes on some activity that would double the amount of money you could give to the zoo each year without otherwise costing you any money, would you not do it? In other words: do you actually care about the outcomes of your charitable work, or are you just doing it because there is some minimum level of action at which you feel good, irrespective of the outcome?
  • heimatau 11y ago
    I agree with your overall frustration but metrics are important. How much does that 'something' matter to you? How often is it repeated? Is the problem, that matters to you, getting solved effectively or is the problem getting worse? For example, if I want to feed the homeless and I volunteer to do that but the problem is metrically getting worse, there is a greater conflict at large. The house is burning and you're only throwing a handful of water at the problem. Context and effectiveness are important.
• danieltillett 11y ago
  The greatest good will be accomplished by developing synthetic labour (AI). This will generate so much profit that even a tiny taxation rate (0.001%) will allow everyone to live as billionaires do now and allow us to solve all other problems caused by (relative) poverty.
  • technomancy 11y ago
    Right, because the human race has a really good track record of allowing the benefits of technological productivity increases to impact the poor in a positive way.
    • danieltillett 11y ago
      Have you ever wondered why we are all so much richer today (even the poor) than in the past? It is not because people decided the way to solve poverty was charity. It is only because we have replaced human labor with artificial labor. More seriously once you have synthetic labor all the reasons for scarcity and exploitation of the poor end. Sure there will still be people who are on the bottom of society's pecking order, but their actual standard of living will be far beyond those of our richest today.
      • technomancy 11y ago
        I think I get what you're saying, but even in Star Trek this doesn't work without a source of essentially-perpetual energy.
        • danieltillett 11y ago
          It is pretty lucky that we are only 93 million miles away from exactly that :) I actually did the calculations back in the early 1990s of how many dollars you could generate by capturing all the solar output combined with synthetic labor. It is something on the order of 10^24 times the entire world GDP. When you have that level of resources then scarcity ceases to be a concern.
• oska 11y ago
  Providing women access to contraception and pregnancy termination services is what I personally identify as one of the best charitable causes. Helping women prevent the birth of unwanted children who will, on average, lead worse lives than wanted children but who will still put additional strain on the world's environment seems a very clear case of a worthy cause to me. An example charity in this area is Marie Stopes International [1]. [1] http://www.mariestopes.org http://www.mariestopes.org
• reddog 11y ago
  Wow. This is a tough crowd. Its not enough to generously give your time and money to charity, you have to have an effective data driven approach to your giving or you suck. And if you can bill at $500 an hour, no helping out at the soup kitchen for you -- that an inefficient use of societies resources. Back to your cubicle, work some extra hours and give it to whatever causes our models say are best. Kind of a cold and sterile way to approach giving.
  • asdf333 11y ago
    but what if its the most impactful?
  • hayksaakian 11y ago
    To me it seems selfish to feed 100 people by donating time at a kitchen, instead of working more hours and donating to a charity that might feed 200. It's as if I want the personal gratification of helping a human being in person as opposed to helping N times as many equally real human beings who I will never meet.
    • jodrellblank 11y ago
      Or, why don't you give me the money and I'll ... make sure they get it? http://fortune.com/2015/06/03/red-cross-haiti-six-homes/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/03/red-cross-haiti-six-homes/ At least with the soup kitchen, you see and feel the results of your input, in real actual people helped, not fractions of a fraction of a number on a report created by a report writer dedicated to presenting an organisation in the best possible light no matter what.
  • ThrustVectoring 11y ago
    There's generally two things people want to accomplish out of charitable giving - making the world a better place, and the "warm fuzzies" of helping out. The fact that getting the warm fuzzies isn't a particularly good way of making the world better doesn't mean that you can't get the fuzzies, too. It just means that there's a tradeoff involved, which means you want to make the best tradeoff you can between the two. Go ahead and volunteer at the soup kitchen while you make $500, or even $5000 per hour. I particularly encourage it if you find it emotionally rewarding or motivating for the nitty-gritty work of making the world better.
• guelo 11y ago
  It seems like simple education would be more effective than directly buying bed nets. How about subsidizing the cost for whole nations and educating with billboards?
  • SixSigma 11y ago
    A common fallacy is that the donors know best. It would be wise to consult the works of William Easterly [1] e.g. The White Man's Burden [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly [2] http://www.davidmays.org/BN/EasWhit.html http://www.davidmays.org/BN/EasWhit.html
• rikkus 11y ago
  The definition of charity seems to be giving money to those in need, but I prefer a less specific definition: Helping those in need. To do this, you can give money to 'charities', or you could perhaps try to help with systemic problems by attempting to effect wider change: If you're able to influence your country's government, isn't this more likely to have more effect, especially in the long run?
• netcan 11y ago
  A point on "best." There seems to be a lot of interest, some coming from the tech culture of evaluating charity and its efficiency. This is a good thing and could make a lot of difference. But for an individual that wants to give, you don't necessarily need it. You just need to find a destination for your donation. Try to understand that single organisation. I like the idea of simple things where the money = thing equation is understandable. For example, I have a distant cousin in the Philippines who builds "houses" for squatters with arrangements with land owners. It started after the storm. He lives locally and understands building. It's about £400 per hut. Most of the cost is labour. Materials are largely donated. The crew are locals that he knows. The recipients are living rough otherwise. This may not scale to millions, but it works for individual donations. IE, you can find a charity that has the capacity to take your donation. Understand what they do and make an effective choice. It's a much easier problem to solve than the "how to make global donations more effective" problem and is really the problem at hand when you make a choice. Also.. Why was I doing it? Maybe the donation was the equivalent of an agnostic’s prayer, on the off-chance the supernatural listens to altruism. I like that. I'd apply an atheist version for myself. A prayer to human solidarity and fraternity, the things I hope for. I don't expect to make these things happen personally, but I can offer my prayer.
  • rictic 11y ago
    > You just need to find a destination for your donation. The effective altruism counterpoint is that the same £400 is just about the amount necessary to save a life from malaria or schistosomiasis. Usually a child. The last number I saw was that ~$800 to one of GiveWell's top charities can be expected to save a life. The "how to make global donations" problem is hard, but it's important, and we're fortunate that great work and research has been done. Let's use it to put our charitable donations to their best use!
    • netcan 11y ago
      The choices between putting a roof over a family in The Philippines and saving a child from malaria in Myanmar is an impossible one. Information can't solve it. I have nothing against Give Well's approach. I think it is important. I'm just making the point that at a personal choice level, the "problem" is a lot more solvable. You only need to know about one charity, really.
• mmrasheed 11y ago
  My two cents... Open your startup in the third world, developing countries. Or, at least lead some people in those regions to grow their own problem solving skills with IT and engineering. Or, travel to those regions with your targeted donation savings and see the suffering of humans. If charity means donating the money we think we no longer need, then we should go for any of the charity foundations mentioned in other comments. But the real charity would be to take our butts off our comfort zones, travel to the targeted countries, experience the real suffering of humans, and to find out how we can contribute with our top notch expertise in IT and engineering. Even discovering hidden prospects in those regions and nurturing them for local socio-economic development would be cool charitable work. Even, opening our startups and employing local people would contribute more significantly in those regions than millions of dollars in donations to those named charity foundations. It will not only improve our skill in practical problem solving, it will also enhance our spirituality.
  • drodgers 11y ago
    * Technical experts won't necessarily be good at teaching people to use technology, or helping to set up infrastructure in third world countries. * Other people (eg. teachers) will be better-placed to teach technical expertise to people in the third world. * Technology isn't necessarily the most valuable thing to people in the third world - often they need simple things like corrugated steel roofs, anti-parasitics drugs and malaria nets. * Technical experts are the best people at creating technology (tautologically) and they'll be more productive at that than they would be at any other task (and more productive any anyone else would be at creating technology). So the elegant, effective solution is to have technical experts apply their technical expertise where it's most needed, get paid as much as possible (while doing useful work) and donate a significant portion of their earnings to fund education and development experts (who would otherwise be doing something less valuable) to go to where they're needed and help poor people in whatever way they need help. Sending technologists to the third world will do about as much good as sending academics to the farms. May it would be spiritually enriching for the technologists, but a lot of technology will go unbuilt and a lot of poor people will miss out on deworming pills because that money went to fund plane tickets.
  • willmacaskill 11y ago
• willmacaskill 11y ago
  Hey - I'm the guy described in the post - if anyone wants to ask me about anything to do with effective altruism, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, GiveWell (which I didn't cofound but is part of the same charitable movement), or what Derek Thompson's household habits are, please do so! :)
  • willmacaskill 11y ago
    Some general comments I have on the article (which I thought in general was very good): - At 80,000 Hours (the social impact career advice service I cofounded) we don't advise that many people to aim to earn to give in the long-term; less than a third of the people who have changed their plans on the basis of our advice have done so in the past, and the proportion will be less in the long-term. - Most commonly, the people who do this are those who really wanted to work in lucrative career X anyway, but were thinking of doing something else. E.g. Matt Gibb really wanted to do startups, but thought he should instead do something 'more ethical'; our advice made him realise he could do both. He's pledging 30% of his equity at LendLayer. (interview here: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/ https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/) - Another common strategy (which we do recommend) is to gain skills in a for-profit company before then moving to something with greater direct impact afterwards. While you're working for that for-profit, you may as well be donating a lot too! - if you think this is cool and are an entrepreneur, you might want to take the Founders Pledge (http://thefounderspledge.org/about/ http://thefounderspledge.org/about/) - if you think this is cool and can't or don't want to take the Founders Pledge, you might want to take the Giving What We Can pledge (disclaimer: i cofounded GWWC) https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/become-member https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/become-member - If you think this is cool and aren't sure what you should do with your life, then we can advise you at 80,000 Hours (https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/). We're currently in Mountain View for the summer.
  • Frompo 11y ago
    Some of the charities mentioned are clearly advocating for policy change (lifting copyright and restructured tax schemes), and I think that generally all charities must decide how to relate to the current structure of the world because whatever the ill you are campaigning against preventive measure are most effective at preventing suffering. So one question is if you see any natural limit for when something goes from a charity to a political campaign and vice versa. For instance, imagine the bizarre scenario where a presidential candidate pledges a significant increase to foreign humanitarian aid by taking from the foreign military aid budget. Will make that candidacy a worthwhile charity (supposing the bizarro candidate has reasonable probability of winning)? An unrelated question is: why do you think there are so few investment opportunities that are truly concerned with being ethical? The GiveWell founders seems like they could have made an investment fund dedicated to growing local companies in the poorer parts of the world. Direct cash transfers are among the best ways of helping the poor, but stable financing with modest return expectations seems like it could be pretty good too, with the benefit of slightly growing the capital available to help. Or you could imagine getting a significant amount of shares in Shell and turn up at shareholders meetings and make them repair their pipelines properly and such things.
• sai1511 11y ago
  Any service that your heart melts most for.
• mari_says 11y ago
  Charity is the opposity of justice. It preserves a state of things, a division among those who give and those who take. The best charitable cause is a world without it.