This is a cross-post with Substack

In 2024, I split my donations between two grant-making organizations: GiveWell (GW) and Charity Entrepreneurship. Both organizations work in global poverty, but their approaches are quite different, so I split my giving to manage risk.

This post is a knockoff inspired by an excellent post by the same name from the Thing of Things substack, which I recommend if you aren’t already following.

Thing of Things

Why Give to Charity at All?

In 2016, I took the Giving What We Can pledge to give 10% of my income to effective charities, and I’ve kept up the pledge every year since then. This year, I donated about ~50% of my income to charity, 25% to each organization. My income fell due to my switch to working at the Cosmos Institute, so compared to 2023, I gave less in dollars, but more as a percent of my income.

In 2016, I worked as a researcher, as I do now. I’ve always felt that research has a tenuous relationship toward positive developments in the world. No single experiment or prototype I work on is guaranteed to work, and if it does work, there’s no guarantee it will go on to see development or see actual users. Looking back, I’m fortunate that some of my projects have gone on to meet the world. My 2016 work for Disney was eventually deployed in the parks, but I didn’t know that at the time.

When I’m older, I’d like to reflect back on my life and conclude that I left the world a better place. It’s hard to hold that hope as a researcher, because I think every researcher hopes that their work will revolutionize their field and eventually change the world for the better. I assume every researcher imagines that their complete transformation of the world for the better will be cited in the Nobel committee’s reason for recognizing their important work. But at the same time, every clear-eyed investigator has to take the outside view perspective that most of their work is likely to be tangential at best to the most important breakthroughs.

So, I took the GWWC pledge in order to have some certainty in life. My research may win a Nobel prize or, more likely, it may languish in obscurity. Or somewhere in between. But at least I bought some medicine for people who needed it.

GiveWell

I’ve always liked GiveWell because their work is very concrete, it’s very well-documented, and I have a lot of confidence that marginal donations will go toward helping someone in need. If you donate to their Top Charities Fund, then they will maximize their tilt toward the exploit side of the explore-exploit tradeoff, donating only to charities which they have very high confidence in. Right now I believe that means buying malaria nets.

This year I gave to the All Grants Fund instead. It funds less-well-understood interventions that might succeed wildly or, more likely, may fail to find promising results.

I know I said I chose GW because I like the certainty they provide. I’d like to say I had a principled reason for choosing All Grants instead of Top Charities, but the truth is that I was distracted when I made the donation at the end of December, and I figured I would give GW staff maximum leeway to decide where to allocate the funds. I realize you may think I should put more thought into where I allocate one quarter of my income, but GW as an organization has significant comparative advantage in detailed funding decision making.

Ozy suggests that you should give to GiveWell’s unrestricted fund and I agree. I also am a fan of GW having an office and electricity to convert into detailed funding decision making. I should admit that I’m not being very principled here; I just like the certainty of knowing that my donation will turn directly into medicine or clean drinking water.

GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly is one of my favorite charities. They take donations and send about $0.89 of every $1.00 directly to one of the poorest people on earth. They publish GiveDirectly Live, which is just a feed of survey responses from people reporting what they did with donations. I really encourage you to check it out if you’ve never seen it before, because it’s a window into how the global poor live. It’s full of stories of people spending $30 to repair their leaking roof, or $100 to send their kid to school for the year. It’s an extremely direct reminder that a small donation for me can dramatically improve the life of someone I have never and will never meet.

I gave $0 to GiveDirectly this year.

I erred on the side of risk-taking, and I sent money instead to more speculative charities.

Charity Entrepreurship

More speculative charities, you say? Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) is an organization that incubates new charities as they’re starting out. It’s basically venture capital for charities. Much more than GW’s All Grants fund, I expect most of these initiatives to fail to meet the cost-effectiveness bar, but for them to occasionally exceed it with potential to grow.

CE’s model is that they send potential donors pitch decks for a number of charities, and ask them to make a decision about which ones to back. These initiatives vary pretty significantly in their goals and methods, so one donor might be persuaded by a financial project to reduce fees in remittances, while another donor might have confidence in CBT to reduce crime.

I backed two new charities. First, Learning Alliance is an education-focused initiative, and I backed them because I want to find a cost-effective way to help educate kids. Contra Scott Alexander, I think education helps people participate in the economy and lead happy lives. Plus, I just like learning and school in general in the abstract. This particular charity creates lesson plans in local languages for teachers to follow.

My favorite thing about CE is that they make each applicant charity articulate their Theory Of Change and explain what might go wrong:

Learning Alliance is confident that they can make high-quality lesson plans, but not so confident that they’ll get used.

Secondly, I backed one of CE’s more mature charities, Taimaka. They have a very straightforward program to help malnourashed children. I backed them because they seem likely to pass a high cost-effectiveness bar, and I want them to succeed. Here’s their theory of change: