My Donation Recommendations

By Brian Tomasik

First published: . Last nontrivial update: .

Note from : The details in this piece are slightly outdated. Maybe I'll update this page at some point, but for now, here's a quick summary of my current views.

In terms of maximizing expected suffering reduction over the long-run future, my top recommendation is the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS), closely followed by the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR). (I'm an advisor to both of them.) I think both of these organizations do important work, but CRS is more in need of funding currently.

CRS and CLR do research and movement building aiming to reduce risks of astronomical suffering in the far future. This kind of work can feel very abstract, and it's difficult to know if your impact is even net good on balance. Personally I prefer to also contribute some of my resources toward efforts that more concretely reduce suffering in the short run, to avoid feeling like I'm possibly wasting my life on excessive speculation. For this reason, I plan to donate my personal wealth over time toward charities that work mainly or exclusively on improving animal welfare. (I prefer welfare improvements over reducing meat consumption because the sign of the latter for wild-animal suffering is unclear.) The Humane Slaughter Association is my current favorite. A decent portion of the charities granted to by the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund also do high-impact animal welfare work. I donate a bit to Animal Ethics as well.

Summary

This piece describes my views on a few charities. I explain what I like about each charity and what concerns me about it. Currently, my top charity recommendation for someone with values similar to mine is the Foundational Research Institute (an organization that I co-founded and volunteer for).

Contents

Introduction

It's hard to find charities that align with my values, because either the charities have different goals from mine (the typical case), or if their goals align, I think they often miss important pitfalls that could undercut the value of their work. This piece aims to paint a picture of how I rank a few notable charities relative to my values and beliefs. Most of the ranking scores are based on ideological alignment and overarching strategy, rather than good management or effective employees, because picking the overall direction of work seems to me the most crucial thing to get right. Productivity in the wrong direction is not very useful.

Rankings

U.S penniesIn the following table, I've rated charities both according to how much expected suffering I think they reduce in risk-neutral, "cold and calculating" terms as well as how "spiritually meaningful" they feel based on their abilities to clearly reduce suffering in the short term rather than gambling on speculative scenarios about far-future possibilities. The division is partly inspired by my own psychology and partly by Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately".

The error bars specified by the "+/-" in the "utilons" column might be something like 75% confidence intervals, but they're not intended to be at all precise.

Charity Expected impartial value ("utilons") Expected spiritual value ("fuzzies")
Foundational Research Institute 200 +/- 400 50
Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF) activities besides FRI 170 +/- 300 50
Machine Intelligence Research Institute 35 +/- 300 10
Animal Ethics 40 +/- 80 50
an insect charity (doesn't yet exist) 25 +/- 75 25
Against Malaria Foundation 2 +/- 50 6
Animal Charity Evaluators 10 +/- 100 10
Humane Slaughter Association 20 +/- 50 75
Future of Humanity Institute 0 +/- 300 0

Explanations

This section explains the motivations for the "utilons" estimates in the preceding table. The "fuzzies" estimates were easier to pin down because they're visceral, although they're somewhat informed by the utilons estimates (as in the case of FRI), combined with the directness and clarity of the charity's suffering-reduction work.

Foundational Research Institute (FRI)

Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF) (in Switzerland)

Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)

My current guess is that there's a ~62% chance that MIRI's work is net positive by negative-utilitarian lights and ~38% that it's net negative. But given the high leverage of MIRI's work, the expected benefits of MIRI are still substantial.

In 2018, I reduced the utilon value of MIRI a bit because MIRI became less funding-constrained than in the past, while charities like FRI remain relatively funding-constrained.

Animal Ethics (AE)

An insect charity (doesn't yet exist)

Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)

Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)

Humane Slaughter Association (HSA)

I wrote more about HSA here.

Future of Humanity Institute (FHI)

My donation plans

If I resume earning to give, I might donate something like this:

Tax-deductibility for charitable donations is capped at 50% of adjusted gross income in the USA, so there's no benefit to donating all income after costs of living to my donor-advised fund. However, HSA is not currently deductible in the USA, so I might have to give to HSA out of the after-tax dollars that I can't deduct due to hitting the 50%-of-income donation limit.

Older version of this piece

The current essay is an updated version of "My Donations: Past and Present".