Chapter 346 - A Long-run Perspective On Strategic Cause Selection And Philanthropy[1]

Introduction

A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked us about what we would do if we didn't face financial constraints. We gave a detailed answer that we thought we might as well share with others, who may also find our perspective interesting. We gave the answer largely in hope of creating some interest in our way of thinking about philanthropy and some of the causes that we find interesting for further investigation, and because we thought the answer would be fruitful for conversation.

Our honest answer to your question

Our honest answer to your question is that we would systematically examine a wide variety of causes and opportunities with the intention of identifying the ones which could use additional money and talent to produce the best long-run outcomes. This would look a lot like setting up a major foundation--which is unsurprising, given that many people in this situation do set up foundations--so we will concentrate on the distinguishing or less typical features of our approach:

Unlike many foundations, we would place a great deal of emphasis on selecting the highest impact program areas, rather than selecting program areas for other reasons and working hardest to find the best opportunities within those areas. Like GiveWell, we believe that the choice of program areas may be one of the most important decisions a major philanthropist makes and is consistently underemphasized.

We would invest heavily in learning, funding systematic examination of the spectrum of opportunities, and the transparent publication of our process and findings.

In addition to sharing information about giving opportunities, we would share detailed information about talent gaps, encouraging people with the right abilities to seek out opportunities in promising areas that are constrained by people rather than money.

We would measure impact primarily in terms of very long-run positive consequences for humanity, as outlined in Nick's PhD thesis.

We would be skeptical of our intuitions, and check them through such means as external review, the collection of track records for our predictions, structured evaluations, and the use of simple and sophisticated methods of aggregating and improving on expert opinion (e.g. the forecasting training and aggregation methods developed by Philip Tetlock, calibration training, prediction markets, and anonymous surveys of appropriate experts).

We understand that you probably aren't contacting us about setting up a foundation, though you might be interested in hearing more about the approach and assumptions above, so we'll say a few things about how we would go about strategically selecting causes, and our leading hypotheses about which causes are most promising to investigate further.

Briefly,

We believe that maximizing good accomplished largely reduces to doing what is best in terms of very long-run outcomes for humanity. We think this has significant practical implications when making trade-offs between short-term welfare and the broad functioning of society, our ability to face major global challenges and opportunities, and increasing society's resilience to global catastrophes.

Five causes we are interested in investigating first include immigration reform, methods for improved forecasting, an area we call "philanthropic infrastructure," catastrophic risks to humanity, and research integrity. These would be areas for investigation and experimentation, and we would pursue them in the short run primarily for the sake of gaining information about how attractive they are in comparison with other areas. There many other causes we would like to investigate early on, and would begin investigating those causes less deeply and in parallel with our investigations of the causes we are most enthusiastic about. We'd be happy to discuss the other causes with you as well.

We elaborate on these ideas below.