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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2801 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Entrepreneurial charity...

I'm pretty well off but I haven't given a lot of money to causes recently because they all suck. I mean, really, they suck. Many I've dealt with are just incompetent. To the point where they can't even cash checks in a timely manner or return phone calls. I shouldn't have to nag you to cash my $20,000 check. Others enable the very thing they are trying to solve. Breast cancer charities don't want to cure breast cancer. Homeless charities don't want to end homelessness. Many non-profits exist merely as grifts to employ non-productive college graduates. But the worst problem is that nearly every non-profit seems to be infected with the woke mind virus. Even if they were doing good work (which I doubt in most cases) I wouldn't feel good about donating to a non-profit that supports that stuff.

But I'm still an altruist at heart and I have more money than I need. So I'd like to go solo and do charity work on my own.

I've done a few things that are really minor like pick up trash or shovel the sidewalk near my house. But I think there are a lot of opportunities to do something bigger. What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?

Entrepreneurial charity...

(...)

Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?

Invest in promising business, also ones unlikely to take off and become multibillion companies (that is covered by VC chasing another Google)?

https://www.againstmalaria.com/ ?

Have you looked into Effective Altruism? The movement was literally built to directly solve your problem.

Hi I am interested in you funding me.

I have a unique expertise in gerontology, oncology and pharmacology.

I also work on the first true semantic parser, that convert natural language text to a graph representation that preserve meaning isomorphically.

I am a no bullshit human being focused on concrete results and my rationality allows me to see through the blind spots of the academic research and go beyond the state of the art.

For a start, I intend to write a blog about the first comprehensive optimal pharmacologic treatment for cancers.

How about you pay me once you've read it, if you like it, and how much depending on how much you see me as a scientific disrupter?

I am a no bullshit human being focused on concrete results

Which results you achieved already?

I also work on the first true semantic parser, that convert natural language text to a graph representation that preserve meaning isomorphically.

Can you link already existing code?

my rationality allows me to see through the blind spots of the academic research

please link examples

What are you trying to accomplish with your charity? You say

Homeless charities don't want to end homelessness.

so maybe you want to do something that will reduce homelessness or help people get out of homelessness. Maybe providing more permanent housing than a shelter? Maybe helping them get jobs (which could take a lot of forms)?

Other posters suggested getting involved with government somehow. Actually working on campaigns (or running for office yourself) isn't the only way to influence policy. There's also single-issue activist/lobbying organizations like FairVote. If there's some policies you believe in, maybe you could be working to convince other people of those policies, which may be preferable to getting directly involved in government.

Also, while I do feel the same desire to try to direct charity towards fixing problems instead of treading water dealing with them... even if they work structural fixes are slow and people are poor right now. Long-term fixes are important but I wouldn't completely dismiss the value of short-term band-aids.

(If you're writing any charity a check of any sizable amount, you may be missing out on the tax benefits of donating appreciated stock. See your brokerage for more information.)

If you want to just give people money, GiveDirectly is the most effective (in the EA sense) way to do it. A dollar goes much further in Rwanda or wherever than in the US.

What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?

Maybe. I guess it depends what your goals are. The thing is that finding the 'right' people to hand cash to can be hard. Hand too much money to someone poor and they can easily end up worse off. Hand money to someone doing well, and you might not feel like you've really improved anything.

You could browse a sub like /r/entrepreneur or /r/sweatystartup, lurking to find random users who seem like they have drive, but capital is the thing holding them back. Could probably do the same thing with artists and writers.

Even people struggling with illness or disability. Find their passion and fund it. Gives them purpose, and probably helps them in a way most charities can't. There are plenty of charities out there handing out wheelchairs to cripples. But if that cripple loves woodworking, there ain't no charity handing out tablesaws and lathes.

Handing out free 3D printers to people wanting one is probably far more altruistic than giving the same amount of money to a charity that will shovel it into a bottomless pit.

Most charity revolves around surviving, rather than living. Once people start living, they tend to become a bit better at surviving on their own.

Handing out free 3D printers to people wanting one is probably far more altruistic than giving the same amount of money to a charity that will shovel it into a bottomless pit.

And to enable more sharing - maybe give fund to random hackerspace that has an idea how to use it.

The person who is most qualified to handle your money is yourself, although there are probably exceptions if you have a drug or gambling addiction. FTX investors learned that the hard way.

I think your intuitions that most charitable organizations will rip you off are correct. I’m not really sure how rich you are, but if you can afford 20000$ checks why not get involved in local politics instead? Even slightly improving you’re local government would be a hugely consequential charitable act relative to almost anything else you could be spending on.

I value my personal life enough not to do this. I live in Seattle where anyone to the right of Marx is tarred and feathered. I guess I just view local politics in Seattle as unredeemable although I do at least vote and support better candidates in small ways.

That’s fair, I accidentally replied to the wrong person below and didn’t realize that local meant Seattle.

Funding an underground/samizdat group seems like a good use of money. Seattle is reaching a critical point where the regime can't paper over the dysfunction any longer, and a group of smart people still moored to reality could find themselves having outsized influence.

Friedman's "keep sanity alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable," basically.

I have never lived in Seattle (just visited and not since 2019), and it aways struck me as one of the more functional American cities. Also wondering how much different Bellvue is politically?

How so?

I guess I'm modeling the average local government as...basically functional. Not much low-hanging fruit. It does paperwork, keeps the trees off the power lines, maybe hosts a festival a couple times a year. I don't feel like changing one or two of the names at the top would change much of that normal operation. The calculus is different if you've got a Sheriff of Nottingham situation, sure. But otherwise, what does that slight improvement look like?

I'm reminded of the corporate policy updates at my company. Every couple weeks, we'll get a mass email announcing that Policy Number Such-and-Such has been revised, and now if you submit a requirements compliance matrix, it has to have a row showing percent completion. Or if you make a purchase order, the form now has a field for which fiscal year we're in. Someone, somewhere, cares about this, and in theory expects an efficiency gain from the change. Would an outside shareholder care?

I know local government isn't and shouldn't be a business, but that's how I see influencing local politics. Getting one functionary elected rather than another isn't going to change the character of the government. It's more likely to generate a couple policy revisions, plus a bunch of "business as usual."

Oh, and political donations are possibly really ineffective. That doesn't really encourage me either.

So I didn’t realize that for you local government meant Seattle, which might be too big for you to have any meaningful influence. Although I will note that in general, every municipality has a mix of competent and incompetent politicians. At this level they really aren’t functionaries to nearly the same degree that any other politician you will encounter at the state or national level and having slightly better/less corrupt/smarter leadership really can improve quality of life for lots of people.

I think it’s also sort of ridiculous to assume that the city is competently run, you wouldn’t have any way of knowing unless you had worked for the city or had some political involvement. Corruption in municipal governments is absurdly common and only the most outrageous cases (such as this https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-payscandal-arrests/mayor-officials-arrested-in-california-pay-scandal-idUSTRE68K40N20100922 ) ever result in prosecutions. This is historically how the us has worked (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall as the most famous example in the us)

Finally I said you should get involved. This involves donating money but volunteering is probably more important. The benefit of a donation is that it will make you specifically known to the politician you are supporting.

Ah.

I'm Texan, though @jeroboam is some variety of Washington resident.

I don't doubt that local governments have corruption. My favorite example is the Battle of Athens.

Running for office (or at least consulting, if you work in something more technical) is probably an effective way to increase efficiency. I would think it is more expensive, though. $20,000 is a few weeks' compensation; what's the minimum time you'd need to spend to secure any real influence? Say, over a small team. Spending a whole career in politics might be further than OP is willing to go.

Hell, I don't think I have the interpersonal skills to coordinate more than a few people. But that's why I avoid management like the plague.

Breast cancer charities don't want to cure breast cancer.

Being sometimes downstream of those charities, I can give some perspective - stop me if you know all this already.

Most people go through a lot of work and hardship to raise like 200$ and feel happy about it. Depending what I'm doing, a single experiment can cost 500 to tens of thousands of dollars and the vast majority of experiments don't work and are never published. So you could safely say the cost to society for a single paper including salaries, infrastructure and reagents is in the 7 figure range.

With that in mind, and given the fact that a lot of (especially high-impact) research doesn't fit nicely into a 'breast cancer' bin, how would you optimally like to see your money spent? In my experience, the money most often goes towards fellowships and whatever the student/post doc ends up publishing goes into their marketing materials.

What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?

Yes. Fund my startup :)

To the point where they can't even cash checks in a timely manner or return phone calls.

Sounds like they are not spending much money on nonessential staff. That seems like a good charity to me.

I guess Effective Altruism is not on the table? I donate to Givewell's Maximum Impact fund.

I guess I have trouble believing that it works. If mosquito nets or Guinea worm vaccination or whatever can improve lives so cheaply how have they not been 100% funded by now? I know there are smart people working on this, but they also tend to be quokkas.

Okay, I'm probably being too dismissive here. I'll give it another look, but I do still worry about supporting wokism.

If mosquito nets or Guinea worm vaccination or whatever can improve lives so cheaply how have they not been 100% funded by now?

(1) People do not really care about poor people in Africa so much.

(2) Malaria and worms suck on a large scale[1] and you can (even efficiently) shovel much money into it before problem disappears ([1] about 1/3 of all people who ever died were killed by malaria - though that has massive error bars).

but I do still worry about supporting wokism

Depends on whether "helping poor people in Africa" counts as supporting wokism or "fuck you bunch of lying liars, I have done more to help poor people in Africa than 99.99% of wokes"

My better half’s great uncle, who at the end, was just living off social security, had wonderful end-of-life care at a non-profit, charitable hospice facility.

It was not woke in any way. Just made sure people without means could part this mortal coil with a bit of sympathy and dignity.

We were so impressed/moved we set up a monthly, recurring donation.

I don’t know if you’d ever hear back from anyone in terms of thanks, or that it structurally changes the world for the better, but it quietly helps people during a very difficult time that at that point in their lives can’t help themselves.

That's the absolute first time I've heard of such places not being horrible hellholes. Pleasant surprise.

member of my family works in another one and it is fine and definitely not "horrible hellhole"

also, I bet that media stories are biased toward horrible hellholes in this case - how you make story of regular one?

I guess I’m really glad we’re donating to the aforementioned one, in that case.

I think it makes it even more awesome that you are keeping that one going - as someone who is currently helping elderly family members look into that kind of thing, let me say thanks on behalf of the families your support has helped, in the hopes we will be as fortunate.

Thank you and best of luck.

You could check your local churches. Most of them will have a benevolence fund that is explicitly for charity to the needy and cannot be used for church operations or expenses. My experience has been that these are highly effective in the individual sense, because they tend to be operated by volunteers who have a lot of on-the-ground information. However they generally do very little EA-type "systems" work, for better or for worse. Since they are in charge of deciding exactly who to help, contributions are tax-deductible as well.

Haha. I live in Seattle. They'll spend it on buttplugs for preteens.

But that's a great idea in general and I'll look into it!

A church would?

I'm joking of course, but yes, the churches near me are ultra-woke.

Still, I would expect at least some to not be turboleftist. Even more in adjacent more rural areas.

Should I just straight up send people cash?

Depending on how much cash you're talking--yes! Go pay off someone's house, or student loans, or car... their reaction will be 1000% more gratifying to you than any check mailed to an institution. Even more if it's not some random stranger, but someone you care about (e.g. relatives, friends). For example.

In terms of contemporary ideals re: "effective altruism" this is probably not a great way to go, of course. Most people who can qualify for a loan will be able to pay that loan off on their own eventually, and the misery they'll go through to do it is pretty small by comparison with some of the other trials people have (hunger, homelessness, etc.). But if you'd like to prioritize people who will cash your check quickly, be effusively grateful about it, and not spend it employing humanities graduates who can't find a job peddling DEI for woke corporations, then I recommend thinking of people in your life who have a medium-sized debt hanging over them (and who aren't likely to resent your generosity--you do have to pick your targets with some care). Just go wipe that debt out and watch them grin.

(I feel I should add, as a mod, that there is a place where Zorba accepts donations to keeping the site up and running, too. Zorba has been pretty low key about it, which I think is appropriate, and I don't know whether this place counts as an "institution" in your reckoning, but--one more option among many.)

e.g. relatives, friends

beware of risk of people starting to queue for handouts - may be nice to do it anonymously

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