With the EA Forum's giving season just behind us, it's a natural moment to look back on your donations over the past year and think about where you'd like to give in the year ahead. We (Tristan and Sergio) rarely spend as much time on these decisions as we'd like. When we tried to dig a bit deeper this year, we realized there are a lot of big questions about personal donations that haven't been crisply put together anywhere else, hence the post.

We've tried to make some of those questions clearer here, to highlight things that you might want to consider if they haven't occurred to you before, and to encourage comments from others as to how they think about these factors. Some of these factors aren’t original to us, and in general we’re aiming to bring together considerations that are scattered across different posts, papers, and conversations, and present them in one place through the lens of personal donation decisions. Happy giving!

This post focuses on five considerations that arise as you try to deepen your giving, especially as you give to specific opportunities rather than just to a fund. Those are:

• Deference: Funders have [...]

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Outline:

(01:03) TLDR

(03:25) 1. Deference

(04:23) When is reasonable to deviate

(05:50) 2. Indirect Effects

(06:25) The cluelessness problem

(07:20) 3. Moral Uncertainty and Diversification

(09:24) Career vs donations

(10:25) But coordination matters

(11:01) 4. Timing

(11:21) Approach 1: A steady drip of donations

(12:02) Approach 2: Reserve for pivotal moments

(12:44) Approach 3: Patient philanthropy

(13:58) 5. Moral Seriousness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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