Tag Archives: Charity

The Alms Expert Opening

By Robin Hanson · September 17, 2012 8:15 am · Comments (19)

Around 1800 in England and Russia, the three main do-gooder activities were medicine, school, and alms (= food/shelter for the weak, such as the old or crippled). Today the three spending categories of medicine, school, and alms make up ~40% of US GDP, a far larger fraction than in 1800. …

Foragers who personally taught kids, cared for sick folks, and gave food/shelter to weak folks, credibly signaled their loyalty to allies, at least when such needy were allies. Weak group selection helped encourage such aid as ways to signal loyalty. … [Today,] votes supporting spending taxes on medicine, school and alms are interpreted as showing loyal “caring” for one’s community. (more)

Today, two of these three classic charities have very powerful associated “professions”: doctors and teachers. These professions are powerful because they are seen as representing the good in those causes – doctors are our official authorities on what is good for patients, and teachers are our official authorities on what is good for students. So we tend to back these experts when they fight with other related organizations, such as when docs fight with insurance companies, or when teachers fight with mayors. This allows such experts to be very well paid and pampered relative to other professionals.

The missing group here is alms experts: we have no strong profession of those who specialize in helping the poor, crippled, etc. While there are of course people who specialize in such roles, they are not united together under a single recognized label to leverage public sympathy, and they do not speak as a unit, or negotiate as a unit with related organizations.

But, given the example of docs and teachers, it seems plausible that if alms experts were to create an encompassing profession of “feeders”, and if they as a unit publicly challenged other related organizations, like charities or government funders, this feeding profession could often get their way. Of course they’d probably mostly use their power to benefit themselves. To guess if they would help the world, ask yourself if organized docs and teachers help the world.

Even so, there does seem to be an as yet largely unused opening for a feeding profession.

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Why Not Agents For All?

By Robin Hanson · August 5, 2012 2:00 pm · Comments (17)

Top actors, writers, and athletes have agents, who help them find good jobs, in exchange for a small part of their income. But having an agent is pretty rare – why don’t the rest of us have agents?

You might think its only worth paying an agent 5% of your income for jobs where wages vary by large factors, and that most people’s wages are pretty much set by their occupation, education, etc. Not true, however. Consider: workers in the same occupation, with the same observable experience, school, etc. can easily earn 30% more, or 30% less, just based on the industry they work in. For example, in the auto industry both janitors and truck drivers make twice the salary of janitors and truck drivers in the “eating and drinking place” industry. (More on industry wage differences below.)

Having an agent can also signal high quality, as agents usually won’t represent low quality folks. Also, while prior employers, often avoid being honest about your prior experience to potential future employers, agents can have incentives to be more honest, being repeat players with reputations to protect.

For an interesting example of ordinary people with “agents”, consider Giving What We Can (GWWC), an organization that “asks members to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities.” Since GWWC wants to promote charity donations, it wants its members’ to have high incomes, all else equal. So affiliated folks advise members on how to find better paying jobs. If they put enough effort into this, I can believe members might actually earn more on net than they otherwise would, even after accounting for their 10% charity donation.

That promised info on industry wages differences: Continue reading "Why Not Agents For All?" »

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Brain Prize Eval Fund Near Enough

By Robin Hanson · July 14, 2012 1:00 pm · Comments (16)

Great news: The cryonics organization Alcor is adding $10,000 to the Brain Preservation Technology Prize Evaluation Fund. With the other donations counted here (including my $5000), that should bring the prize evaluation fund to near $30,000, which might be near enough (so please donate more):

We [Alcor] are committing $10,000 towards the Evaluation Fund. … Although the Prize itself is fully funded, funds are needed to conduct the evaluation. Alcor’s contribution will make a big difference, since the tests are estimated to cost $25,000 to $50,000.

Alcor does not directly have a horse in this race. The cryopreservation approach is represented by a team from 21st Century Medicine. 21CM aims to demonstrate the quality of ultrastructure preservation that their low temperature vitrification technique can achieve when applied to whole rabbit brains.

We will follow up this announcement of Alcor’s contribution with a longer piece. That article will address claims (currently untested) for the advantages of chemopreservation over cryopreservation. We will critically examine the claim that chemopreservation or plastic embedding would be much cheaper (for individuals not committed to whole body preservation), look at some reasons to expect significant damage caused by chemopreservation of whole brains, identify problems for chemopreservation under less-than-ideal circumstances, explain why the Prize handicaps the cryopreservation option because of the way the test is to be carried out, and will argue why brain preservation technologies should be evaluated by viability criteria as well. (more)

While I look forward to reading their critique, I’ll note no one has accepted my bet offer:

I offer to bet up to $5K that plastination is more likely to win this full prize than cryonics. (more)

My thinking has evolved a bit over the last month. In chemopreservation [= plastination], one fills a brain with plastic-like chemicals, which make strong cross-links bonds between most everything they touch. So there are two times when brain info can be lost: before it is filled with plastic, and after.

Assuming you can keep them safe from melting, burning, etc., plastic brains should last for a very long time:

Brain researchers have looked at samples preserved many decades ago, and see almost no change. Tissues preserved in amber seem to have remain unchanged for forty million years. (more)

So the main issue is how much info is lost before filling with plastic. Now it is obvious that non-fresh brains with collapsed blood vessels pose a serious problem – the plastic might just not get to some places. But for brains filled with plastic within a few minutes of live blood flow, I just can’t see the problem.

For example, imagine that key brain info is encoded in certain key protein densities at tiny synapse pores, with different nearby pores having different key proteins. As long as there are thousands of copies of each key protein in each pore area, the plastic will almost surely usually preserve the info of which kind of proteins were in which areas. Even if some key proteins move away from their pores, most will stay near, and the amino acid sequences that define the proteins will mostly be preserved by the cross-link bonds the plastic makes.

And even if this isn’t true for twenty percent of the key proteins, there is almost surely enough brain system redundancy for this to not matter. Yes, you’d need a finer scan than the Brain Preservation Prize will use to read it, but the info is still there.

So as far as I can tell, the main issue with plastination [= chemopreservation] is how quickly brains can fill with plastic after ordinary blood flow has stopped. If we can find ways to do that well, plastination just wins, I think, at least for the goal of saving the info that is you.

Added 19July: Sad news:

The [Brain Preservation] Foundation has declined [Alcor's] donation because of concerns that it might be perceived as influencing the judges’ decisions.

Added 13Jan’13: They reached their $25K goal!

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Plastination Is Near

By Robin Hanson · June 18, 2012 2:00 pm · Comments (67)

The biggest single charity donation I’ve made so far is ~$100. But now I’m donating $5000 to an exceptionally worthy cause. And I suggest you donate too. Here’s my cause:

People who “die” today could live again in the future, perhaps forever, as brain emulations (= uploads, ems), if enough info were saved today about their brains. (And of course if civilization doesn’t die, if someone in the future cares enough to bother, if you are your brain activity, etc.)

This is probably enough brain info: the spatial shape and location of each brain cell, including the long skinny parts that stick out to touch other cells, and two dozen chemical densities (at the skinny part scale) to help identify cell and connection types. Actually, it is probably enough to just get 95% of the connections right, and a half dozen chemical densities.

Today, the main way folks try to save such brain info is to pay a cryonics org to freeze their brain in liquid nitrogen, and keep it so frozen for a long time. Alas, this approach fails if this org ever even briefly fails at this task, letting brains thaw, an event I expect is more likely than not over a century timescale.

In addition, we don’t actually know that frozen brains preserve enough brain info. Until recently, ice formation in the freezing process ripped out huge brain chunks everywhere and shoved them to distant locations. Recent use of a special anti-freeze has reduced that, but we don’t actually know if the anti-freeze gets to enough places. Or even if enough info is saved where it does go.

The people who developed the anti-freeze published some 2D pictures that look good, but we don’t know how selectively these were chosen, or how much worse is the typical cryonics freezing process. Some good brain researchers are skeptical. (Yes, future folk might undo even very complex brain scrabbling, but don’t count on it.) And given my usual medical skepticism, I gotta be skeptical here too.

Though cryonics has been practiced for forty years, its techniques have improved only slowly; its few customers can only induce a tiny research effort. The much larger brain research community, in contrast, has been rapidly improving their ways to do fast cheap detailed 3D brain scans, and to prepare samples for such scans. You see, brain researchers need ways to stop brain samples from changing, and to be strong against scanning disruptions, just so they can study brain samples at their leisure.

These brain research techniques have now reached two key milestones:

  1. They’ve found new ways to “fix” brain samples by filling them with plastic, ways that seem impressively reliable, resilient, and long lasting, and which work on large brain volumes (e.g., here). Such plastination techniques seem close to being able to save enough info in entire brains for centuries, without needing continual care. Just dumping a plastic brain in a box in a closet might work fine.
  2. Today, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than the price charged for one cryonics customer, it is feasible to have independent lab(s) take random samples from whole mouse or human brains preserved via either cryonics or plastination, and do high (5nm) resolution 3D scans to map out thousands of neighboring cells, their connections, and connection strengths, to test if either of these approaches clearly preserve such key brain info.

An anonymous donor has actually funded a $100K Brain Preservation Prize, paid to the first team(s) to pass this test on a human brain, with a quarter of the prize going to those that first pass the test on a mouse brain. Cryonics and plastination teams have already submitted whole mouse brains to be tested. The only hitch is that the prize organization needs money (~25-50K$) to actually do the tests!

This is the exceptionally worthy cause to which I am donating $5K, and to which I encourage others to donate.  (More info here; donate here.) We seem close to having a feasible plastination technique, where for a few 10K$ or less one could fill a brain with plastic, saving its key brain info for future revival in an easily stored form. We may only lack donations of a similar amount to actually test that it does save this key brain info. (And if the first approach fails, perhaps to test a few revisions.)

I don’t understand why the cryonics community isn’t already all over this. To express my opinions to them more forcefully, I offer to bet up to $5K that plastination is more likely to win this full prize than cryonics. That is, if plastination wins but cryonics fails, I win the bet, and if cryonics wins but plastination fails, I lose. If they both win or both fail, the bet is called off. Any takers?

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Grace-Hanson Podcasts

By Robin Hanson · May 31, 2012 8:00 pm · Comments (19)

Katja Grace and I just recorded two more podcasts, on:

We’ve recorded four podcasts before, on Signaling, Idealism, School, and Future.

Added 2June: I guess I wasn’t clear enough in the Saving The World podcast about the focus of my skepticism. I wasn’t saying that actually caring isn’t a part of the usual mix of charity motives, nor was I claiming that you can’t have reasonable evidence that your personal charity style is unusual. My skepticism was about too quickly assuming that a major source of your unusual style is that you just care more than most people about helping the world. This seems suspiciously self-serving, especially given all the other possible ways you could be weird.

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Government As Charity

By Robin Hanson · April 24, 2012 4:50 pm · Comments (41)

Matt Zwolinski:

About $3.2 million was given to reduce the [US] debt in 2011. … Why so little? One possible explanation is that people are selfish. … But this explanation is difficult to square with the large amounts of money that Americans give to charity each year – over $300 billion in 2009. … I suggest … most people know that there are better and more efficient ways of using their money to help other people than giving it to government.

The usually sharp Will Wilkinson invokes free rider problems, and misses the point. But like Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan gets it:

Despite widespread nationalist and statist sentiments, Uncle Sam’s share of the charity market is microscopic – less than .001%. How very odd. … If you ask “Why don’t people give more money to my charity?,” the best answer is that people hold your charity in low esteem. Similarly, if total donations to the U.S. government add up to a few million dollars a year, the best explanation is that people see lots of better ways to spend not just their dollars, but their charitable dollars. I do wonder, though: Could the U.S. government attract a lot more donations with better marketing? … What if Congress publicly acknowledge the ten biggest donors in an annual ceremony?

That 0.001% stat is striking, and worth pondering. Most tiny charities can say their donations are low because few have heard of them, or because most who have don’t have a visceral scene of what they really do. But everyone knows about government debt, and a lot about what it pays for.

Now if we counted the value of time donated, we’d get a bigger figure, as many donate time to local government-run schools, sport leagues, hospitals, police, and roads. So it seems to be non-local government that donors neglect. For some perspective, here is a breakdown of annual US donations:

  • Money: 300B$: Religion 33%, Educational or youth service 26%, Social or community service 14%, Health 8%, Civic, political, professional, or international 5%, Sport, hobby, arts 4%, Environment/animal 2%.
  • Time: ~3B hrs: Religion 35%, Education 14%, Foundations 11%, Human services 9%, Health 8%, Public-society benefit 8%, Arts, culture, humanities, 5%, International affairs, 5%, Environment/animal 2%.

Admittedly, charity donations are far from a direct measure of people’s estimates of social value – charity isn’t about helping, after all. People like to meet and associate with others who donate to the same cause. Even so, it is worth pondering why non-local government gets so few donations of time or money.

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Donors Affiliate

By Robin Hanson · April 4, 2012 7:30 pm · Comments (47)

When you donate to a charity, you not only give them resources to further their aims, you also affiliate with others who donate to the same charity. Because of this, you might not donate to a charity you otherwise like because you dislike other donors. And because of that, charities may refuse donations from disliked people.

Think that doesn’t apply to you? If you donate to Planned Parenthood, they think it applies to you – they refused a $500,000 donation by Tucker Max. Why? Because:

PP: “I guess it’s the way you write about women.”

Tucker “What do you mean? I’m not negative towards women in my writing. Women love my writing; more than half my fans are female.”

PP: “Well…there are certain jokes you make we feel can be perceived in a certain negative manner.”

Tucker: “So because I made a fat girl joke you won’t accept a $500,000 donation?”

PP: “I wouldn’t characterize it that way.”

Tucker: “How would you then? I’m listening and I want your best quote.”

PP: “We don’t feel it would be appropriate, given Planned Parenthood’s mission and your body of work, to accept your donation.”

Tucker: “What? I thought Planned Parenthood’s mission was about helping women, not passing judgment on humor.” (more)

It seems Planned Parenthood thinks that by accepting Tucker’s large donation they would discourage even more donations by others.

Would you refuse to donate to a charity because someone you disliked had also donated? What if you could be assured this donor had no influence on what the charity did with its money?

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Saints And Burdens

By Robin Hanson · March 19, 2012 10:00 pm · Comments (31)

Let a person’s benefit ratio be the amount of benefit they give to others, divided by their cost to others. Then consider two classes of people:

  • Burdens – Those for whom the ratio is less than one. Such folks are a net burden on the rest of the world.
  • Saints – Those for whom the ratio is far greater than one, such as a thousand or a million. Such folks are fantastic altruists.

While these would seem to be opposite types of people, I think I see a correlation in the world: those who talk the most about trying to be saints also tend to have an unusually large chance of actually being burdens. Why this correlation?

One story is that variance is a good way to increase your chance of very good outcomes, but high variance altruism strategies tend to have more risk of both altruism extremes. So people who try hard to increase the thickness of their high tail of altruism must typically also accept a thicker low tail of being a burden.

A very different story is that people who feel guilty about their high risk of being a net burden compensate by talking more about wanting to be saints. They don’t have much of a chance of actually being saints, but by deluding themselves they can avoid guilt about being a burden.

What evidence would distinguish these theories?

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Info Cuts Charity

By Robin Hanson · December 9, 2011 9:00 pm · Comments (24)

Our culture tends to celebrate the smart, creative, and well-informed. So we tend to be blind to common criticisms of such folks. A few days ago I pointed out that creative folk tend to cheat more. Today I’ll point out that the well-informed tend to donate less to charity:

The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali, the team found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa — the ones who were essentially given more to think about — were less likely to give. …

Daniel Oppenheimer … found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely efficient. …

According to [John] List, thinking about all the people you’re not helping when you donate  …  makes the act of giving a lot less satisfying. (more; HT  Reihan Salam)

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Why Weak Charity Rules?

By Robin Hanson · October 31, 2011 9:30 pm · Comments (30)

In April I posted on “trailer for David Alvarado’s slick-looking new [3D] film on longevity.” There’s now a new trailer:

The Methuselah Generation; The Science of Living Forever from David Anthony Alvarado on Vimeo.

They are using Kickstarter to solicit funds from folks like you to help them finish the film. The film looks nice, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. But alas I can’t in good conscience say that this is my best guess for the charity that, per dollar contributed, does the most good for the world.

It is interesting that they use an innovative way to solicit donations. Why is there so much more innovation in charity funding than in business funding? Here’s a related question: why do Alvarado and company ask for donors, but not investors, for their film? The film might make money, and if it does, why not offer to give some of that back?

The explanation in both cases is probably that regulatory hurdles are far larger for investors. Regulations set far higher standards for people who can ask for your money, if there is a suggestion that you might get some of it money back later. But why? Shouldn’t it be even more important that your money be spend well, if you won’t ever get any of it back?

This regulatory asymmetry seems to me to be an implicit recognition that we mainly donate to charity to signal our good intentions and loyalties, and that we don’t actually care much what happens to the money we donate.

If you invest money hoping to get it back and more, then you are furious if it is badly managed, perhaps stolen, and want stronger regulations to stop that from ever happening again. But if you donate money and the funds are mismanaged, perhaps stolen, so that your good intentions aren’t realized, well you aren’t actually so mad about that. You don’t as furiously demand stronger regulations. Because you already got most of what you wanted: a chance to show everyone how much you care.

Added 20Nov: David asks folks to vote for his project here.

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