Donating to religious groups, youth sports, “the arts”, etc is harmful, because of the opportunity cost of omitting the same donation to more effective charities. Each dollar to local youth soccer is exactly one dollar’s worth of malaria net protection or waterborne parasite protection denied.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24606622)
Youth sport bad. Buying video games good.
I can’t think of any utility-loss consequences if the primary outlets for youth exercise and socialization simply ceased to exist across the country.
And, of course, the most effective charity is building a computer god that can digitise the universe and simulate everything being OK. Hence, doing anything other than that is absolute evil.
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On the other hand donating to the local Rationalist party fund is the most moral and correct choise.
If I remember right Scott Alexander actually suggested you put 50% of your donations towards that.
It’s almost like we need some organization to coordinate charitable giving by collecting money (a “tax”) from the charitable givers (the “tax payers”) and then distributing that money according to the collective desires of the “tax payers” or their representatives. We can call it a democracy and its the best we can do until the Singularity.
All this hard thinking and not a brain cell spent on the idea that on a macro level money is a social construct. (Aka you as an individual consumer cant ever do as much good as say France or the IMF going ‘hey African nations, those debts we made you have for being colonized, they don’t exist anymore’.
And this way you don’t have to feel guilt for buying yourself a steam game and not somebody a malaria net.
This is all just bikeshedding
E: Also, fyi, to fight malaria you need 4 things, meds, stopping the nearby bugs from breeding by cleaning up their local breeding grounds, insecticides, and nets, the monofocus on just netting just isnt enough. (according to an epidemiologist). (well five actually, local support is the most important one). Why am I mentioning this? This goes to show that going ’normal charities are inefficient, we will stop malaria by creating our own charity with less waste (and hookers and blackjack) and just send out nets, is a bad idea).
Do not donate to religious groups ‘supporting God’s cause’, support us instead in creating God(AI).