Many people know about GiveWell and their top-ranked charities. But how easy would it be to make a better one? In “Why It Should Be Easy to Dominate GiveWell’s Recommendations”, Rob Wiblin notes the simple solution – fundraise for whatever organizations GiveWell recommends, and raise more than a dollar with each dollar you receive.

Organizations themselves are wary of fundraising, mainly because spending a lot of resources on fundraising messes with their “overhead ratio” or percentage of funds spent directly on the mission. Even if an organization could achieve gains through fundraising, it’s outweighed by “looking bad”. So ideally, we’d need other people to come together and create an organization that does full-time fundraising for other organizations.

Luckily, an organization has been founded to do just that. Joey Savoie, Xiomara Kikauka, and Lucas Zamprogno have come together to create Effective Fundraising an organization that provides free fundraising to charities with a proven track record of effectiveness, as ranked by GiveWell, Giving What We Can, or Effective Animal Activism. Currently, they’re fundraising for both the Against Malaria Foundation and The Humane League, both of which don’t do any grant fundraising themselves.

Not only that, but they fundraise using the most effective methods that has been proven by studies – grant writing and high net worth fundraising. The UK Institute of Fundraising estimates that grant writing returns, on average, $7 for every $1 invested and focusing on high net worth giving can get average returns of $4 for every $1 invested. Fund Raising: Evaluating and Managing the Fund Development Process states that these two are the highest return fundraising campaigns, with a return of $10 and $5 per $1 invested respectively.

You can read more about their values, their epistemology, and strategy, as well as why they’re interested in fundraising on their website.

They’re still in the “proof of concept” phase and are not currently actively seeking funding, but they seem like a promising opportunity to keep an eye on for the future.

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_Disclaimer: As of 22 July, I am now a volunteer for this organization.

Author’s Note: This was also cross-posted on LessWrong. It was edited on 22 July to correct a mistaken citation._

Recently, The Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting teamed up and published a list of America’s Worst Charities. Here, they ranked non-profit organizations by the amount of money they paid solicitors, or fundraisers, and the amount those fundraisers returned. They mention that “watchdog groups say no more than 35 percent of donations should go to fundraising costs” and suggest that these organizations are basically nothing more than scams designed to get fundraisers rich.

Perhaps these charities listed here actually are some of the worst. Perhaps they’re even outright scams. However, the amount of money they spend on fundraising isn’t going to let you know whether the organization is one not worth your donations. The CEOs of GuideStar, Charity Navigator, and the BBC Wise Giving Alliance – three organizations that regularly rank non-profits – came together and wrote a “Letter to the Donors of America” that states “The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as ‘overhead’ — is a poor measure of a charity’s performance.”

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A lot of people rely on Politico for politics news and it does produce valuable reporting. But it’s also frequently misleading and iaccurate. Why? Perhaps Nate Silver is paying them?

Speaking of Politico, here’s an interesting interview with them.

And if you want to improve your political literacy, Cracked points out five ways to spot a B.S. political story in under ten seconds. If the article headline contains the word “gaffe”, ends in a question mark, contains the word “blasts”, says something is a “blow to” someone else’s plans, or is about a lawmaker saying something really stupid, you shouldn’t put much stock in the article.

Giving What We Can interviews Peter Singer on effective altruism.

A comical take on why it might not be so bad to brag about donations. I wrote about this in “To Inspire People to Give, Be Public About Your Giving”.

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Want to be happier than you already are? Many people look to self-help books as a way to become happy. Sometimes they give good advice and sometimes they dont. However, one of the most robust, enduring findings from psychological studies of increasing people’s happiness has been that happiness can be found from journaling, especially when you keep a regular journal of what you’re grateful for.

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Peter Singer discusses in the New York Times about why giving to charity is important and how much one should give.

You may know about The Lean Startup. But can this apply to non-profits? Probably yes?

“The Four Habits that Form Habits”. If you want to learn how to form good habits, you need to start from base habits that will support you in your quest for future good habits. Otherwise, you’ll constantly derail and give up.

It’s difficult to give good advice about whether to go to graduate school or not, but here’s good advice on avoiding bad advice.

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Whenever you think you have an obvious answer to a question that has been debated for several thousand years by some of the greatest philosophers, and you’re just a college student, one would be justified in presuming you to be a bit arrogant.

Of course, while I try to be a bit humble about it, this describes me all to well – on both accounts of atheism and morality, and several other things. Whether this counts as grounds to dismiss all of my ideas without considering them – well, that’s your fallacy to commit.

Very few other topics have had more ink and electrons dedicated to them than studying the topic of morality. However, despite tens of thousands of pages, all that remains is the same amount of confusion as where we started. It should be obvious that if a process goes through thousands of years of thinking and emerges with nothing to show for it, something isn’t just wrong with the answers, but with the process that is generating those answers.

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What am I grateful for? I’m keeping a log here, to reflect! I’m doing this because psychology research shows it will boost my happiness.

1 July: I’m grateful that my friend Josh takes time away from South Africa and uses what little internet time he has to work on making Venture Philanthropy great. I’m grateful for my brother and his willingness to pretty much drop everything and help me learn how to drive. I’m also grateful for Apple products – I now have a new iPad and Macbook air and they’re working wonderfully!

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Immigration is in the news with the new reform bill, so I thought it was worthwhile to highlight why I’ve changed my mind from “don’t care much about immigration” to “definitely in favor of making immigration easier”. It turns out that immigration (1) improves the quality of life of the immigrants themselves and (2) improves the quality of life of the immigrants’ home families and communities. These two parts alone make it worth the net cost to the host country, in my opinion.

…But wait, you say? There actually isn’t a “net cost to the host country” because immigration is a “win-win”? Yes! Turns out that all the people afraid of “Mexican immigrants stealin’ our dang jobs” were wrong, because immigration also (3) creates economic growth in the country they immigrate to. It turns out that the desire to build a large fence between US and Mexico, perhaps even with an “alligator-filled moat” and “topped with electrified barbed wire”, pretty much couldn’t be any more terrible…

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Follow up to “Resolutions Update: June Edition”.

About half a year ago, I outlined some New Years Resolutions, and then did what I thought impossible – used the power of blogging, precommitment, and betting to actually stick to my plans. Following up my last report in June, I present my July update, where I see how I’m doing against my goals, and… more importantly… update my goals based on how things are going so far.

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A Decision Theory FAQ! I’m almost certain these questions are not actually frequently asked, but if you ever wanted to know what decision theories were, here’s a good way to find out. (Note: decision theories are surprisingly not all that helpful at allowing you to make actual decisions in your everyday life.)

A study done over multiple time points showing with cool graphics how conservatives react in a biased manner to political information. This isn’t about conservative-bashing, though, as liberals exhibit the same phenomena under conservative presidents. It just so happens that this study was done under a liberal president (Obama).

Diplomacy is a strange game where you have a map of World War I Europe and your goal is to capture up to 18 supply centers. However, each player has the same sized army in the beginning and there are no luck elements. All you can do is play off each other, forming and breaking alliances. No one wants to play it because its a really long game (I’ve heard games can take days to finish), but I want to play it because it sounds like a really exciting way to test game theory.

The correlation between someone being pro-choice on abortion and pro-gay rights is not as strong as one might think. Also, pro-life stances are more common among liberals than one might think.

Dictator games, or laboratory tests intended to measure altruism by seeing how much money a participant is willing to split with another person, are probably useful only in very specific conditions, because the laboratory is not real life.

Going to space probably isn’t worth it, unless incentives for private business change.

Five myths about Iraq.

A good review of the considerations surrounding donating to the third world.

A unification of Superman’s powers [PDF]. One can derive all of Superman’s powers from the single power to manipulate inertia.

100% confidence is a lot less common in practice than you might think. An amusing anecdote contained within.

There’s an important difference between believing in something and believing you believe something.

Google Correlate does not imply Google causation.