Here’s how I’m donating in 2016.
After the election, I set up a recurring $20 donation to the ACLU. Normally, my moral foundations other than harm/care are fairly quiescent; however, loyalty and sanctity started kicking up a fuss after the election, and I have chosen to indulge them with a small donation. I am confident that the ACLU is aligned with my values and that the average dollar given to the ACLU does a great deal of good. I like that the ACLU works on many issues, because I think they will be able to respond fluidly to whatever unpredictable nonsense the Trump administration attempts to push through. I am highly uncertain if they are funding-constrained or how much value the marginal dollar given to the ACLU purchases. I am very interested in pointers to funding-constrained charities which focus on civil liberties and anti-authoritarianism (in the US and globally).
I am giving $100 to Tostan. Aceso Under Glass wrote an excellent blog post about why she believes more people should donate to Tostan. While I don’t have a firm opinion on the underlying issue, I think that not enough people do independent charity research, and in particular not enough global poverty effective altruists do independent charity research. While GiveWell is an amazing organization, it’s important not to have a single point of failure; a diversity of viewpoints means that we’re more likely to notice their mistakes and things they overlook. And since effective altruism has major talent gaps, it’s good for people to try to fill them. Therefore, I am giving to Tostan to encourage more people to do such research. I will probably give to other charities recommended by particularly impressive blog posts, until it seems like there is enough independent charity research.
The rest of my donations ($2032) I will donate to GiveWell. I do not currently have any particular expertise in charity evaluation. I don’t predict that I will acquire such expertise in the near future, and I am concerned that if I save my money until I have acquired this expertise then all of the tastiest low-hanging fruit will have been plucked by the time I get around to donating. GiveWell seems to me to be highly competent as an organization and to agree with my values; therefore, I think they are a reasonable proxy for what a hypothetical version of me who knew more would donate to.
I think many people in my position pick their favorite of GiveWell’s top charities; this is certainly what I did in the past. I have decided not to do this because it feels intellectually dishonest, the donation equivalent of the apocryphal story about housewives wanting cake mixes where they have to add an egg because then it feels like they’re actually cooking. If you add an egg you’re still using a cake mix, and if you choose between Give Directly and Deworm The World you’re still letting GiveWell allocate your money; it makes you feel like you have agency, but you actually don’t. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using a cake mix or a charity evaluator if you happen to be unskilled in baking or cause prioritization. But I prefer to have an accurate model of exactly how much agency I have.
I am giving to GiveWell’s operations, because GiveWell gives its excess funds as grants; thus, giving to operations is the best possible way to make GiveWell make all my decisions for me.
Thing of Things 
Personally I donate specifically to the humane societies. The more I know of people the more I like dogs.
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Unfortunately, the ACLU picked a side in the culture war (uncritically accepting questionable statistics and tacitly agreeing with the violations in due process that have been happening due to the ‘Dear colleague’ letter).
Now, I fully understand that after the election of Trump, you consider it more important to ensure that he is fought if he does some of the things he has said, than to the fair treatment of (mainly) male students. However, I want to point out that your donation merely supports civil liberties and anti-authoritarianism for some and not necessarily for all (and that the increasing politicization of ‘impartial’ entities like the media, science and organisations like the UCLA results in them being seen as oppressive forces in the eyes of a portion of society, partially with good reason).
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Tostan and GiveWell seem like good charities and I agree that ‘micromanaging’ your donations can lead to sub-optimal outcomes, especially due to that talent gap you mentioned. There is a risk that popular charities get way more money than they can usefully spend, while others are underfunded. This is especially true for ‘bottom up’ charities like Tostan, which focuses more on funding things that are popular with the recipients than the givers and thus pretty much by definition, are bad at attracting targeted donations.
PS. The blog post about the talent gap advocates migration for humanitarian reasons, but AFAIK migration of talented people aka brain drain is a major cause for talent gaps in developing nations. I’m a bit worried that Open Phil may contribute to this and then fly in expensive Westerners, which is far, far more costly (and probably less effective due to cultural mismatches) than using local talent.
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I agree with the ACLU about campus sexual assault. I can already sense the massively tiresome thread that is going to erupt, so let it be known that discussion of campus sexual assault is off-topic and annoying and will be deleted.
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I was sloppy in my argument and shouldn’t have implied that you disagree with them on this point.
PS. Surely the ACLU is funding constrained? AFAIK more lawyers tend to graduate than jobs come available for them.
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My (highly uninformed) model of why they wouldn’t be funding-constrained is actually not “the ACLU is talent-constrained” but “the ACLU is cases-with-standing-constrained.”
(The ACLU does things other than suing people– for instance, the ACLU group I used to volunteer with helped felons register to vote, and I think they do a fair amount of putting the fear of God in people who are violating civil liberties– but I think those things are generally less valuable.)
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The ACLU ‘suing’ mission isn’t limited to litigating landmark cases, is it? It seems to me that they could start helping more individuals who were clearly wronged if you look at case law, but who don’t have the means to fight for their rights. In my experience, government doesn’t automatically follow the law, especially when dealing with people who don’t fight for their rights, even when it is established how the law should be interpreted. Although you seem to argue that they choose not to do this and instead do things like voter registration.
I’m wondering though, did that voter registration effort actually cost a decent amount of ACLU money or was it mainly a way to give non-lawyer volunteers something to do, so the ACLU wouldn’t have to turn away volunteers? Basically, a way to keep those volunteers happy and engaged (so they’ll keep donating and helping to get others to donate), even if the volunteer work doesn’t help with the primary UCLA mission.
If so, I would argue that the volunteer work is ‘volunteer-constrained’ (or rather: volunteer-driven) and donating more wouldn’t make the UCLA do this more.
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One option for to balance out any degree to which the ACLU has “picked a side” would be to contribute to other civil liberty groups that will stand up for many of the same rights but with (perhaps) different ideological priors.
Two that come immediately to mind are the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (free speech) and the Institute For Justice (eminent domain abuses and occupational licensing/crony capitalism). Between the two of them and the ACLU, a donor would cover a wide spectrum of civil rights issues that could be under threat soon–and would support a group with a wide set of ideological priors.
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As I argued, I prefer a situation where organisations rally around ideals and stick to them, even if it is not popular, rather than pick a side in the culture war and act inconsistently as a result.
Having balance by having two sides who each defend their ‘tribe’ is not great, especially for the people who do not neatly fit in either tribe, who can easily fall in the cracks and have no one backing them.
That said, the wiki page for FIRE suggests that they are pretty neutral and consistent in defending their ideals, although they don’t seem to focus on the specific issue with ACLU that I complained about, but rather, freedom of speech. On that front, the ACLU is saying the right thing, although I don’t know how much effort they put into helping students whose freedom of speech is violated. So it might still be a good idea to donate to FIRE, as that issue is important as well (and universities are traditionally a place where ideologies could develop, which is valuable and requires free speech).
Let me also state that I don’t think that the ACLU has become truly partisan (yet), it’s more that I worry about this partisanship spreading.
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@Aapje
I agree that it’s better when organizations try their hardest to avoid partisanship and to, as you say, “rally around ideals and stick to them, even if it is not popular.” I also think that this is really hard—as is evidenced by the inevitable unconscious biases that come up in academia, or news gathering, or any other area where people try to be unbiased but tend to have one-sided political views in their private lives.
Based on that, I support ideological diversity in addition to supporting attempts to avoid politicization. For example, I think it’s good for psych departments to *both* attempt to be impartial *and* hire some faculty who might vote for/donate to republican causes—even on an unconscious level, the different perspectives can matter.
Similarly, I think civil liberty organizations should both attempt to be unbiased *and* should have members that have diverse ideological perspectives. In an absolutely ideal world, that ideological diversity could take place within a single organization (such as the ACLU). But I recognize that there’s something convivial about working with people who share your ideological views and wouldn’t mind if the ACLU was comprised of (mostly) liberal people trying to impartially fight for free speech and FIRE was comprised of (mostly) conservative people trying to impartially fight for free speech. I would view that situation the same as if, say, the Harvard psych department were full of mostly liberal professors trying to get to the truth about social phenomena and, say, the Chicago psych department were full of mostly conservative professors trying to get to the truth about those phenomena.
(I’m not making a descriptive claim that any of those entities are currently like that, just that I wouldn’t mind if they were.)
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@FrayedKnott
I think that we need to distinguish between ideology and tribalism. The ACLU has always had a fairly liberal ideology, which results in various positions that certain people do not agree with. For example, keeping the state out of regulating people’s sex lives.
I’m fine with the ACLU not catering to people who favor sodomy laws, where people who want that can work through organisations with a different (non-liberal) ideology.
The issue is that tribalism regularly results in a non-consistent ideology, where people advocate liberalism when the beneficiary is part of their tribe, yet choose a non-liberal position when their tribe benefits from forcing other people to do things.
The more advocacy organizations engage in tribalism, the less ‘moral’ their position becomes and instead, they become organizations that use the power they have to the maximum extent possible to help their tribe, even if it hurts others.
Maximally using the power you have to benefit your own group, without caring to be fair to others, is the opposite of (lowercase) social justice, IMHO.
Unfortunately, my observation is that the concern that people have for the rights of others has a strong inverse correlation with the power they have. For example, conservative religious people in my nation have been mostly marginalized and they have become far more liberal and favor the rights of the marginalized far more than when they still had a lot of power.
I currently see an opposite change on the ‘left’ who have been gaining a lot of power in certain communities and who have become far less liberal as they themselves can now use that power to push around others.
Of course, we can keep going around in circles where a group of people resist the abuses of those in power, gain entry to the halls of power, then abuse that power themselves, whereupon the newly abused do the same thing, ad infinitum.
I prefer we don’t do that, though (and will speak out against those who do it, even if I support their ideals).
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“I am confident that the ACLU is aligned with my values and that the average dollar given to the ACLU does a great deal of good. I like that the ACLU works on many issues,”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/california-circumcision-b_n_901873.html
“GiveWell seems to me to be highly competent as an organization and to agree with my values;”
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/voluntary-medical-male-circumcision
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