Over the weekend on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit posed an interesting question:
Assume that I’m going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the “common good”. Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other?
A lot of the discussion consists of tedious (and non-specific) banging on about the wonders of start-ups, but there’s some good stuff in there if you have the patience to read through it.
Buried in there with everything else is an attempt to compile a list of charities that would be attractive to rationalists. The response might charitably be described as “tepid,” which isn’t surprising, because I’ve heard this song before.
This is one of the things I’ve found really frustrating about ScienceBlogs. We’ve got a huge audience (in absolute terms, if not relative to the Gawker empire), and it’s remarkably easy to get a hundred-odd people to bitch about something (on any given day, take your pick of the “Most Active” links in the right sidebar), but it’s very difficult to convert that into any sort of positive action. Attempts to raise money for worthy causes, in particular, draw almost as many pissy comments about charity being inefficient/stupid/evil as donations.
The dynamic in the FriendFeed and Less Wrong threads seems to be pretty similar. I don’t know if that’s a relief, or just depressing. It may just be an indication of the difficulty of monetizing anything on the Internet (as any number of media company executives could tell you).
I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done about this (especially in the current economic climate). I’ve kind of become resigned to it, myself. Two years ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I was really annoyed at the whole business; this past year, I managed to keep my expectations lower, and wound up being more successful (though offering to dance like a monkey had a lot to do with that).
I’d be happy to hear other people’s thoughts on the matter, though.