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Comment by fasthands9 | Hacker News Reader

What's the main difference between when breast cancer awareness spends so much money on advertising to raise more money? In both cases it is true that spending on overhead raises total lifetime donations but ultimately it seems to increase the amount of productive hours spent doing administrative work that means nothing on its own.

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I wouldn't argue there's a difference except that "EA" taken as a whole probably has way less overhead than Susan G. Komen (for example). If (if!) a breast cancer charity running ads drastically increases the amount of money they get in donations, that's probably a good thing up until the point that the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of the charity running more ads outweighs the marginal benefit to breast cancer researchers of just getting the money. If $1 in ads consistently brought in $2 of donations, it'd seem like the right thing to do to run a ton of ads, even if we agree running ads about breast cancer or AI or malaria nets or tickets to the opera for inner city youth is not intrinsically valuable.

I think I can speak for EAs when I say overhead is not the greatest metric by which to judge a charity[1]. I understand why it's an intuitive one, and overhead is probably correlated with measures of effectiveness, but if your targets are concrete enough you can just... actually measure effectiveness.

[1]: https://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a...

All of this sounds, to put it bluntly, like a lot of hemming and hawing to get around the fact that your favorite charity organization just spent $15 million on a castle.

Yeah I can't really defend that. But this was probably how they convinced themselves it was "effective".

Breast cancer charities aren't effective with the money they use to further their goal compared to givewell charities. Focusing on overhead is a mistake, impact matters.

I suppose that's fair. I dont want to conflate EA the org with EA the movement or with Givewell - but still the pitch I usually here is "If you give you know your money is going directly to efficient programs where it will actually save lives". The pitch is not "If you give you know your money is going to an administrative org which will multiply your donations by advertising, workshops, and branding"

If I am trying to do the second (influence behavior of others or multiple givings through sustainable orgs) then I would probably donate to Democratic politicians, not EA.

100% of donations to the givewell fund go to the charities they support. Their operations are wholly funded by dustin moskovitz. I don't think the center for EA has ever acted like money donated there was going to anything other than org building. Some people believe org building is the most effective use for their money, but for those that don't they can go to givewell.

I'm not a huge fan of the org building stuff, and I think the center for EA especially has been wasteful due to SBF abundance, so my donations go to givewell where I know exactly what I'm "buying".

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