[hprhpr]

Agreed about the importance of making sure you donate to the right charities, which is why I was disappointed to read this: "And, to begin, they have sprinkled $1 million on Silicon Valley nonprofits that focus on everything from urban forestry to homeless families."

Another good essay about this stuff is here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

[pmarca]

For what it's worth, those six nonprofits weren't just chosen randomly. Each GP picked one he and his family had direct experience with.

For my part, I don't know as much about this as some people, but my wife teaches philanthropy at Stanford and has studied, written about, and taught the topic of effective giving for her whole career, so that works out nicely for me. (Can't resist plugging her recent book "Giving 2.0" for people interested in the topic.)

[waterlesscloud]

Thank you for taking the questions here seriously and taking the time to address them thoughtfully.

This sort of topic brings out high emotions on both sides, and it's good to bring the rhetoric level down a bit. Certainly it's the way to win people over to your way of thinking and have even more of an impact.

I'm curious, has your wife written about the sorts of topics raised here? Would she do so on the web, if she hasn't already? There's a notable portion of the entrepreneurial community that has these sorts of legitimate questions and it would seem like she'd be in a unique position to discuss them and sway hearts and minds.

[zmitri]

Hey Marc, speaking of giving 2.0, do you think there's some value in making it easier for companies to promote positive initiatives like this? Or do you think the action is more of a means in itself?

For example, if a16z said "Hey users of instagram (or users of a16z product that just sold), we're going to let you decide which cause some of this money goes to," would that create a delta in value from the original proposition?

[rdl]

Given that "how people donate money" (or spend money, or invest money seems to conflict with what they claim are their stated preferences, I wonder which is more representative. I'd bet on the revealed preferences by actions.

Basically no one would say (or is allowed to say in polite company) that they care more about having art available locally than the lives of a thousand people in some third-world country that they'll never meet. Yet, it seems pretty obvious that donations to local art save fewer lives than the anti-malarial mosquito nets, and should be obvious to the people donating.

[hprhpr]

Agreed about nobody saying they prefer local art over thousands of lives, but I don't think that means their revealed preferences are more representative of what they really want, I think it just shows how irrational they are. Most people don't sit down and think about what they want most and construct a plan to achieve that, so it shouldn't be surprising that they end up doing such drastically sub-optimal things as donating a lot of money to a museum when someone asks them to. It seems like a good thing to do, so they do it. They don't consider whether it's what they actually most prefer.