“Stop asking “how good is this” to decide between donation opportunities I recommend” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Prospective donors often ask how cost-effective my team's various recommendations are — they want to donate to the most cost-effective opportunity. But the answer is often roughly:

If we do our job right, then all donations we recommend to you are equally valuable on the margin, and that value is our bar. If an opportunity is substantially above our bar, we will make sure to fill it with or without you; you're not counterfactual. (Alternative framing: we will just recommend more funding for that opportunity until its marginal value falls to our bar.) Your donations funge[1] with donations to our other recommendations. (That's fine; our bar is high.[2])

This is a simplification:

• Sometimes there are legal limits like "max $7K per donor" and this means we can't direct as much money to the opportunity as we'd like, so marginal donations are above our bar. And sometimes the identity of the donor provides various costs or benefits, so certain donors have an advantage. For this reason, many donors should set aside some money for capped opportunities or opportunities where they're a particularly good donor.
• Sometimes a great opportunity is sufficiently urgent/sensitive/weird that we're uncertain we can fill it, or [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 27th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8fKcCLbKa3J4PmaZ4/stop-asking-how-good-is-this-to-decide-between-donation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.