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Donate Unrestricted

paulgraham.com

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Re: Donate Unrestricted

#121

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #120
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration. I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful. I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of res…

If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but…

> If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any.

This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy" component, and while I'd like to support effective emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute to the preaching for individual asceticism.

I have no issue giving to "some project + a proportionate share of central/overhead costs".

Unfortunately, it's often extremely hard to find a charity that is tax deductible where you live, part of employer matching programs, effective in running projects you want to support, and not performing activities you specifically don't want to support.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#122

Post by a1369209993 »

elcomet wrote: post #103
ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

But the non-profit is spending the money, and is not earning any money. If you decide to ask for repayment, how could they pay you back?

Absent anyone else willing to pay for whatever it is they're doing, they can't and would go bankrupt. That's the point.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#124

Post by dougb5 »

Not so long ago the author warned that non-profits are a "magnet for sociopaths" because "their defining feature is to make no profit" and there's "no intrinsic accountability". (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040?lang=en). I thought this was an odious and wrong thing to say for many reasons and it made me think that while he clearly has a lot of experience with non-profits of a certain kind or scale or connection to tech VC, maybe it's not so broad-based. And it's hard for me to square this attitude with this new blog post: If there's no intrinsic accountability, then how do unrestricted gifts help? Shouldn't gifts provide some of that accountability? The best interpretation I can come up with is "Apply very strict conditions to where you decide to donate, but when you do, do it unconditionally".

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#125

Post by scythe »

lowercased wrote: post #86
scythe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing t…

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math. HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?

>I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer"

In my opinion, there is a problem here, but it's being expressed wrong. The complaint should be: "focus on getting the right 'answer'", with 'answer' called out, i.e., that writing a number or expression that satisfies the problem setup is the primary goal. But this tends to teach students to take shortcuts when we need to teach fluency in reading and writing mathematical notation, particularly, as I mentioned, basic notation: fractions, parentheses, variables and exponents.

Is this "racist"? Not per se, but it happens within a system where the higher-class students go to schools that have highly qualified teachers and innovative methods (e.g. IB) while the unnecessariat are consigned to schools which have only "proven their worth" through standardized test scores and which teach students to pass the same; what is unfair is that this substandard understanding is mostly taught to the already-disadvantaged.

But the whole site is written like this: the recommendations of the experts have been filtered through seven proxies of PR teams, not all of whom seem to be trying to offer comprehensible and reassuring explanations.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#126

Post by theamk »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #120
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration. I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful. I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of res…

If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any. On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but…

Now all cases like this, many nonprofits have multiple independent projects

Like Mozilla foundation, which has a number of separate "initiatives"

Or Wikimedia, which partially works on Wikipedia.org website, but also works on a number of projects not directly related to the main website.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#127

Post by coldtea »

ralmidani wrote: post #94

Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…

>but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free)

and more often than not, peanuts to those they supposedly help too -- when they're not directly tax scams, covert foreign influence operations, or merely scams...

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#128

Post by temp8964 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #102
scythe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing t…

I imagine that it will turn out to be a mixture of a few valuable insights, and a lot of politically motivated bullshit. The insights will be used as an excuse to push the politics. It would be nice if someone could extract the good insights and publish them separately, maybe just on one page of paper. For example, here are some ideas that come to my mind: * For minority students, make sure that the language itself i…

You are 100% correct. It is critical race theory (CRT) decorated with a few pedagogical insights. Those pedagogical insights have been well known. They can stand alone and do not need those CRT BS at all. Also, they are never a major issues in math education.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#129

Post by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj »

I strongly disagree with this. If I were donating a large sum to a non-profit that helps poor children, I would absolutely earmark it with a stipulation that it must be used to help poor children who grew up as I did (poor, no opportunities for other aid/scholarships because, well we all know why).

In any nonprofit or mentorship situation, I always make sure to reach the children who grew up like me because they truly have no means of assistance.

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