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Donate Unrestricted

paulgraham.com

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Re: Donate Unrestricted

#141

Post by arp242 »

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?

A number of these things are just good general advice. Others a bit less so.

The explainer on "focus on getting the 'right' answer" (page 65) is actually pretty okay. For example it encourages to "Engage with true problem solving" such as "What are some strategies we can use to engage with this problem?". That seems pretty good to me. It goes on to say that "teaching math isn't just about solving specific problems. It's about helping students understand the deeper mathematical concepts so that they can apply them throughout their lives". Again, this seems fairly on-point to me for middle/high-school math.

People seem to have taken this part in particular a bit out of context and ran with it. They mostly mean "having students than semi-mindlessly solve equations to get the right answer isn't really teaching them all that much about math". I think most here would agree with that.

I find the explainer for "Independent practice is valued over teamwork or collaboration" (page 61) really weird though: "it reinforces individualism and the notion that I’m the only one. This does not give value to collectivism and community understanding, and fosters conditions for competition and individual success". At some earlier point there was also a swipe against "capitalism".

Overall, I found it mostly good with some bad mixed in.

But ... I'm from a region in the Netherlands with a fairly homogeneous white population, and attended a school where almost everyone was white; my class certainly was. I can confidently say my math classes sucked, for quite a number of the reasons listed in that article.

But was this because of "white supremacy culture"? I don't think so. That seems like a really narrow view on things. Sometimes bad teaching is exactly that: bad teaching. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#142

Post by randomsearch »

remote_phone wrote: post #135
santoshalper wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the outside, it really looks like it's more about you than it is about helping anyone else.

But the end recipients are getting the money, so who cares?

Because the charity knows how best to spend it, not you (as explained in the essay).

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#143

Post by doktorhladnjak »

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #129

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 trul…

Aren't you already choosing to donate to a non-profit that is focused on this mission? If they're mission-focused, they presumably know how to best spend their money to support that mission.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#144

Post by closeparen »

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…

Shareholder return and the wages of skilled labor/management are very different things! No one is getting rich off a nonprofit merely for putting capital into it, is the point. Nonprofits still buy things that are expensive, including the efforts of skilled and effective people.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#145

Post by doktorhladnjak »

hirundo wrote: post #6

He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money. If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it significantly outweighs the rest.

Fungibility can add inefficiency even if it doesn't make a huge difference in the totals spent.

For example, a friend of mine used to work for an environmental agriculture non-profit. A large donation had been made that could only be spent buying trees to plant. Now, they planted a lot of trees as part of their work anyways so this seems reasonable.

The problem was that it did not cover the labor of planting the trees, tools for planting the trees, or many related costs. In practice, it took them many years to spend all this money across many projects, when an unrestricted donation would have probably had more positive effects sooner.

Moreover, they had to track how much was spent on trees separately for every project so that it could be properly accounted for against this restricted donation, which of course added administrative overhead.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#146

Post by neilv »

> Usually the way the donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have chosen. [...] If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at all.

The situation might not be "understand", but "choose". The donor's interests in donating might not be 100% aligned with the effective mission of the charity.

For one example, I imagine the donor might have a particular problem they want addressed, and that overlaps incompletely with the activity of the charity, but the charity otherwise seems the best vehicle for addressing that particular problem.

For a less admirable example (but still perhaps beneficial to society), I imagine a donation might have PR or social status value for the donor, and a donation for a particular cause/effort sounds better than some of the less-fashionable work of the nonprofit. Or the donor might want the PR/status of their name on a center, and want to make sure that the center has funds to keep paying PR/status dividends.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#147

Post by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #143
kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #129

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 trul…

Aren't you already choosing to donate to a non-profit that is focused on this mission? If they're mission-focused, they presumably know how to best spend their money to support that mission.

No, because there are literally no organizations that would have helped children like me. Not a single one.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#148

Post by dantheman »

Restricted donations can keep the nonprofit from changing is focus. For instance, the ACLU is wavering in it's defense of free speech - if I were to give money to them, it wiuld have to be structured to support the defense of all speech regardless of content.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#149

Post by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj »

randomsearch wrote: post #142
remote_phone wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the end recipients are getting the money, so who cares?

Because the charity knows how best to spend it, not you (as explained in the essay).

They don't though, they just think they do. Their goals are largely motivated by current politics.

Re: Donate Unrestricted

#150

Post by lazyasciiart »

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…

If I were any of the half dozen non-profits I've worked with, I would be unwilling to accept that loan because it is a completely unreasonable amount of risk to be beholden to some untrustworthy random person for any important sum of money, and a completely unreasonable amount of work to be beholden to some untrustworthy random person for any unimportant sum of money.

Start your own foundation and manage your own money. This isn't genius, it's ignorance.

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