See the paper He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune and my review of the book Power and Prosperity for more arguments that led me to this belief.

To try to avoid perpetuating this problem, I try to focus on organizations whose results I can evaluate, but I'm still concerned about the subjective nature of my evaluations, and am trying to look for better metrics, hopefully something approaching the objectivity of the accounting system used to measure corporate profits.

Also, I try to focus on organizations that are small enough that they don't develop much of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

Here are the charities in which I have some hope (listed roughly in order of decreasing average (not marginal!) value of donations):

• The Center for Applied Rationality helps people minimize the harm caused by their biases. It might have a more important effect on existential risks than organizations that focus more directly on those risks, e.g. by influencing the rationality of a broad group of startup founders who wouldn't be influenced by "ordinary" existential risk organizations. This could be unusually important if that includes startups that create the first AGIs.
  I have clear but hard-to-communicate evidence that they're helping people, but little idea of how to quantify that value.
  They have been mildly constrained by funding, and their ambitions for expansion suggest that funding constraints may become more important in a few years.
• The Future of Humanity Institute is focused on minimizing existential risks. Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development is a good explanation of why this is important. FHI seems to have been highly influential (via the book Superintelligence) at persuading mainstream academics and businessmen to worry about AGI. As of late 2015, they appear to have gotten enough large grants that they have little immediate need for donations from ordinary people.
• AI Impacts
  Researches ideas related to AGI risks that other organizations are likely to avoid.
  My current impression is that they're not constrained by funding right now, but I ought to pay attention to whether they develop a need for more funding soon.
• GiveWell rates some of the most transparent charities according to how many dollars they need to save one life. This seems to be a better criterion than any of the others I'm aware of, and I am giving a small fraction of my charitable contributions to the charities GiveWell rates highest.
  See On Fudge Factors for a skeptical view.
• FLI is at least superficially doing important tasks by providing grants to numerous people and organizations to research AGI risks. This approach is potentially better than MIRI's because it can promote more diversity of approaches. But FLI's apparent desire to be relatively mainstream seems to water down whatever focus it might have had on existential risks.
• CEA
  Promotes the idea of Effective Altruism. There's a modest chance that donating to them will be more effective at getting money to the charities listed above than direct donations to those charities would be.
• The Brain Preservation Foundation
  Supports research into better ways to preserve brain tissue. It might produce some important progress towards mind uploading or alternatives to cryonics. My best guess is that existing brain preservation techniques are good enough that progress in those areas is mostly constrained by other problems. But reducing preservation costs will help. [I'm being less altruistic in supporting this cause than in supporting existential risk reduction; if I were young I'd feel less urgency about brain preservation.]
• MAPS funds clinical trials of therapy assisted by psychedelic drugs that drug companies avoid due to lack of patentability. I see modest chances that a little more money will result in many people getting access to good therapy for anxiety and trauma.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
  Defending freedom in cyberspace. If you're unfamiliar with the arguments it makes, you shouldn't assume you're informed enough to vote in the U.S.
• Methuselah Mouse Prize
  I donated to the Methuselah Mouse Prize from 2003 through about 2008. There's no longer a simple way to specifically donate to the prize, and with the prize fund at $1.4 million [in late 2015], additional donations seem likely to have less impact on the prize's prestige than was the case a decade earlier. I stopped donating for those reasons and because the charities listed above seem more important.
  I'm leaving some prior comments about why I supported them here:
  Dedicated to curing aging. Unlike most requests for health oriented research money, this is an information prize. It doesn't require the donor to have the expertise to distinguish in advance whether the research is promising (since even researchers have trouble knowing whether their research is valuable, it's unlikely that many donors are able to make even an educated guess at that). Instead, all a donor has to evaluate is whether the results it rewards are connected to something medically desirable. And a cure for aging would certainly be one of the more important medical advances that I can imagine, as it should reduce deaths from heart attacks and cancer to roughly the rates seen in 20 or 30 year olds.
  See the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence web page for some serious discussion about the possibility of curing aging.
• Foresight Institute
  Educating the world about the benefits and risks of accelerating technological change, particularly molecular nanotechnology.

Last updated 2015-12-06.