<story><title>The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reasonattlm</author><text>Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80&amp;#x2F;20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you&amp;#x27;re going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish more people would, actually, no such thing as too much help here).&lt;p&gt;Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day, and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others. Nothing else comes even close as a single presently addressable cause of terrible things in the world, and lack of money is the greatest obstacle to progress towards meaningful treatments that address the root causes of aging and thus all age-related disease.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Greatest Good: What is the best charitable cause in the world?</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reasonattlm</author><text>Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80&amp;#x2F;20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you&amp;#x27;re going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish more people would, actually, no such thing as too much help here).&lt;p&gt;Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day, and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others. Nothing else comes even close as a single presently addressable cause of terrible things in the world, and lack of money is the greatest obstacle to progress towards meaningful treatments that address the root causes of aging and thus all age-related disease.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>melling</author><text>Americans gave $358 billion in philanthropy last year.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philanthropy.com&amp;#x2F;interactives&amp;#x2F;giving-usa-2015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;philanthropy.com&amp;#x2F;interactives&amp;#x2F;giving-usa-2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;A trillion dollars every 3 years. Simply trying to make every dollar more effective would go a long way. We probably need fewer, but more effective charities, for example.  Identify the best ways to fund medical research.</text></comment>