Anyone can be one
A charitologist is someone who practices charitology: studying, testing, teaching or improving how generosity is aimed. There is no exam to pass first and no institution to join. A donor who asks better questions before giving is practicing it. So is a program officer who funds an evaluation, a student who codes a sample of charities on the depth scale and a volunteer who finds a broken source and fixes it.
This chapter is about how to start.
The Giver’s Checklist
The simplest way to practice is to ask ten questions before a gift. Together they are the Giver’s Checklist, and each one points to a chapter of this book.
- Symptom or source? Where on the chain does this gift act: relief, repair, prevention, structure or source? Know which one you are paying for. See the depth scale.
- What happens if I don’t give? If the work would be funded anyway, the real effect of your gift lands somewhere else. See counterfactual impact.
- How do we know it works? Look for outcomes, not activity, and ask what the strongest study found. See the Method.
- How would anyone find out if it stopped working? A program nobody measures can fail for years without anyone noticing. See the Missing Feedback Loop.
- Who decided this was the need? Ask what knowledge and decision rights the people served bring. See the Missing Voice.
- Is this the cheapest way to get this result? Compare results per dollar, not overhead ratios. See the Overhead Myth.
- Does my gift come with strings it doesn’t need? Unrestricted money lets an organization fix what it learns is broken. See the Restriction Reflex.
- Will it still matter in ten years? Some good ends when the money stops, and some compounds. See the Short Horizon.
- Am I giving to the story or to the size of the problem? Some studies find attention effects, while replications show important limits. Check whether the appeal helps you see the scale and the evidence. See the Story Bias.
- Who else is already funding this? Neglect can suggest opportunity, but only if there is a useful way to make progress. See neglectedness.
No gift will score well on every question, and that is not the point. The checklist turns a feeling into a set of choices you make on purpose.
A routine for one gift
Pick one gift you are planning to make, and write a page about it before you give. It can be short.
- Place it. Say where it sits on the depth scale and why. If you are unsure between two levels, write both.
- Write the chain. Sketch the theory of change from what the money buys to the outcome you hope for, and mark the weakest link.
- Label the evidence. Is the claim that it works strong, moderate, mixed, weak or unknown? Chapter 4 explains the grades.
- Name your lenses. Which of the eight moral frameworks does this gift serve, and which would question it? The Values Compass can help.
- Make a forecast. Write down the chance you think the program will achieve its stated outcome within a year or two. When the time comes, check. Over many gifts, scored forecasts show whether your confidence is calibrated.
Then give, and keep the page. Reading it again a year later starts your own feedback loop.
Contributing to Charitology
Charitology is written in the open, and every page is a file anyone can improve. Every page has a link to edit it on GitHub and a link that opens a prefilled issue for a correction or a red-team challenge. See the Contribute page for how to get started. The short version follows the rules in the project’s style guide:
- Every factual claim needs a source you have read. If you can’t find one, leave the claim out. A gap is a finding, and it can be linked to an Open Problem.
- Label claims honestly. Use the evidence labels and grades in Chapter 4. Charitology’s own untested claims are always hypotheses.
- Describe mechanisms, not people. No judgment of anyone’s character or motives, and no ratings of named charities.
- Write plainly. Short sentences, everyday words and a definition or link for every technical term.
- Expect review. Every new entry starts as a draft. A second contributor who has checked the sources marks it reviewed.
- Disclose AI assistance in your pull request, and check every source yourself.
Good first contributions include checking the sources on an existing page, adding a term to the Lexicon and writing an entry for the Encyclopedia or the Failure Archive.
Taking on an Open Problem
The Open Problems are 23 questions precise enough that someone could answer them, each with a stated test for what would count as progress. Anyone can work on one. Approaches, datasets and partial results go into GitHub issues tagged open-problem, where they are discussed in public. When a result holds up under review, the problem’s status moves from open to partial or solved, and the Progress Report records it.
Some problems can be started small:
- The Depth Census. Draw a random sample of organizations from a public registry, place each one on the depth scale using its program descriptions, and have a second person do the same. How often you agree is a finding in itself.
- Proximity and Obligation. A scoped survey experiment could test how comparisons affect choices, with its cost and limits stated.
- Story Without Bias. Test whether a story about a whole community, or a picture of scale, changes giving compared with a story about one person.
- The Question of Questions. Estimate which open problem, if solved, would move the most money, and publish your reasoning.
Prizes for progress are planned through Question Bounties, once that program is funded.
Going further
For people who want to make charitology a larger part of their life, Charitology’s programs include the Principles Course, the Charitology Fellowship, the Certified Charitologist program, University Chapters and Local Charitology groups.
Whether training in charitology changes where money goes is itself an open question. Charitology’s founding claim is that a profession would improve how generosity is aimed, as medicine improved how illness is treated. That claim is a hypothesis, and testing it is Open Problem 17, the Profession Question.
The point of naming it
The Missing Profession ends with a simple observation: a name can invite people to learn and test a proposed craft. This book has tried to name it, map its subject and set out its first methods. The rest is practice, and the practice belongs to anyone who wants it.
Reading notebook
Private notes and reading progress stay in this browser. This is a reading marker, separate from course assessment.