I support the change. I mean, I would, as someone who’s taken advantage of the ambiguity in the current pledge to donate to x-risk-related causes, but I think even independent of that I support the change.
The GWWC pledge is a good institution. It provides a unified community norm of “at least ten percent” and helps keep people honest. It’s a piece of “social technology” that makes effective altruism easier.
As such, if GWWC restricted it to the developing world, I would expect and encourage the animal rights movement and the x-risk movement to get their own similar pledges so that they could benefit from the same social technology.
But at that point, we would probably all wish there was just one pledge. Having multiple ones is unwieldy, unnecessarily fractures the movement, and creates new transaction costs—someone who took the animal rights pledge can’t shift their giving to the developing world (or vice versa) in response to new information without unpledging and repledging.
So while acknowledging that GWWC is an organization primarily donated to the developing world, I think that mission could be consistent with it providing the pledge as a service to the broader effective altruism community, especially since its privileged position as host of the pledge gives it extra credibility and standing in the movement, which helps their own cause in the end. I think this would be in keeping with the behavior of other EA organizations who both push their own causes and try to help the movement as a whole with whatever their comparative advantage is.
I support the change. I mean, I would, as someone who’s taken advantage of the ambiguity in the current pledge to donate to x-risk-related causes, but I think even independent of that I support the change.
The GWWC pledge is a good institution. It provides a unified community norm of “at least ten percent” and helps keep people honest. It’s a piece of “social technology” that makes effective altruism easier.
As such, if GWWC restricted it to the developing world, I would expect and encourage the animal rights movement and the x-risk movement to get their own similar pledges so that they could benefit from the same social technology.
But at that point, we would probably all wish there was just one pledge. Having multiple ones is unwieldy, unnecessarily fractures the movement, and creates new transaction costs—someone who took the animal rights pledge can’t shift their giving to the developing world (or vice versa) in response to new information without unpledging and repledging.
So while acknowledging that GWWC is an organization primarily donated to the developing world, I think that mission could be consistent with it providing the pledge as a service to the broader effective altruism community, especially since its privileged position as host of the pledge gives it extra credibility and standing in the movement, which helps their own cause in the end. I think this would be in keeping with the behavior of other EA organizations who both push their own causes and try to help the movement as a whole with whatever their comparative advantage is.