The pledge specifically includes ‘now and in future’ to make clear that not only currently existing people are important. We already have (and I believe have for many years had) members who donate to, for example, the Future of Humanity Institute.
Huh, I had never realised members included people who donated to FHI. I read “now and in the future” to refer to donating in future years. English is an ambiguous language indeed!
It really is. We spent quite a while trying to work out the best way of wording this, in particular trying to avoid weird philosophical jargon (problems of many of us being philosophers...), and this seemed the clearest. Sorry it’s still not fully clear!
I can see it’s hard and I’m sure you put a lot of thought into it. I’d suggest making it as direct as possible—if “people in developing countries, now and in the years to come” means “present and future people in developing countries”, you could say that.
That’s actually quite an awkward ambiguity; whether or not the pledge receives the proposed revision it would be good to clear this up.
Even just dropping the comma before “now” might work for that. Perhaps at that point replacing “now” with “today” would make it read better. But that’s just a minimal change; it might be you can do better by rearranging it further.
Huh, I had never realised members included people who donated to FHI. I read “now and in the future” to refer to donating in future years. English is an ambiguous language indeed!
It really is. We spent quite a while trying to work out the best way of wording this, in particular trying to avoid weird philosophical jargon (problems of many of us being philosophers...), and this seemed the clearest. Sorry it’s still not fully clear!
I can see it’s hard and I’m sure you put a lot of thought into it. I’d suggest making it as direct as possible—if “people in developing countries, now and in the years to come” means “present and future people in developing countries”, you could say that.
That’s actually quite an awkward ambiguity; whether or not the pledge receives the proposed revision it would be good to clear this up.
Even just dropping the comma before “now” might work for that. Perhaps at that point replacing “now” with “today” would make it read better. But that’s just a minimal change; it might be you can do better by rearranging it further.