Thanks for posting this. I also appreciated this thoughtful essay.
There was also this passage (not in your excerpts):
An alternate solution, and the one that has, I believe, been adopted by many EAs, has been a form of weak-EA. Strong-EA takes “do the most good you can do” extremely seriously as a central aspect of a life philosophy. Weak-EA uses that principle more as guidance. Donate 1% of your income. Donate 10% of your income, provided that doesn’t cause you hardship. Be thoughtful about the impact your work has on the world, and consult many different sources. These are all good things to do! The critique of this form is that it’s fine and good, but also hard to distinguish from the common pre-existing notion many people have, “live well, and try to do some good in the world”.
My emphasis. (I’m not quite sure whether Nielsen endorses this—see his comment further down.)
I wouldn’t agree with that. I think that one can increase one’s impact very substantially over the baseline referred to in the bold sentence by, e.g. working directly on a high-impact cause, even if one doesn’t donate a large fraction of one’s income.
Fwiw, I think the logic is very different when it comes to direct work, and that phrasing it in terms of what fraction of one’s time one donates isn’t the most natural of thinking about it.
You can usually relatively straightforwardly divide your monetary resources into a part that you spend on donations and a part that you spend for personal purposes.
By contrast, you don’t usually spend some of your time at work for self-interested purposes and some for altruistic purposes. (That is in principle possible, but uncommon among effective altruists.) Instead you only have one job (which may serve your self-interested and altruistic motives to varying degrees). Therefore, I think that analogies with donations are often a stretch and sometimes misleading (depending on how they’re used).
Thanks for posting this. I also appreciated this thoughtful essay.
There was also this passage (not in your excerpts):
My emphasis. (I’m not quite sure whether Nielsen endorses this—see his comment further down.)
I wouldn’t agree with that. I think that one can increase one’s impact very substantially over the baseline referred to in the bold sentence by, e.g. working directly on a high-impact cause, even if one doesn’t donate a large fraction of one’s income.
(Fwiw I also wouldn’t call that weak-EA.)
Right. Donating 10-50% of time or resources as effectively as possible is still very distinctive, and not much less effective than donating 100%.
Wouldn’t it be roughly a tenth to half as effective?
Whereas choosing the wrong cause could cost orders of magnitude.
Fwiw, I think the logic is very different when it comes to direct work, and that phrasing it in terms of what fraction of one’s time one donates isn’t the most natural of thinking about it.
Can you say why?
You can usually relatively straightforwardly divide your monetary resources into a part that you spend on donations and a part that you spend for personal purposes.
By contrast, you don’t usually spend some of your time at work for self-interested purposes and some for altruistic purposes. (That is in principle possible, but uncommon among effective altruists.) Instead you only have one job (which may serve your self-interested and altruistic motives to varying degrees). Therefore, I think that analogies with donations are often a stretch and sometimes misleading (depending on how they’re used).
Roughly one-tenth to one-half as effective as sustainably donating 100% over the course of your life, which is impractical.