I don’t think “you should donate to charity, and at least 10% to effective charities” is a more difficult message to convey than “you should donate at least 10% to charity, and at least 8% of that 10% to effective charities.”
To the extent “you should only donate to effective charities” is being conveyed in practice, it’s not clear to me why deploying a 2⁄8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging. It seems you could get much of the value you’re seeking by explaining that many (probably most?) people choose to give to causes that are meaningful to them above and beyond the pledge.
And I do think the costs of a 2⁄8 message would be substantial. The 10% community standard is implicitly making some sort of moral claim. I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes. In my view, the idea that one can partially satisfy the moral claim implied by the community standard by donating to music for rich people substantially weakens the claim.
As you imply, the 10% figure is morally arbitrary—but at least it has some cultural grounding[1] and is a nice round number. Adding in a 2⁄8 split adds a second arbitrariness—and one that lacks any clear cultural grounding or status as a nice round number. Why not 3/7? or, more likely given the desire for round numbers, 5/5?
The grounding is not based in an appeal for religious donors to replace their religious tithe with a secular one. Rather, using a percentage that was culturally salient reduces the impression that we pulled the 10% number out of thin air. Even to those who are not religious, there’s a decent chance they would recognize the figure as a traditional aspiration for charity.
In fact, ignoring concerns about message complexity and not trying to be too fancy, I might suggest we eliminate any hard percentage standard in favor of a recommended % donation that scales with income. So somebody earning < $10,000-$20,000/year might be advised not to donate. Someone earning $80,000 might be asked to donate 10%. Someone earning $10,000,000/year might be asked to donate 90%. These are just rough numbers. But I think this might be better treated in book form or in tailored appeals to individual people. In the EA community I think it would be nice if we often discussed specific ways we could refine and tailor this community standard in a way that’s optimized for “it’s easy to understand how this number was computed yet it makes sense for me” rather than being optimized for compatibility with a sound bite in a media appearance.
That would be more accurate, but doing it well would start to feel like a tax return. But going on income alone without considering cost of living, debt obligations, family size, etc. would produce inaccurate results.
Maybe it could be a range—e.g., We recommend the average person earning $80K a year donate 11%; for most people at this income we would recommend donating somewhere between 8-14% depending on personal circumstances. (I changed 10 percent from your example to 11 percent as a starting point, because I think the median person would assign themselves a slightly-less-than-median point in the range.)
To the extent “you should only donate to effective charities” is being conveyed in practice, it’s not clear to me why deploying a 2⁄8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging.
It’s certainly not the most effective way in all circumstances. I think that, on a substantial the margin, a 2⁄8 message would be more effective in many circumstances. I think a sophistated EA take would be that the real goal is to find a substantial yet isustainable level of giving to effective causes, one that is tailored to the individual’s material situation and the constituency of their moral parliament.
For people who haven’t encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren’t going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off, a 2⁄8 message gestures at subtlety of thought, implying moral parliamentarian ideas, the idea of distinguishing effective causes from personal passions, the idea of a substantial habit of charitable giving.
A 10% message hits the latter two points, but implies that we’re trying to frame the personal passions of the target of our giving appeal as unworthy targets of charitable giving. This is indeed the direct implication of the idea that altruistic efficiency follows a power law distribution—ineffective charities are massively worse than the best, and we lose huge value on the margin when we direct funds and energies to suboptimal causes.
But this totalizing view is one of the major reasons why even people who see the sense of cost-benefit calculations resist thinking in this manner. The implications are profoundly destabilizing if you don’t moderate them. So we moderate them. But when you get hit with that realization that there’s a whole community of people whom you haven’t met, who think in terms of cost/benefit altruistic calculations, and that the straight-line calculation is that you ought to give everything to a narrow band of super-effective causes and live on the level of the global poor, that borks the brain and causes people distance themselves.
A 10% standard addresses many of those concerns and is much better than the straight-line calculation by protecting people from utilitarian ravages and promoting movement growth. But its limit is that it seems to imply that symbolically, every other area in life is valueless and that our aim is to reduce the amount of non-EA charitable giving you engage in to zero. This is a bad argument but one that people reliably seem to come up with, because people aren’t all mathematically literate or careful reasoners the first time they encounter an idea. A 2⁄8 message addresses this specific way that the thought process and conversation can go wrong by saying: “Yes, your passion causes are valuable and we do approve of them, and you can keep giving to them, and that is a positive thing that you do. We are also asking you to recognize the sheer magnitude of clear, unambiguous good you can do by donating to things like X-risk prevention or malaria bednets and to really step up your donating in order to support these causes.” Putting hard numbers on it gives people a sense of the proportions we might consider appropriate as a community standard, which is why “2%/8%” and not just the qualitative description is a necessary part of the message, just as “10%” is necessary rather than “a very substantial level of giving.”
I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes.
I originally meant to include a metaphor that I think is a helpful reframing of the idea of a community standard/line in the sand/Schelling point, but apparently I never worked it into the main post.
I think of a community standard not as a rigid number that’s a pass/fail, but an elastic tether. We have anchored it at 10%. Obviously, for a solid earner in a country like the USA, being at 9% is a little worse, 11% a little better, but we don’t encourage you to “stretch the standard” all the way up to 50% (because it can set an intimidating or extremely demanding-sounding image of what our standard is and provoke a sense of being not good enough in ways that are bad for community growth) or all the way down to 0%. But a little variability around 10% really doesn’t matter much. The idea of the “elastic” standard is that it resists further deformation the further you try and move away from it. Having elasticity built into the standard makes it a better standard because it emphasizes the ways our community embraces flexibility and personal fit whlie still having actual, meaningful standards.
So yeah, full agree, no “green checkmark” mentality. More like a “green tether” or something like that.
I think you’ve hit on one of the challenging bits here—what the 10% represents is not particularly well defined, certainly not to someone just encountering EA ideas. We can approximate the intent with metaphors or phrases like “community standard,” “some sort of moral claim,” “green tether,” etc. But if we’re assuming a target audience who hasn’t “encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren’t going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off,” then we can’t assume any kind of nuanced understanding of what the pledge represents.
If I understand the perceived problem you’re trying to fix correctly, the theory is that at least a meaningful fraction of the target audience is going to misinterpret the community standard as somehow precluding or discouraging less-effective donations out of the 90% -- even though this is a pretty unreasonable interpretation to start with, [1] and can be disclaimed pretty early in a presentation.
To me, a more plausible inference would be to read the standard as embodying a claim that following the standard is morally obligatory—or at least significantly morally superior—to not following it, at least for a median-income adult in a developed country with no special circumstances.[2] And if the listener comes in with that inference, the 2⁄8 standard seems much harder to justify as a philosophical matter than the 10% standard. And that seems like a significant downside to me, given that EA has had more success with philosophically-minded people.
In the end, some of what we’re discussing touches on empirical questions that Giving What We Can might find worth evaluating. When presented with brief information about the GWWC pledge, what beliefs about the community standard do people endorse? How do various ways of explaining the community standard effect the listener’s understanding? That’s not about trying to manipulate people; it is seeing if the way things are being communicated faithfully conveys the community’s beliefs. If we are unsuccessful in tweaking the presentation to dispel the incorrect idea that less-effective donations are discouraged through messaging tweaks, how do more substantial reforms (like a 2⁄8 standard) perform in accuracy?
The community standard doesn’t say anything about what to do with the other 90%, and a standard that was totally fine with the pledger buying Taylor Swift tickets but objected to donating the same money to a local animal shelter instead would be . . . bizarre.
I think most people would intuitively grasp the implications of partial compliance: the median-income adult meeting 80% of the standard is acting in a morally superior to an adult in the same circumstances meeting 60% of it, and so on.
I don’t think “you should donate to charity, and at least 10% to effective charities” is a more difficult message to convey than “you should donate at least 10% to charity, and at least 8% of that 10% to effective charities.”
To the extent “you should only donate to effective charities” is being conveyed in practice, it’s not clear to me why deploying a 2⁄8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging. It seems you could get much of the value you’re seeking by explaining that many (probably most?) people choose to give to causes that are meaningful to them above and beyond the pledge.
And I do think the costs of a 2⁄8 message would be substantial. The 10% community standard is implicitly making some sort of moral claim. I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes. In my view, the idea that one can partially satisfy the moral claim implied by the community standard by donating to music for rich people substantially weakens the claim.
As you imply, the 10% figure is morally arbitrary—but at least it has some cultural grounding[1] and is a nice round number. Adding in a 2⁄8 split adds a second arbitrariness—and one that lacks any clear cultural grounding or status as a nice round number. Why not 3/7? or, more likely given the desire for round numbers, 5/5?
The grounding is not based in an appeal for religious donors to replace their religious tithe with a secular one. Rather, using a percentage that was culturally salient reduces the impression that we pulled the 10% number out of thin air. Even to those who are not religious, there’s a decent chance they would recognize the figure as a traditional aspiration for charity.
In fact, ignoring concerns about message complexity and not trying to be too fancy, I might suggest we eliminate any hard percentage standard in favor of a recommended % donation that scales with income. So somebody earning < $10,000-$20,000/year might be advised not to donate. Someone earning $80,000 might be asked to donate 10%. Someone earning $10,000,000/year might be asked to donate 90%. These are just rough numbers. But I think this might be better treated in book form or in tailored appeals to individual people. In the EA community I think it would be nice if we often discussed specific ways we could refine and tailor this community standard in a way that’s optimized for “it’s easy to understand how this number was computed yet it makes sense for me” rather than being optimized for compatibility with a sound bite in a media appearance.
That would be more accurate, but doing it well would start to feel like a tax return. But going on income alone without considering cost of living, debt obligations, family size, etc. would produce inaccurate results.
Maybe it could be a range—e.g., We recommend the average person earning $80K a year donate 11%; for most people at this income we would recommend donating somewhere between 8-14% depending on personal circumstances. (I changed 10 percent from your example to 11 percent as a starting point, because I think the median person would assign themselves a slightly-less-than-median point in the range.)
Hi Jason, thank you for your response.
It’s certainly not the most effective way in all circumstances. I think that, on a substantial the margin, a 2⁄8 message would be more effective in many circumstances. I think a sophistated EA take would be that the real goal is to find a substantial yet isustainable level of giving to effective causes, one that is tailored to the individual’s material situation and the constituency of their moral parliament.
For people who haven’t encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren’t going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off, a 2⁄8 message gestures at subtlety of thought, implying moral parliamentarian ideas, the idea of distinguishing effective causes from personal passions, the idea of a substantial habit of charitable giving.
A 10% message hits the latter two points, but implies that we’re trying to frame the personal passions of the target of our giving appeal as unworthy targets of charitable giving. This is indeed the direct implication of the idea that altruistic efficiency follows a power law distribution—ineffective charities are massively worse than the best, and we lose huge value on the margin when we direct funds and energies to suboptimal causes.
But this totalizing view is one of the major reasons why even people who see the sense of cost-benefit calculations resist thinking in this manner. The implications are profoundly destabilizing if you don’t moderate them. So we moderate them. But when you get hit with that realization that there’s a whole community of people whom you haven’t met, who think in terms of cost/benefit altruistic calculations, and that the straight-line calculation is that you ought to give everything to a narrow band of super-effective causes and live on the level of the global poor, that borks the brain and causes people distance themselves.
A 10% standard addresses many of those concerns and is much better than the straight-line calculation by protecting people from utilitarian ravages and promoting movement growth. But its limit is that it seems to imply that symbolically, every other area in life is valueless and that our aim is to reduce the amount of non-EA charitable giving you engage in to zero. This is a bad argument but one that people reliably seem to come up with, because people aren’t all mathematically literate or careful reasoners the first time they encounter an idea. A 2⁄8 message addresses this specific way that the thought process and conversation can go wrong by saying: “Yes, your passion causes are valuable and we do approve of them, and you can keep giving to them, and that is a positive thing that you do. We are also asking you to recognize the sheer magnitude of clear, unambiguous good you can do by donating to things like X-risk prevention or malaria bednets and to really step up your donating in order to support these causes.” Putting hard numbers on it gives people a sense of the proportions we might consider appropriate as a community standard, which is why “2%/8%” and not just the qualitative description is a necessary part of the message, just as “10%” is necessary rather than “a very substantial level of giving.”
I originally meant to include a metaphor that I think is a helpful reframing of the idea of a community standard/line in the sand/Schelling point, but apparently I never worked it into the main post.
I think of a community standard not as a rigid number that’s a pass/fail, but an elastic tether. We have anchored it at 10%. Obviously, for a solid earner in a country like the USA, being at 9% is a little worse, 11% a little better, but we don’t encourage you to “stretch the standard” all the way up to 50% (because it can set an intimidating or extremely demanding-sounding image of what our standard is and provoke a sense of being not good enough in ways that are bad for community growth) or all the way down to 0%. But a little variability around 10% really doesn’t matter much. The idea of the “elastic” standard is that it resists further deformation the further you try and move away from it. Having elasticity built into the standard makes it a better standard because it emphasizes the ways our community embraces flexibility and personal fit whlie still having actual, meaningful standards.
So yeah, full agree, no “green checkmark” mentality. More like a “green tether” or something like that.
I think you’ve hit on one of the challenging bits here—what the 10% represents is not particularly well defined, certainly not to someone just encountering EA ideas. We can approximate the intent with metaphors or phrases like “community standard,” “some sort of moral claim,” “green tether,” etc. But if we’re assuming a target audience who hasn’t “encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren’t going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off,” then we can’t assume any kind of nuanced understanding of what the pledge represents.
If I understand the perceived problem you’re trying to fix correctly, the theory is that at least a meaningful fraction of the target audience is going to misinterpret the community standard as somehow precluding or discouraging less-effective donations out of the 90% -- even though this is a pretty unreasonable interpretation to start with, [1] and can be disclaimed pretty early in a presentation.
To me, a more plausible inference would be to read the standard as embodying a claim that following the standard is morally obligatory—or at least significantly morally superior—to not following it, at least for a median-income adult in a developed country with no special circumstances.[2] And if the listener comes in with that inference, the 2⁄8 standard seems much harder to justify as a philosophical matter than the 10% standard. And that seems like a significant downside to me, given that EA has had more success with philosophically-minded people.
In the end, some of what we’re discussing touches on empirical questions that Giving What We Can might find worth evaluating. When presented with brief information about the GWWC pledge, what beliefs about the community standard do people endorse? How do various ways of explaining the community standard effect the listener’s understanding? That’s not about trying to manipulate people; it is seeing if the way things are being communicated faithfully conveys the community’s beliefs. If we are unsuccessful in tweaking the presentation to dispel the incorrect idea that less-effective donations are discouraged through messaging tweaks, how do more substantial reforms (like a 2⁄8 standard) perform in accuracy?
The community standard doesn’t say anything about what to do with the other 90%, and a standard that was totally fine with the pledger buying Taylor Swift tickets but objected to donating the same money to a local animal shelter instead would be . . . bizarre.
I think most people would intuitively grasp the implications of partial compliance: the median-income adult meeting 80% of the standard is acting in a morally superior to an adult in the same circumstances meeting 60% of it, and so on.