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Some of the comments here are suggesting that there is in fact tension between promoting donations and direct work. The implication seems to be that while donations are highly effective in absolute terms, we should intentionally downplay this fact for fear that too many people might ‘settle’ for earning to give.
Personally, I would much rather employ honest messaging and allow people to assess the tradeoffs for their individual situation. I also think it’s important to bear in mind that downplaying cuts both ways—as Michael points out, the meme that direct work is overwhelmingly effective has done harm.
There may be some who ‘settle’ for earning to give when direct work could have been more impactful, and there may be some who take away that donations are trivial and do neither. Obviously I would expect the former to be hugely overrepresented on the EA Forum.
Thanks for the post! I broadly agree with the arguments you give, though I think you understate the tensions between promoting earning to give vs direct work.
Personal example: I’m currently doing AI Safety work, and I expect it to be fairly impactful. But I came fairly close to going into finance as it was a safe, stable path I was confident I’d enjoy. And part of this motivation was a fuzzy feeling that donations was still somewhat good. And this made it harder to internalise just how much higher the value from direct work was. Anecdotally, a lot of smart mathematicians I know are tempted by finance and have a similar problem. And in cases like this, I think that promoting longtermist donations is actively in tension with high impact career advice
Thanks Neel for sharing your personal experience! I can see how this would be a concern with promoting earning to give too heavily.
However, Michael’s post advocating for promoting earning to give, it’s about promoting effective giving. This is a really important distinction. GWWC is focused on promoting effective giving more broadly to the wider public and not focused on promoting earning to give as a career path.
Promoting effective giving outside the EA community helps fund important work, provides many people with a strong opportunity to have a big impact, and also brings people into the EA community.
A good post Michael!
Something I feel confused about is, does the Long-Term Future Fund have room for more funding for AI safety, or does it and Open Philanthropy already have enough money to fund all the AI safety things they think are good? What’s an example of something that it might fund in AI safety that it isn’t currently because it doesn’t have enough money, or something that an AI safety org would want to do if only it had more money? Are there people that they’re not hiring that they would if they had more funding?
E.g., it seems to me that salaries at CHAI could be somewhat higher to be more competitive with, say, a software engineering internship in industry – indeed, salaries at the Alignment Research Center are quite high, probably so that they can attract the best candidates. But it’s also possible that the organizations have reason to keep salaries lower than they can afford – e.g., the meta org Lightcone Infrastructure chooses to pay 30% below market rate for various reasons – or high salaries have detrimental effects on the community. So I’m confused about whether there is a funding gap here.
Nitpick: universities (including Berkeley) have strict payscales and usually refuse to allow direct raises even when funding is completely secured. But this is a nitpick, because there are ways around this.
It was a sunny winter night, and the utilitarians had gathered in their optimal lair. At the time, they hadn’t yet taken over the world, but their holdings were vast, and even vaster in expectation, because they were sure to attract the right kind of multi-billionaire in the future. So vast were their holdings, that they were most bottlenecked on projects and people to give it out to. And yet, their best estimates suggested that even though doing direct work was the optimal thing to do—and indeed the thing that all the conspirators were doing—, the optimal thing to promote was earning to give. There were just too many people who could be convinced of the one thing, but not of the other. There was some cackling after this was discussed, because having a good laugh probably increased one’s lifespan, but soon the conversation moved to other topics.
I appreciate the point of your story, Nuño, but I don’t think it fairly characterises my post, and I think its dismissiveness is unwarranted.
For one, I didn’t suggest that, from a longtermist perspective, “the optimal thing to promote was earning to give.” I explicitly said the opposite here:
And in general, I quite repeatedly indicate that my argument does not make claims about the value of effective giving compared to direct work. Promoting effective giving is not the same thing as promoting earning to give.
So I think your story, though humorous and (I take it) coming from a place of love, is directed at something I’m not saying.
The highlighted part is why I think your post is a cope. Because in fact, effective giving is in tension with pursuing direct work.
What I mean by “a cope” is: Initially, EA was big on earning to give, and grew in such a way as to cultivate it, etc. But now, it’s not so necessary, and we both think that direct work is better. I think this warrants a reflection and a change in course, but if you send this post to e.g., Giving What We Can members, I think that they’re not likely to attempt that change in course. So “technically correct” is not the best kind of correct, because your emphasis is wrong.
I think that changes in course are difficult and annoying, and that people are likely to not do them unless in exceptional circumstances, and I think that the satire above, much like the phrase “its Giving What We Can, not Giving Only the Contents of Our Wallets”, can maybe help people see through the flinch. Similarly, it seems reasonable that GWWC as it has been rebooted should use different stragies than the initial version (you probably are doing that, though!).
Also, as a pet peeve, I think that the near-termist part of EA also has enough money that, e.g., as a near-termist, attempting to create a new NGO through Charity Entrepreneurship also beats earning to give.
Thanks for your reply.
It seems to me your key disagreement is with my view that promoting effective giving is compatible with (even complementary to) encouraging people to do direct work. Though, I’m not exactly sure I understand your precise claim — there are two I think you might be making, and I’ll respond to each.
One way to interpret what you’re saying is that you think that promoting effective giving actually reduces the number of people doing direct work:
As an example, you suggest that GWWC members, upon reading this post, might fail to switch to direct work due to its emphasis. I don’t agree, in part because I don’t think people are going to make career decisions based on the “emphasis” of a post, in spite of the fact that same post has a section titled “So, should I earn to give?” which highlights that:
And in part I disagree because I more broadly think that a journey from improving the world by effective giving, to doing direct work, is one many have already taken, and I expect many future people will continue to take. But I’m not sure how to resolve our disagreement about this broad point (as mentioned, I’ll be providing more arguments for it in an upcoming post).
But perhaps you aren’t making as strong a claim as this (that GWWC, and promoting effective giving generally, actually reduces the amount of people doing direct work). Another way to interpret you (based more off what you’ve said in our personal conversations than your comments here) is that, though GWWC and promoting effective giving likely does help encourage people to do direct work, it’s not “optimal” or “the best strategy now.”
The issue with this less strong view is I’m not sure I follow it, because I don’t know what you mean by optimal or “best strategy.” My claim is that effective giving should remain a part of the effective altruism portfolio, in part because effective giving — even from a longtermist perspective — is still impactful. The reason I think it should be part of the effective altruism portfolio isn’t because I think it provides the best marginal use of money or time from a longtermist perspective (I don’t think that’s the relevant bar).
Perhaps I can state my position in your terms: I think it wouldn’t be optimal for GWWC to stop promoting effective giving (from a longtermist worldview, but perhaps especially from other plausible non-longtermist worldviews). I also think it wouldn’t be optimal for us to be squeamish about mentioning that we think donations can be extremely impactful, for fear of making people mistakenly pursuing earning to give when direct work would have been better.
This is mostly responding to the negative case against effective giving, and I want to flag that I’m excited about promoting effective giving much more because of its positive case than my scepticism of the negative one! But I thought there was enough in this comment already for you to respond to.
I think that your answer to that is something like: ”...But introducing people to EA is hard, so it makes sense to start with effective giving. Also, there are some better and worse ways to do earning to give, like donating to donor lotteries, donating to small projects that are legible to you but not to larger funders yet, etc.”
Which is fine. But it’s still surprising that the strategies which EA chose when it was relatively young would still be the best strategies now, and I’m still skeptical to the extent that is the case in your post.
RE your pet peeve:
Obviously, it’ll depend on the fit for earning to give/starting a new NGO, but this sounds plausible to me in general — I’m extremely excited about people creating new NGOs through Charity Entrepreneurship (among other ways of doing direct good in global health and development, animal welfare, etc.).
[answered with wrong account.]
It was a sunny winter night and a utilitarian was walking through a park. In the middle of the park was a pond, and in the pond was a drowning child. The utilitarian considering jumping into save them, but then remembered that they did direct work in effective altruism and it was a weekend, so they strolled on past. They felt good because saving the child and doing direct work was in tension.
New update to the “utilitarianismverse” just dropped: <https://archiveofourown.org/works/41911392/chapters/105186876>