I feel a bit confused about how much I should be donating.
On the one hand there’s just a straight forward case that donating could help many sentient beings to a greater degree than it helps me. On the other hand, donating 10% for me feels like it’s coming from a place of fitting in with the EA consensus, gaining a certain kind of status and feeling good rather than believing it’s the best thing for me to do.
I’m also confused about whether I’m already donating a substantial fraction of my income.
I’m pretty confident that I’m taking at least a 10% pay-cut in my current role. If nothing else my salary right now is not adjusted for inflation which was ~8% last year so it feels like I’m at least underpaid by that amount (though it’s possible they were overpaying me before). Many of my friends earn more than twice as much as I do and I think if I negotiated hard for a 100% salary increase the board would likely comply.
So how much of my lost salary should I consider to be a donation? I think numbers between 0% and 100% are plausible. −50% also isn’t insane to me as my salary does funge with other peoples donations to charities.
One solution is that I should just negotiate for my salary from a non-altruistic perspective, and then decide how much I want to donate back to my organisation after that. This seems a bit inefficient though and I think we should be able to do better.
One reason I don’t donate ~50% of my salary is that I genuinely believe it’s more cost-effective for me to build runway than donate right now. I quite like the idea of discussing this with someone who strongly disagrees with me and I admire and see if they come round to my position. It feels a bit too easy to find reasons not to give, and I’m very aware of my own selfishness in many parts of my life.
A couple of considerations I’ve thought about, at least for myself
(1) Fundamentally, giving helps save/improve lives, and that’s a very strong consideration that we need equally strong philosophical or practical reasons to overcome.
(2) I think value drift is a significant concern. For less engaged EAs, the risk is about becoming non-EA altogether; for more engaged EAs, it’s more about becoming someone less focused on doing good and more concerned with other considerations (e.g. status); this doesn’t have to be an explicit thing, but rather biases the way we reason and decide in a way that means we end up rationalizing choices that helps ourselves over the greater good. Giving (e.g. at the standard 10%) helps anchor against that.
(3) From a grantmaking/donor advisory perspective, I think it’s hard to have moral credibility, which can be absolutely necessary (e.g. advising grantees to put up modest salaries in their project proposals, not just to increase project runway but also the chances that our donor partners approve the funding request). And this is both psychologically and practically hard to do this if you’re not just earning more but earning far more and not giving to charity! Why would they listen to you? The LMIC grantees especially may be turned off—disillusioned, by the fact that they have to accept peanuts while those of us with power over them draw fat stacks of cash! The least we can do is donate! Relatedly, I think part of Charity Entrepreneurship’s success is absolutely down to Joey and co leading by example and taking low salaries.
(4) Runway is a legitimate consideration, especially since there are a lot of potentially impactful things one can do but which won’t be funded upfront (so you need to do it on savings, prove viability and then get it funded). However, I don’t think this is sufficient to outweigh points 1-3.
(5) In general, I think it’s not useful at all to compare with how much others are earning—that only leads to resentment, unhappiness, and less impactful choices. For myself, the vast majority of my friends are non-EAs; we have similar backgrounds (elite education, worked for the Singapore government as policy officers/scholars at one point or another) and yet since leaving government I’ve had a riskier career, earn far less, have fewer savings, and am forced to delay having a family/kids because of all those reasons. All of this is downstream of choices I’ve made an EA, particularly in avoiding job offers that paid very well but which didn’t have impact (or in fact, had negative impact). Is the conclusion I’m supposed to draw that I’ve made a mistake with my life? I don’t think so, because statistically speaking, some random African kid out there is alive as a result of my donations (and hopefully, my work), and that’s good enough for me.
Thanks for these thoughts. It’s nice to get such detailed engagement. I’m going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - I’m not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I don’t think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, I’ve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I don’t think that I am particularly worthy of praise—but I do think that I score reasonably well on “moral credibility”. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamics—I don’t want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I don’t think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if that’s useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donations—and that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesn’t increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I don’t think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but it’s more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that I’d like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than that—I am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesn’t really lead to resentment/unhappiness. It wasn’t clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesn’t mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/hardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I don’t resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what it’s worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldn’t have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually it’s probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organization’s runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing one’s personal runway is. You don’t have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.
I’m probably misunderstanding you, but I’m confused by (3) and (5). They seem like they somewhat contradict each other. Remove the emotive language and (3) is saying that people in positions of power should donate and/or have lower salaries because donors or grantees might be upset in comparison, and (5) is saying that we shouldn’t compare our own earnings and donations to others.
These claims contradict each other in the following ways:
If we take (5) as a given, (3) no longer makes sense. If it truly is the case that comparing earnings is never useful, we should not expect (or want) grantees or donors to compare earnings.
Hypothetically, maybe your position might be more like “oh it’s clearly bad to compare earnings, but we live in a flawed world with flawed people.” But if that were the case, then acceding to people’s comparisons is essentially enabling a harmful activity, and maybe we should have a higher bar for enabling others’ negative proclivities.
If we take (3) as the primary constraint (Donors/grantees respect us less if we don’t visibly make sacrifices for the Good), then it seems like (5) is very relevant. Pointing out ways in which we sacrificed earnings to take on EA jobs just seems like a really good reply to concerns that we are being overpaid in absolute terms, or are only doing EA jobs for the money. At least in my case, I don’t recall any of our large donors complaining about my salary, but if I did, “I took a >>70% pay cut originally to do EA work” [1] seems like a reasonable response that I predict to mollify most donors.
Though I think it’s closer to ~40-50% now at my current salary, adjusting for inflation? On the other hand, if I stayed and/or switched jobs in tech I’d probably have had salary increases substantially above inflation as well, so it’s kind of confusing what my actual counterfactual is[2]. But I’m also not sure how much I should adjust for liking EA work and being much more motivated at it, which seems like substantial non-monetary compensation. But EA work is also more stressful and in some ways depressing, so hazard pay is reasonable, so...¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
In part because I think if I wasn’t doing EA work the most obvious alternative I’d be aiming for high-variance earning-to-give, which means high equity value in expectation but ~0 payout in the median case.
(I’m writing this in my personal capacity, though I work at GWWC)
On 1: While I think that giving 10% is a great norm for us to have in the community (and to inspire people worldwide who are able to do the same), I don’t think there should be pressure for people to take a pledge or donate who don’t feel inspired to do so—I’d like to see a community where people can engage in ways that make sense for them and feel welcomed regardless of their donation habits or career choices, as long as they are genuinely engaging with wanting to do good effectively.
On 3: I think it makes sense for people to build up some runway or sense of financial stability, and that they should generally factor this in when considering donating or taking a pledge. I personally only increased my donations to >10% after I felt I had enough financial stability to manage ongoing health issues.
I do think that people should consider how much runway or savings they really need though, and whether small adjustments in lifestyle could increase their savings and allow for more funds to donate—after all, many of us are still in the top few % of global income earners even after taking jobs that are less than we would getting in the private sector.
It may be that building runway is, in fact, the best way to do good in the long term. And maybe certain levels of personal consumption make you more able to sustainably do good through your work.
But just engage seriously with the cost of that runway. With straightforward Givewell charities, that might mean someone dies annually that you could have saved.
I guess there are two questions it might be helpful to separate.
what is the best thing to do with my money if I am purely optimising for the good?
how much of my money does the good demand?
Looking at the first question (1), I think engaging with the cost of giving (as opposed to the cost of building runway) wrt doing the most good is also helpful. It feels to me like donating $10K to AMF could make me much less able to transition my career to a more impactful path, costing me months, which could mean that several people die that I could have saved via donating to Givewell charities.
It feels like the “cost” applies symmetrically to the runway and donating cases and pushes towards “you should take this seriously” instead of having a high bar for spending money on runway/personal consumption.
Looking at (2) - Again I broadly agree with the overall point, but it doesn’t really push me towards a particular percentage to give.
For me, if the answer to #1 is in favor of saving for runway, that disposes of the question. Just need to be careful, as you are aware, of motivated reasoning.
For #2, for me, the good demands all of your money. Of course, you are not going to be the most effective agent if you keep yourself in poverty, so this probably doesn’t imply total penury. But insofar as other conscious beings today are capable of positive and negative experiences like you are, it isn’t clear why you should privilege your own over those of other conscious beings.
To share another perspective: As an independent alignment researcher, I also feel really conflicted. I could be making several multiples of my salary if my focus was to get a role on an alignment team at an AGI lab. My other option would be building startups trying to hit it big and providing more funding to what I think is needed.
Like, I could say, “well, I’m already working directly on something and taking a big pay-cut so I shouldn’t need to donate close to 10%”, but something about that doesn’t feel right… But then to counter-balance that, I’m constantly worried that I just won’t get funding anymore at some point and would be in need of money to pay for expenses during a transition.
Fwiw my personal take (and this is not in my capacity as a grantmaker) is that building up your runway seems really important, and I personally think that it should be a higher priority than donating 10%. My guess is that GWWC would suggest dropping your commitment to say 2% as a temporary measure while you build up your savings.
Many people see the commitment of the pledge to give 10% as one over their lifetime, so if you needed to drop back to build up runway for a while, with the intention of donating more in the following years once your finances were more secure, I personally think that would be an acceptable way to fulfil the pledge!
There’s no strict requirement that donations need to be made each year, but GWWC does encourage regular giving where possible.
I would be interested in seeing your takes about why building runway might be more cost-effective than donating.
Separately, if you decide not to go with 10% because you want to think about what is actually best for you, I suggest you give yourself a deadline. Like, suppose you currently think that donating 10% would be better than status quo. I suggest doing something like “if I have not figured out a better solution by Jan 1 2024, I will just do the community-endorsed default of 10%.”
I think this protects against some sort of indefinite procrastination. (Obviously less relevant if you never indefinitely procrastinate on things like this, but my sense is that most people do at least sometimes).
(to be clear, I do donate I just haven’t signed the pledge, and I’m confused about how much I am already donating)
I think the main things are:
whilst I think donating now > donating in the future + interest, the cost of waiting to donate is fairly low (if you’re not worried about value drift)
I can think of many situations in the past where an extra $10k would have been extremely useful to me to move to more impactful work.
I don’t think that it always makes sense for funders to give this kind of money to people in my position.
I now have friends who could probably do this for me, but it has some social cost.
I think it’s important for me to be able to walk away from my job without worrying about personal finances.
My job has a certain kind of responsibility that sometimes makes me feel uneasy, and being able to walk away without having another reason not to seems important.
I think I’ve seen several EAs make poor decisions from a place of poor personal finance and unusual financial security strategies. I think the epistemic effects of worrying about money are pretty real for me.
Also:
If I were trying to have the most impact with my money via donations, I think I would donate to various small things that I sometimes see that funders aren’t well positioned to fund. This would probably mean saving my money and not giving right now.
(I think that this kind of strategy is especially good for me as I have a good sense of what funders can and can’t fund—I think people tend to overestimate the set of things funders can’t fund)
I don’t see why the GWWC 10% number should generalise well to my situation. I don’t think it’s a bad number. I don’t weigh the community prior very strongly relative to my inside view here.
Concerning 2 I think from an organization’s perspective it might be even helpful to have a salary agreed with you that makes it easier to replace you and so calculate a realistic runway for the organization.Then you can still voluntarily reduce the salary and claim it as donation. This is what I’m doing and it helps with my own budgeting and with that of my org. I was inspired by this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GxRcKACcJuLBEJPmE/consider-earning-less
I feel a bit confused about how much I should be donating.
On the one hand there’s just a straight forward case that donating could help many sentient beings to a greater degree than it helps me. On the other hand, donating 10% for me feels like it’s coming from a place of fitting in with the EA consensus, gaining a certain kind of status and feeling good rather than believing it’s the best thing for me to do.
I’m also confused about whether I’m already donating a substantial fraction of my income.
I’m pretty confident that I’m taking at least a 10% pay-cut in my current role. If nothing else my salary right now is not adjusted for inflation which was ~8% last year so it feels like I’m at least underpaid by that amount (though it’s possible they were overpaying me before). Many of my friends earn more than twice as much as I do and I think if I negotiated hard for a 100% salary increase the board would likely comply.
So how much of my lost salary should I consider to be a donation? I think numbers between 0% and 100% are plausible. −50% also isn’t insane to me as my salary does funge with other peoples donations to charities.
One solution is that I should just negotiate for my salary from a non-altruistic perspective, and then decide how much I want to donate back to my organisation after that. This seems a bit inefficient though and I think we should be able to do better.
One reason I don’t donate ~50% of my salary is that I genuinely believe it’s more cost-effective for me to build runway than donate right now. I quite like the idea of discussing this with someone who strongly disagrees with me and I admire and see if they come round to my position. It feels a bit too easy to find reasons not to give, and I’m very aware of my own selfishness in many parts of my life.
A couple of considerations I’ve thought about, at least for myself
(1) Fundamentally, giving helps save/improve lives, and that’s a very strong consideration that we need equally strong philosophical or practical reasons to overcome.
(2) I think value drift is a significant concern. For less engaged EAs, the risk is about becoming non-EA altogether; for more engaged EAs, it’s more about becoming someone less focused on doing good and more concerned with other considerations (e.g. status); this doesn’t have to be an explicit thing, but rather biases the way we reason and decide in a way that means we end up rationalizing choices that helps ourselves over the greater good. Giving (e.g. at the standard 10%) helps anchor against that.
(3) From a grantmaking/donor advisory perspective, I think it’s hard to have moral credibility, which can be absolutely necessary (e.g. advising grantees to put up modest salaries in their project proposals, not just to increase project runway but also the chances that our donor partners approve the funding request). And this is both psychologically and practically hard to do this if you’re not just earning more but earning far more and not giving to charity! Why would they listen to you? The LMIC grantees especially may be turned off—disillusioned, by the fact that they have to accept peanuts while those of us with power over them draw fat stacks of cash! The least we can do is donate! Relatedly, I think part of Charity Entrepreneurship’s success is absolutely down to Joey and co leading by example and taking low salaries.
(4) Runway is a legitimate consideration, especially since there are a lot of potentially impactful things one can do but which won’t be funded upfront (so you need to do it on savings, prove viability and then get it funded). However, I don’t think this is sufficient to outweigh points 1-3.
(5) In general, I think it’s not useful at all to compare with how much others are earning—that only leads to resentment, unhappiness, and less impactful choices. For myself, the vast majority of my friends are non-EAs; we have similar backgrounds (elite education, worked for the Singapore government as policy officers/scholars at one point or another) and yet since leaving government I’ve had a riskier career, earn far less, have fewer savings, and am forced to delay having a family/kids because of all those reasons. All of this is downstream of choices I’ve made an EA, particularly in avoiding job offers that paid very well but which didn’t have impact (or in fact, had negative impact). Is the conclusion I’m supposed to draw that I’ve made a mistake with my life? I don’t think so, because statistically speaking, some random African kid out there is alive as a result of my donations (and hopefully, my work), and that’s good enough for me.
Thanks for these thoughts. It’s nice to get such detailed engagement. I’m going to try to respond point by point.
(2) - I’m not particularly worried about value drift, and I think there are more effective ways to guard against this than earning to give (e.g. living with people who share your values, talking about EA stuff regularly with people you care about). I think I have quite a lot of evidence in favour of me being pretty resilient to value drift (though I often change my mind about what is important intentionally).
(3) I think this is interesting, though I don’t think that I share this view re being taken seriously. I think that I, and many people I know, have taken actions that they found much harder than donating (e.g. I live in a different country than my partner and in a pretty suboptimal timezone because I think I can do my work better from my current location, I work a lot of hours, I spend a lot of time doing tasks that I find emotionally challenging, I’ve been in situations that I found extremely stressful for ~0 credit). To be clear, I don’t think that I am particularly worthy of praise—but I do think that I score reasonably well on “moral credibility”. Also, I have concerns about this kind of signalling and think it often leads to concerning dynamics—I don’t want EA Funds grantees to feel pressured into taking shoestring salaries. When I was at CE, I remember there being a lot of pressure to take extremely low salaries despite many successful charity founders thinking this was a bad idea. It also led to weird epistemic effects (though I hear things have improved substantially).
(4) I don’t think that runway and grants from EA funders are as fungible as you do. I can talk a bit more about this if that’s useful. I guess that this general point (3) is where we have substantive disagreement. It seems likely to me that I can have much more impact through my career than through my donations—and that having more runway could substantially increase the value of my career. If it doesn’t increase the value of my career and I am wrong, then I can donate later (which I don’t think incurs much in the way of losses from a NTist perspective, but it’s more confusing from a LTist one). To be clear, I think that I’d like to build up 12-24 months of runway, and right now, I have substantially less than that—I am not talking about being able to retire in 10 years or anything.
(5) I think for me, the comparison stuff doesn’t really lead to resentment/unhappiness. It wasn’t clear from my post, but one of the reasons that I made this comparison was because many of my friends do very altruistically valuable work and earn substantially more than I do. They are extremely talented and hard-working (and lucky), and whilst this doesn’t mean that I could get a highly-paying job that generated a lot of altruistic value, I think talking to them regularly has given me an understanding of the kind of work that they do and what it might take to enter a similar role, and it feels doable for me to enter similar roles in a relatively short amount of time (on my inside view). I also have friends that I think are similarly smart/hardworking etc., who earn a lot more money than me in purely for-profit roles. Again, I don’t resent any of these people, and the comparison seems pretty useful to me.
For what it’s worth, I think saving up runway is a no brainer.
During my one year as a tech consultant, I put aside half each month and donated another 10%. The runway I built made the decision for me to quit my job and pursue direct work much easier.
In the downtime between two career moves, it allowed me to spend my time pursuing whatever I wanted without worrying about how to pay the bills. This gave me time to research and write about snakebites, ultimately leading to Open Phil recommending a $500k investment into a company working on snakebite diagnostics.
I later came upon great donation opportunity to a fish welfare charity, which I gave a large part of my runway to and wouldn’t have been able to support if I had given all my money away two years prior.
Had I given more away sooner I think it would be clearer to myself and others that I was in fact altruistically motivated. I also think my impact would have been lower. Impact over image.
EDIT: Actually it’s probably a some-brainer a lot of the time, seeing as I currently have little runway and am taking a shoestring salary. The reason I take a shoestring salary is to increase my organization’s runway, which is valuable for the same reasons that increasing one’s personal runway is. You don’t have to spend as much time worrying about how your org is going to pay the bills and you can instead focus on impact.
(I work with Caleb. Opinions are my own.)
Thank you for your comment.
I’m probably misunderstanding you, but I’m confused by (3) and (5). They seem like they somewhat contradict each other. Remove the emotive language and (3) is saying that people in positions of power should donate and/or have lower salaries because donors or grantees might be upset in comparison, and (5) is saying that we shouldn’t compare our own earnings and donations to others.
These claims contradict each other in the following ways:
If we take (5) as a given, (3) no longer makes sense. If it truly is the case that comparing earnings is never useful, we should not expect (or want) grantees or donors to compare earnings.
Hypothetically, maybe your position might be more like “oh it’s clearly bad to compare earnings, but we live in a flawed world with flawed people.” But if that were the case, then acceding to people’s comparisons is essentially enabling a harmful activity, and maybe we should have a higher bar for enabling others’ negative proclivities.
If we take (3) as the primary constraint (Donors/grantees respect us less if we don’t visibly make sacrifices for the Good), then it seems like (5) is very relevant. Pointing out ways in which we sacrificed earnings to take on EA jobs just seems like a really good reply to concerns that we are being overpaid in absolute terms, or are only doing EA jobs for the money. At least in my case, I don’t recall any of our large donors complaining about my salary, but if I did, “I took a >>70% pay cut originally to do EA work” [1] seems like a reasonable response that I predict to mollify most donors.
Though I think it’s closer to ~40-50% now at my current salary, adjusting for inflation? On the other hand, if I stayed and/or switched jobs in tech I’d probably have had salary increases substantially above inflation as well, so it’s kind of confusing what my actual counterfactual is[2]. But I’m also not sure how much I should adjust for liking EA work and being much more motivated at it, which seems like substantial non-monetary compensation. But EA work is also more stressful and in some ways depressing, so hazard pay is reasonable, so...¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
In part because I think if I wasn’t doing EA work the most obvious alternative I’d be aiming for high-variance earning-to-give, which means high equity value in expectation but ~0 payout in the median case.
Hey Caleb!
(I’m writing this in my personal capacity, though I work at GWWC)
On 1: While I think that giving 10% is a great norm for us to have in the community (and to inspire people worldwide who are able to do the same), I don’t think there should be pressure for people to take a pledge or donate who don’t feel inspired to do so—I’d like to see a community where people can engage in ways that make sense for them and feel welcomed regardless of their donation habits or career choices, as long as they are genuinely engaging with wanting to do good effectively.
On 3: I think it makes sense for people to build up some runway or sense of financial stability, and that they should generally factor this in when considering donating or taking a pledge. I personally only increased my donations to >10% after I felt I had enough financial stability to manage ongoing health issues.
I do think that people should consider how much runway or savings they really need though, and whether small adjustments in lifestyle could increase their savings and allow for more funds to donate—after all, many of us are still in the top few % of global income earners even after taking jobs that are less than we would getting in the private sector.
It may be that building runway is, in fact, the best way to do good in the long term. And maybe certain levels of personal consumption make you more able to sustainably do good through your work.
But just engage seriously with the cost of that runway. With straightforward Givewell charities, that might mean someone dies annually that you could have saved.
I guess there are two questions it might be helpful to separate.
what is the best thing to do with my money if I am purely optimising for the good?
how much of my money does the good demand?
Looking at the first question (1), I think engaging with the cost of giving (as opposed to the cost of building runway) wrt doing the most good is also helpful. It feels to me like donating $10K to AMF could make me much less able to transition my career to a more impactful path, costing me months, which could mean that several people die that I could have saved via donating to Givewell charities.
It feels like the “cost” applies symmetrically to the runway and donating cases and pushes towards “you should take this seriously” instead of having a high bar for spending money on runway/personal consumption.
Looking at (2) - Again I broadly agree with the overall point, but it doesn’t really push me towards a particular percentage to give.
Yes that’s right.
For me, if the answer to #1 is in favor of saving for runway, that disposes of the question. Just need to be careful, as you are aware, of motivated reasoning.
For #2, for me, the good demands all of your money. Of course, you are not going to be the most effective agent if you keep yourself in poverty, so this probably doesn’t imply total penury. But insofar as other conscious beings today are capable of positive and negative experiences like you are, it isn’t clear why you should privilege your own over those of other conscious beings.
To share another perspective: As an independent alignment researcher, I also feel really conflicted. I could be making several multiples of my salary if my focus was to get a role on an alignment team at an AGI lab. My other option would be building startups trying to hit it big and providing more funding to what I think is needed.
Like, I could say, “well, I’m already working directly on something and taking a big pay-cut so I shouldn’t need to donate close to 10%”, but something about that doesn’t feel right… But then to counter-balance that, I’m constantly worried that I just won’t get funding anymore at some point and would be in need of money to pay for expenses during a transition.
Fwiw my personal take (and this is not in my capacity as a grantmaker) is that building up your runway seems really important, and I personally think that it should be a higher priority than donating 10%. My guess is that GWWC would suggest dropping your commitment to say 2% as a temporary measure while you build up your savings.
Many people see the commitment of the pledge to give 10% as one over their lifetime, so if you needed to drop back to build up runway for a while, with the intention of donating more in the following years once your finances were more secure, I personally think that would be an acceptable way to fulfil the pledge!
There’s no strict requirement that donations need to be made each year, but GWWC does encourage regular giving where possible.
(FYI I work at GWWC)
I would be interested in seeing your takes about why building runway might be more cost-effective than donating.
Separately, if you decide not to go with 10% because you want to think about what is actually best for you, I suggest you give yourself a deadline. Like, suppose you currently think that donating 10% would be better than status quo. I suggest doing something like “if I have not figured out a better solution by Jan 1 2024, I will just do the community-endorsed default of 10%.”
I think this protects against some sort of indefinite procrastination. (Obviously less relevant if you never indefinitely procrastinate on things like this, but my sense is that most people do at least sometimes).
(to be clear, I do donate I just haven’t signed the pledge, and I’m confused about how much I am already donating)
I think the main things are:
whilst I think donating now > donating in the future + interest, the cost of waiting to donate is fairly low (if you’re not worried about value drift)
I can think of many situations in the past where an extra $10k would have been extremely useful to me to move to more impactful work.
I don’t think that it always makes sense for funders to give this kind of money to people in my position.
I now have friends who could probably do this for me, but it has some social cost.
I think it’s important for me to be able to walk away from my job without worrying about personal finances.
My job has a certain kind of responsibility that sometimes makes me feel uneasy, and being able to walk away without having another reason not to seems important.
I think I’ve seen several EAs make poor decisions from a place of poor personal finance and unusual financial security strategies. I think the epistemic effects of worrying about money are pretty real for me.
Also:
If I were trying to have the most impact with my money via donations, I think I would donate to various small things that I sometimes see that funders aren’t well positioned to fund. This would probably mean saving my money and not giving right now.
(I think that this kind of strategy is especially good for me as I have a good sense of what funders can and can’t fund—I think people tend to overestimate the set of things funders can’t fund)
I don’t see why the GWWC 10% number should generalise well to my situation. I don’t think it’s a bad number. I don’t weigh the community prior very strongly relative to my inside view here.
Concerning 2 I think from an organization’s perspective it might be even helpful to have a salary agreed with you that makes it easier to replace you and so calculate a realistic runway for the organization.Then you can still voluntarily reduce the salary and claim it as donation. This is what I’m doing and it helps with my own budgeting and with that of my org. I was inspired by this post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GxRcKACcJuLBEJPmE/consider-earning-less