I think it’s bad when people who’ve been around EA for less than a year sign the GWWC pledge. I care a lot about this.
I would prefer groups to strongly discourage new people from signing it.
I can imagine boycotting groups that encouraged signing the GWWC pledge (though I’d probably first want to post about why I feel so strongly about this, and warn them that I was going to do so).
I regret taking the pledge, and the fact that the EA community didn’t discourage me from taking it is by far my biggest complaint about how the EA movement has treated me. (EDIT: TBC, I don’t think anyone senior in the movement actively encouraged we to do it, but I am annoyed at them for not actively discouraging it.)
(writing this short post now because I don’t have time to write the full post right now)
I’m also eager to read it. This would affect the activities of quite a few groups (mine included). I can’t currently think of any good reasons why the pledge should be controversial.
I’m very sorry to hear that you regret taking The Pledge and feel that the EA community in 2014 should have actively discouraged you from taking it in the first place.
If you believe it’s better for you and the world that you unpledge then you should feel free to do so. I also strongly endorse this statement from the 2017 post that KevinO quoted:
“The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.”
I would very much appreciate hearing further details about why you feel as strongly as you do about actively discouraging other people from taking The Pledge and the way this is done circa 2021.
Last year we collaborated with group leaders and CEA groups team to write a new guide to promoting GWWC within local and university groups (comment using this link). In that guide we tried to be pretty clear about the things to be careful of such as proposing that younger adults be encouraged to consider taking a trial pledge first if that is more appropriate for them (while also respecting their agency as adults) – there are many more people taking this option as of 2021 compared with 2014 (~50% vs ~25% respectively). We also find that most new members these days started by giving first before making a pledge, and this is something that we actively encourage and will be further developing during 2022.
Personally, I’ve found giving to be something that has been very meaningful to me during my entire involvement in EA and that The Pledge was a way of formalising that in a meaningful, motivating and sustainable way. My experience isn’t dissimilar to what we hear regularly from many members, and it has also been demonstrated by the various EA surveys (including the recent one by Open Philanthropy) which show GWWC to be a strong way in which people engage with EA (it was one of the top ranked for positive to negative engagement ratio).
However, I certainly don’t want to diminish any negative experiences that you or anyone else has had in the past and it is very important to me that we learn carefully how to get the most positive outcomes.
I’d be more than happy to talk further about this on a call, or by email, or to continue the discussion on this thread.
The Pledge is a promise, or oath, to be made seriously and with every expectation of keeping it. But if someone finds that they can no longer keep the Pledge (for instance due to serious unforeseen circumstances), then they can simply contact us, discuss the matter if need be, and cease to be a member. They can of course rejoin later if they renew their commitment.
Some of us find the analogy of marriage a helpful one: you make a promise with firm intent, you make life plans based on it, you structure things so that it’s difficult to back out of, and you commit your future self to doing something even if you don’t feel like it at the time. But at the same time, there’s a chance that things will change so drastically that you will break this tie.
Breaking the Pledge is not something to be done for reasons of convenience, or simply because you think your life would be better if you had more money. But we believe there are two kinds of situations where it’s acceptable to withdraw from the Pledge.
One situation is when it would impose extreme costs for you. If you find yourself in hardship and don’t have any way to donate what you committed to while maintaining a reasonable quality of life for yourself and your dependants, this is a good reason to withdraw your Pledge. (Note that during unemployment you donate only 1% of spending money, as described under “Circumstances that change the Pledge” below.)
The other is when you find that you have an option to do more good. For example, imagine you pledged and are now deciding whether to found a nonprofit (which will take all your financial resources) or keep your “day job” in order to be able to donate 10%. If you have good reason to believe that the nonprofit will do significantly more good than the donations, that founding the nonprofit is not compatible with donating 10% of your income, and that you would not be able to make up the gap in donations within a couple of years, withdrawing your Pledge would be a reasonable thing to do.
The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.
We understand that some people have a very strong definition of “pledge” as meaning something that must not be broken under any circumstances. If this is your sense of the word, and you wouldn’t want to take a pledge if there were any chance of you being unable to keep it, you might find that Try Giving on an ongoing basis is a better fit for you. ”″”
I feel like you should be able to “unpledge” in that case, and further I don’t think you should feel shame or face stigma for this. There’s a few reasons I think this:
You’re working for an EA org. If you think your org is ~as effective as where you’d donate, it doesn’t make sense for them to pay you money that you then donate (unless if you felt there was some psychological benefit to this, but clearly you feel the reverse)
The community has a LOT of money now. I’m not sure what your salary is, but I’d guess it’s lower than optimal given community resources, so you donating money to the community pot is probably the reverse of what I’d want.
I don’t want the community to be making people feel psychologically worse, and insofar as it is, I want an easy out for them. Therefore, I want people in your situation in general to unpledge and not feel shame or face stigma. My guess is that if you did so, you’d be sending a signal to others that doing so is acceptable.
You signed the pledge under a set of assumptions which appear to no longer hold (eg., about how you’d feel about the pledge years out, how much money the community would have, etc)
I’m generally pro-[people being able to “break contract” and similar without facing large penalties] (other than paying damages, but damages here would be zero since presumably no org made specific plans on the assumption that you’d continue to follow the pledge) – this reduces friction in making contracts to begin with and allows for more dynamism. Yes, a “pledge” in some ways has more meaning than a contract, but seeing as you (apparently) made the pledge relatively hastily (and perhaps under pressure from other? I find this unclear from your post), it doesn’t seem like it was appropriate for you to have been making a lifelong commitment to the pledge, and I think we as a community should recognize that and adjust our response accordingly.
Here is the relevant version of the pledge, from December 2014:
I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries, now and in the years to come. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.
A large part of the point of the pledge is to bind your future self in case your future self is less altruistic. If you allow people to break it based on how they feel, that would dramatically undermine the purpose of the pledge. It might well be the case that the pledge is bad because it contains implicit empirical premises that might cease to hold—indeed I argued this at the time! - but that doesn’t change the fact that someone did in fact make this commitment. If people want to make a weak statement of intent they are always able to do this—they can just say “yeah I will probably donate for as long as I feel like it”. But the pledge is significantly different from this, and attempting to weaken it to be no commitment at all entails robbing people of the ability to make such commitments.
Your argument about damages seems quite strange. If I buy something from a small business, promise to pay in 30 days, and then do not do so, my failure to pay damages them. This is the case even if they hadn’t made any specific plans for what to do with that cashflow, and even if I bought through an online platform and hence don’t know exactly who would have received the money. The damages are precisely equal to the amount of money I owe the firm—and hence, in the case of the pledge, the damages would be equal to (the NPV of) the pledged income.
I agree with Buck that people should take lifelong commitments more seriously than they have. Part of taking them seriously is respecting their lifelong nature.
I strongly agree that local groups should encourage people to give for a couple years before taking the GWWC Pledge, and that the Pledge isn’t right for everyone (I’ve been donating 10% since childhood and have never taken the pledge).
When it comes to the ‘Further Giving’ Pledge, I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to encourage people to get some kind of pre-Pledge counselling or take a pre-Pledge class, to be absolutely certain people have thought through the implications of the commitment they are making .
I remember there being some sort of text saying you should try a 1% donation for a few years first to check you’re happy making the pledge. Perhaps this issue has been resolved since you joined?
I think it’s bad when people who’ve been around EA for less than a year sign the GWWC pledge. I care a lot about this.
I would prefer groups to strongly discourage new people from signing it.
I can imagine boycotting groups that encouraged signing the GWWC pledge (though I’d probably first want to post about why I feel so strongly about this, and warn them that I was going to do so).
I regret taking the pledge, and the fact that the EA community didn’t discourage me from taking it is by far my biggest complaint about how the EA movement has treated me. (EDIT: TBC, I don’t think anyone senior in the movement actively encouraged we to do it, but I am annoyed at them for not actively discouraging it.)
(writing this short post now because I don’t have time to write the full post right now)
I’m eager to read the full post, or any expansion on what makes you think that groups should actively discourage newbies from take the Pledge.
I’m also eager to read it. This would affect the activities of quite a few groups (mine included). I can’t currently think of any good reasons why the pledge should be controversial.
I’d be pretty interested in you writing this up. I think it could cause some mild changes in the way I treat my salary.
Hi Buck,
I’m very sorry to hear that you regret taking The Pledge and feel that the EA community in 2014 should have actively discouraged you from taking it in the first place.
If you believe it’s better for you and the world that you unpledge then you should feel free to do so. I also strongly endorse this statement from the 2017 post that KevinO quoted:
I would very much appreciate hearing further details about why you feel as strongly as you do about actively discouraging other people from taking The Pledge and the way this is done circa 2021.
Last year we collaborated with group leaders and CEA groups team to write a new guide to promoting GWWC within local and university groups (comment using this link). In that guide we tried to be pretty clear about the things to be careful of such as proposing that younger adults be encouraged to consider taking a trial pledge first if that is more appropriate for them (while also respecting their agency as adults) – there are many more people taking this option as of 2021 compared with 2014 (~50% vs ~25% respectively). We also find that most new members these days started by giving first before making a pledge, and this is something that we actively encourage and will be further developing during 2022.
Personally, I’ve found giving to be something that has been very meaningful to me during my entire involvement in EA and that The Pledge was a way of formalising that in a meaningful, motivating and sustainable way. My experience isn’t dissimilar to what we hear regularly from many members, and it has also been demonstrated by the various EA surveys (including the recent one by Open Philanthropy) which show GWWC to be a strong way in which people engage with EA (it was one of the top ranked for positive to negative engagement ratio).
However, I certainly don’t want to diminish any negative experiences that you or anyone else has had in the past and it is very important to me that we learn carefully how to get the most positive outcomes.
I’d be more than happy to talk further about this on a call, or by email, or to continue the discussion on this thread.
From “Clarifying the Giving What We Can pledge” in 2017 (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drJP6FPQaMt66LFGj/clarifying-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge#How_permanent_is_the_Pledge__)
”″”
How permanent is the Pledge?
The Pledge is a promise, or oath, to be made seriously and with every expectation of keeping it. But if someone finds that they can no longer keep the Pledge (for instance due to serious unforeseen circumstances), then they can simply contact us, discuss the matter if need be, and cease to be a member. They can of course rejoin later if they renew their commitment.
Some of us find the analogy of marriage a helpful one: you make a promise with firm intent, you make life plans based on it, you structure things so that it’s difficult to back out of, and you commit your future self to doing something even if you don’t feel like it at the time. But at the same time, there’s a chance that things will change so drastically that you will break this tie.
Breaking the Pledge is not something to be done for reasons of convenience, or simply because you think your life would be better if you had more money. But we believe there are two kinds of situations where it’s acceptable to withdraw from the Pledge.
One situation is when it would impose extreme costs for you. If you find yourself in hardship and don’t have any way to donate what you committed to while maintaining a reasonable quality of life for yourself and your dependants, this is a good reason to withdraw your Pledge. (Note that during unemployment you donate only 1% of spending money, as described under “Circumstances that change the Pledge” below.)
The other is when you find that you have an option to do more good. For example, imagine you pledged and are now deciding whether to found a nonprofit (which will take all your financial resources) or keep your “day job” in order to be able to donate 10%. If you have good reason to believe that the nonprofit will do significantly more good than the donations, that founding the nonprofit is not compatible with donating 10% of your income, and that you would not be able to make up the gap in donations within a couple of years, withdrawing your Pledge would be a reasonable thing to do.
The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.
We understand that some people have a very strong definition of “pledge” as meaning something that must not be broken under any circumstances. If this is your sense of the word, and you wouldn’t want to take a pledge if there were any chance of you being unable to keep it, you might find that Try Giving on an ongoing basis is a better fit for you.
”″”
For what it’s worth, I think it makes sense to stop pledging if that would allow you to do more good.
I feel like you should be able to “unpledge” in that case, and further I don’t think you should feel shame or face stigma for this. There’s a few reasons I think this:
You’re working for an EA org. If you think your org is ~as effective as where you’d donate, it doesn’t make sense for them to pay you money that you then donate (unless if you felt there was some psychological benefit to this, but clearly you feel the reverse)
The community has a LOT of money now. I’m not sure what your salary is, but I’d guess it’s lower than optimal given community resources, so you donating money to the community pot is probably the reverse of what I’d want.
I don’t want the community to be making people feel psychologically worse, and insofar as it is, I want an easy out for them. Therefore, I want people in your situation in general to unpledge and not feel shame or face stigma. My guess is that if you did so, you’d be sending a signal to others that doing so is acceptable.
You signed the pledge under a set of assumptions which appear to no longer hold (eg., about how you’d feel about the pledge years out, how much money the community would have, etc)
I’m generally pro-[people being able to “break contract” and similar without facing large penalties] (other than paying damages, but damages here would be zero since presumably no org made specific plans on the assumption that you’d continue to follow the pledge) – this reduces friction in making contracts to begin with and allows for more dynamism. Yes, a “pledge” in some ways has more meaning than a contract, but seeing as you (apparently) made the pledge relatively hastily (and perhaps under pressure from other? I find this unclear from your post), it doesn’t seem like it was appropriate for you to have been making a lifelong commitment to the pledge, and I think we as a community should recognize that and adjust our response accordingly.
Here is the relevant version of the pledge, from December 2014:
A large part of the point of the pledge is to bind your future self in case your future self is less altruistic. If you allow people to break it based on how they feel, that would dramatically undermine the purpose of the pledge. It might well be the case that the pledge is bad because it contains implicit empirical premises that might cease to hold—indeed I argued this at the time! - but that doesn’t change the fact that someone did in fact make this commitment. If people want to make a weak statement of intent they are always able to do this—they can just say “yeah I will probably donate for as long as I feel like it”. But the pledge is significantly different from this, and attempting to weaken it to be no commitment at all entails robbing people of the ability to make such commitments.
Your argument about damages seems quite strange. If I buy something from a small business, promise to pay in 30 days, and then do not do so, my failure to pay damages them. This is the case even if they hadn’t made any specific plans for what to do with that cashflow, and even if I bought through an online platform and hence don’t know exactly who would have received the money. The damages are precisely equal to the amount of money I owe the firm—and hence, in the case of the pledge, the damages would be equal to (the NPV of) the pledged income.
I agree with Buck that people should take lifelong commitments more seriously than they have. Part of taking them seriously is respecting their lifelong nature.
I strongly agree that local groups should encourage people to give for a couple years before taking the GWWC Pledge, and that the Pledge isn’t right for everyone (I’ve been donating 10% since childhood and have never taken the pledge).
When it comes to the ‘Further Giving’ Pledge, I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to encourage people to get some kind of pre-Pledge counselling or take a pre-Pledge class, to be absolutely certain people have thought through the implications of the commitment they are making .
I remember there being some sort of text saying you should try a 1% donation for a few years first to check you’re happy making the pledge. Perhaps this issue has been resolved since you joined?