Glad you’re forming your own views on what feels like an obligation and what does not.
Some thoughts gently encouraging advocacy. Not because it’s an obligation, but solely because of its impact:
Giving What We Can conservatively values the lifetime value of a 🔸 10% Pledge at $100K USD (inflation adjusted to 2024)
The implicitly LTV of a 1% Pledge is therefore $10K USD. 1% is a far more accessible option for people who are building up 3-6 months of financial runway, cannot meaningfully save at a 10% pledge, are remitting money to family, are paying off debts, or have other charitable commitments / personal circumstances
Following that, personal advocacy is one of the highest-leverage direct impact activities any working professional can go after without quitting their day job imo
Over 6 months, I helped inspire 8 EG pledges ranging from 1% to 10%. 4 came from personal conversations. Of that, 3 came from people at my private sector job. None have heard of EG before; the counterfactual of personal advocacy is definitely there
I explicitly do not discuss Effective Altruism unless prompted, and so do multiple EG organisations such as One for the World and FarmKind. I view it as unnecessary cognitive load that detracts from the core objective. For most people, it’s not needed when making an informed and personally fulfilling decision to donate more effectively
Understand the feeling of being a hypocrite, but please know that I—and most people on this forum—wouldn’t call you that! We all have our own circumstances
Although that’s an estimate of how much counterfactual value “GWWC generates” from each pledge, which is less than the full value of the pledge. Elsewhere, it is called GWWC-attributable value. The full value is more like $47-60K on best guess.
My understanding is that $47k is the estimated time-discounted average lifetime high-impact donations from a 10% pledger, but does not discount for the fact that many pledgers (especially the largest donors giving much more than 10%) would have donated significantly with or without a 10% pledge, so only a fraction of that is counterfactually due to the existence of the 10% pledge and pledge advocacy (whether by gwwc or by others)
$15K is the attribution to GWWC (would be much harder for someone to pledge without all the digital infrastructure, research, community etc)
$47K is what you’d discount from $100K if you believe cost-effectiveness of the best charities decrease over time as the problem becomes more “solved”, and if a pledger is giving a % of their donation below the GiveWell bar
If I take 10% of the median London annual salary (£4.75K) then assume they work 30 more years (£143K), this roughly in line with GWWC’s headline figure.
At 1%, if we assume annual inflation = annual salary increases = annual negative discounts on cost-effectiveness of top charities we still get ~£14K LTV of a 1% pledge. Maybe apply -£4K discounts on pledge dropouts or changes in life circumstance to £10K.
How you wish to apply % attribution to GWWC’s infrastructure / paid ads / in-person advocacy / the local EA meetup / online forums is probably a messier science and hotly debated. Good thing OP and I aren’t doing this outside a personal capacity.
That said I’d bet that OP’s co-workers and mine have much limited exposure to EA, so the counterfactual upside of personal advocacy is much higher, no matter if you take from the $10K headline or $4.7K time-discounted high-impact donation per 1% pledge.
At the end of the day £10K will still go to high-impact nonprofits, and it would have been a community effort :)
Glad you’re forming your own views on what feels like an obligation and what does not.
Some thoughts gently encouraging advocacy. Not because it’s an obligation, but solely because of its impact:
Giving What We Can conservatively values the lifetime value of a 🔸 10% Pledge at $100K USD (inflation adjusted to 2024)
The implicitly LTV of a 1% Pledge is therefore $10K USD. 1% is a far more accessible option for people who are building up 3-6 months of financial runway, cannot meaningfully save at a 10% pledge, are remitting money to family, are paying off debts, or have other charitable commitments / personal circumstances
Following that, personal advocacy is one of the highest-leverage direct impact activities any working professional can go after without quitting their day job imo
Over 6 months, I helped inspire 8 EG pledges ranging from 1% to 10%. 4 came from personal conversations. Of that, 3 came from people at my private sector job. None have heard of EG before; the counterfactual of personal advocacy is definitely there
I explicitly do not discuss Effective Altruism unless prompted, and so do multiple EG organisations such as One for the World and FarmKind. I view it as unnecessary cognitive load that detracts from the core objective. For most people, it’s not needed when making an informed and personally fulfilling decision to donate more effectively
Understand the feeling of being a hypocrite, but please know that I—and most people on this forum—wouldn’t call you that! We all have our own circumstances
Quick note that the number on the GWWC website is about one order of magnitude lower
But of course these are averages, and the people you inspire could give significantly more/less, or significantly more/less counterfactually
Although that’s an estimate of how much counterfactual value “GWWC generates” from each pledge, which is less than the full value of the pledge. Elsewhere, it is called GWWC-attributable value. The full value is more like $47-60K on best guess.
My understanding is that $47k is the estimated time-discounted average lifetime high-impact donations from a 10% pledger, but does not discount for the fact that many pledgers (especially the largest donors giving much more than 10%) would have donated significantly with or without a 10% pledge, so only a fraction of that is counterfactually due to the existence of the 10% pledge and pledge advocacy (whether by gwwc or by others)
I think all comments here are accurate.
$100K is the headline figure
$15K is the attribution to GWWC (would be much harder for someone to pledge without all the digital infrastructure, research, community etc)
$47K is what you’d discount from $100K if you believe cost-effectiveness of the best charities decrease over time as the problem becomes more “solved”, and if a pledger is giving a % of their donation below the GiveWell bar
If I take 10% of the median London annual salary (£4.75K) then assume they work 30 more years (£143K), this roughly in line with GWWC’s headline figure.
At 1%, if we assume annual inflation = annual salary increases = annual negative discounts on cost-effectiveness of top charities we still get ~£14K LTV of a 1% pledge. Maybe apply -£4K discounts on pledge dropouts or changes in life circumstance to £10K.
How you wish to apply % attribution to GWWC’s infrastructure / paid ads / in-person advocacy / the local EA meetup / online forums is probably a messier science and hotly debated. Good thing OP and I aren’t doing this outside a personal capacity.
That said I’d bet that OP’s co-workers and mine have much limited exposure to EA, so the counterfactual upside of personal advocacy is much higher, no matter if you take from the $10K headline or $4.7K time-discounted high-impact donation per 1% pledge.
At the end of the day £10K will still go to high-impact nonprofits, and it would have been a community effort :)