If I imagine being someone who is new-ish to EA, who wants to do good in the world and is considering making donations my plan for impact, I imagine that I really have two questions here:
Is donating an effective way to do good in the world given the amount of money committed to EA causes?
Will other people in the EA community like and respect me if I focus on donating money?
I think question 2) understandably matters to people, but it’s a bit uncouth to say it out loud (which is why I’m trying to state it explicitly).
In the earliest days of EA, the answer to 2) was “yeah, definitely, especially if you’re thoughtful about where you donate.” Over time, I think the honest answer shifted to “not really, they’ll tell you to do direct work.” I don’t know what the answer is currently, but reading between the lines of the article I’d guess that it’s probably close to “not really” than “yeah definitely.”
Assuming that earning to give is in fact quite useful, this seems like a big problem to me! It’s also a very difficult problem to solve even for high-status community members.
I’d be interested in thoughts on whether this problem exists today and if so, what individual members of the community can do to fix it.
On (2), I’ll say something I’ve said a few times before on the Forum: I like and respect people who donate money. It seems like a very good character trait to be willing to make sacrifices to help others much more than you could help yourself.
And feeling any less good about someone’s donations because they could be working on a “better” career makes little sense to me — I don’t dislike myself for being less than maximally productive in my own career, so extending dislike to someone who (like me, like almost everyone) has chosen a “less-than-maximal-impact” path seems foolish.
Whether someone focuses on donations vs. career may affect certain practical decisions — I think the average donation-focused person will get relatively less out of EA Global than most career-focused people — but it shouldn’t affect “status” in the sense of clearly belonging to this community. If someone is behaving in a way that makes others feel lower-status in this situation, they should stop.
(I work at CEA, and while I don’t speak for my colleagues, I think that almost all of them would endorse almost everything I’ve said here.)
Yeah, does not seem like a good outcome if people are donating, say, 10% of their salary, then they come to EA events and they get the feeling that people look down their noses at them as if to say “that’s it? You don’t have an ‘EA’ job?”
If I imagine being someone who is new-ish to EA, who wants to do good in the world and is considering making donations my plan for impact, I imagine that I really have two questions here:
Is donating an effective way to do good in the world given the amount of money committed to EA causes?
Will other people in the EA community like and respect me if I focus on donating money?
I think question 2) understandably matters to people, but it’s a bit uncouth to say it out loud (which is why I’m trying to state it explicitly).
In the earliest days of EA, the answer to 2) was “yeah, definitely, especially if you’re thoughtful about where you donate.” Over time, I think the honest answer shifted to “not really, they’ll tell you to do direct work.” I don’t know what the answer is currently, but reading between the lines of the article I’d guess that it’s probably close to “not really” than “yeah definitely.”
Assuming that earning to give is in fact quite useful, this seems like a big problem to me! It’s also a very difficult problem to solve even for high-status community members.
I’d be interested in thoughts on whether this problem exists today and if so, what individual members of the community can do to fix it.
On (2), I’ll say something I’ve said a few times before on the Forum: I like and respect people who donate money. It seems like a very good character trait to be willing to make sacrifices to help others much more than you could help yourself.
And feeling any less good about someone’s donations because they could be working on a “better” career makes little sense to me — I don’t dislike myself for being less than maximally productive in my own career, so extending dislike to someone who (like me, like almost everyone) has chosen a “less-than-maximal-impact” path seems foolish.
Whether someone focuses on donations vs. career may affect certain practical decisions — I think the average donation-focused person will get relatively less out of EA Global than most career-focused people — but it shouldn’t affect “status” in the sense of clearly belonging to this community. If someone is behaving in a way that makes others feel lower-status in this situation, they should stop.
(I work at CEA, and while I don’t speak for my colleagues, I think that almost all of them would endorse almost everything I’ve said here.)
Yeah, does not seem like a good outcome if people are donating, say, 10% of their salary, then they come to EA events and they get the feeling that people look down their noses at them as if to say “that’s it? You don’t have an ‘EA’ job?”