Can you change it back to 10%? If you can’t, that sounds like a problem with the pledge system, not you. I think of Beeminder, with its adjustability that takes a week to set in. Perhaps a person could change the hard pledge that they have set themselves to, from a year out, like Beeminder taking a week for changes to set in.
I can see a possibility that I would donate less after making a 10% pledge than I would with no pledge, because the 10% would anchor my donations downward. I would prefer to make no commitment than to commit 10%. Hopefully future me is self-aware enough to avoid this sort of anchoring, but it’s a pretty strong bias that happens even when you know it’s happening.
I agree, and I imagine you can adjust your pledge. If you pledged 50% as a doctor and later decided to change to a lower-paying non-profit career, I doubt whether Giving What We Can would blackball you for adjusting your pledge to 10%.
If the US government were to get rid of the charitable tax deduction or to sharply raise taxes, I couldn’t meet my pledge. But I don’t think that I’d be a worse person than I would’ve been had I correctly forecast changes in tax policy. I would simply update my pledge with Giving What We Can and get on with life.
Can you change it back to 10%? If you can’t, that sounds like a problem with the pledge system, not you. I think of Beeminder, with its adjustability that takes a week to set in. Perhaps a person could change the hard pledge that they have set themselves to, from a year out, like Beeminder taking a week for changes to set in.
I can see a possibility that I would donate less after making a 10% pledge than I would with no pledge, because the 10% would anchor my donations downward. I would prefer to make no commitment than to commit 10%. Hopefully future me is self-aware enough to avoid this sort of anchoring, but it’s a pretty strong bias that happens even when you know it’s happening.
I agree, and I imagine you can adjust your pledge. If you pledged 50% as a doctor and later decided to change to a lower-paying non-profit career, I doubt whether Giving What We Can would blackball you for adjusting your pledge to 10%.
If the US government were to get rid of the charitable tax deduction or to sharply raise taxes, I couldn’t meet my pledge. But I don’t think that I’d be a worse person than I would’ve been had I correctly forecast changes in tax policy. I would simply update my pledge with Giving What We Can and get on with life.