I’m interested to see people phrasing their arguments in terms of distinguishing how much sacrifice people make.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to distinguishing between how much impact people have, but thinking too hard about who sacrifices the most (except inasmuch as it’s correlated with the former) seems like it’s against the spirit of EA. It’s about how much good you do, not how much you give up to do it!
If you’re living on $10k and donating $90k, then donating your marginal $10k is WAY more of a sacrifice than if you’re living on $90k and donating $10k. But it doesn’t do any more good! I have a lot of respect for people who donate/sacrifice up to that margin, but it’s the same kind of respect I have for, like, Wim Hof.*
(Of course, a lot of those people are also doing really important/awesome things, and I have EA-respect for them because of that. But the EA-respect isn’t because they live on small amounts of money or spend every waking hour thinking about EA. It’s what they actually get done!)
*the man who holds the world record for longest time spent immersed in an ice bath.
I think there are some reasons to care about how much sacrifice people make (and related things, like effort, motivation etc.) independent of impact. One obvious one: you can ask and expect people different things of people who are making or are willing to make huge sacrifices compared to those who will only sacrifice a bit. Drawing the distinction is necessary to do a lot of practical tasks. It’s also very important to what kind of movement EA is as a whole: if we are 90% diehard EAs who will donate their last penny to effective charity that’s a very different movement to if we are 90% people who don’t much care for sacrifice.
It seems we also want to recognise the efforts of people who sacrifice a lot but don’t produce so much impact. Even if we try to avoid it we’re inevitably always shuffling around symbolic status and recognition. We want to respect ‘the widow’s mite’ - rather than assign recognition purely based on what actually gets done, given that being able to do a lot depends on the privilege of being able to get a lot done.
I think it can also be incredibly useful PR-wise. The trader making 150K after taxes and living on minimum wage might be doing less good with her donations than the trader making 500K and living on 250K, but emotionally, the former is generally seen as a LOT more admirable, in some sense better for young idealistic people to live up to, and (most importantly) generate more press for people to first hear about the movement and then later find out that they can do a lot of good without being as extreme.
Also (and I’m less sure about this), I think in some sense anchoring people to “large sacrifice” and then learning about how you can do a lot of good while making a smaller sacrifice, or being able to do good in ways that don’t feel like sacrifices at all, is a better recruitment measure than anchoring people to “ridiculously awesome ways to make an impact.” and then hearing that you can do much less, but still a lot of good.
My perspective is that telling people “hey, you can take these small steps to do awesome good things” is a highly beneficial step to take, but not necessarily a recruitment mechanism—that requires more consideration about the kind of people we’re attracting to the movement.
I agree about respecting the widow’s mite—thanks for that term, David, didn’t know about it before and had to look it up, appreciate the knowledge gained :-)
I think it may be better to phrase contributions in terms of resources rather than money. If one can use one’s time to influence others to donate to EA causes, for example, this can be a much more useful activity for advancing flourishing than donating money. This way of framing things also addresses the talent gap in EA better.
Yeh the use of “diehard EAs who will donate their last penny” is purely an example, I don’t mention money other than that (and the proverbial mite of course).
So anyone who is doing the most good that they could possibly do is being an amazing EA. Someone on £1million who donates £50K is not doing anywhere near as much good as they could do.
The rich especially should be encouraged to make big sacrifices, as they do have the power to do the most good.
But this will tend to neglect the fact that people can make choices which make them richer, possibly at personal cost. If we systematically ignore this, we will probably encourage people too much into careers which they enjoy with low consumption levels. I think it’s important to take both degree of sacrifice (because the amount we can do isn’t entirely endogenous) and absolute amount achieved (because nor is it entirely exogenous) into account.
I’m interested to see people phrasing their arguments in terms of distinguishing how much sacrifice people make.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to distinguishing between how much impact people have, but thinking too hard about who sacrifices the most (except inasmuch as it’s correlated with the former) seems like it’s against the spirit of EA. It’s about how much good you do, not how much you give up to do it!
If you’re living on $10k and donating $90k, then donating your marginal $10k is WAY more of a sacrifice than if you’re living on $90k and donating $10k. But it doesn’t do any more good! I have a lot of respect for people who donate/sacrifice up to that margin, but it’s the same kind of respect I have for, like, Wim Hof.*
(Of course, a lot of those people are also doing really important/awesome things, and I have EA-respect for them because of that. But the EA-respect isn’t because they live on small amounts of money or spend every waking hour thinking about EA. It’s what they actually get done!)
*the man who holds the world record for longest time spent immersed in an ice bath.
I think there are some reasons to care about how much sacrifice people make (and related things, like effort, motivation etc.) independent of impact. One obvious one: you can ask and expect people different things of people who are making or are willing to make huge sacrifices compared to those who will only sacrifice a bit. Drawing the distinction is necessary to do a lot of practical tasks. It’s also very important to what kind of movement EA is as a whole: if we are 90% diehard EAs who will donate their last penny to effective charity that’s a very different movement to if we are 90% people who don’t much care for sacrifice.
It seems we also want to recognise the efforts of people who sacrifice a lot but don’t produce so much impact. Even if we try to avoid it we’re inevitably always shuffling around symbolic status and recognition. We want to respect ‘the widow’s mite’ - rather than assign recognition purely based on what actually gets done, given that being able to do a lot depends on the privilege of being able to get a lot done.
I think it can also be incredibly useful PR-wise. The trader making 150K after taxes and living on minimum wage might be doing less good with her donations than the trader making 500K and living on 250K, but emotionally, the former is generally seen as a LOT more admirable, in some sense better for young idealistic people to live up to, and (most importantly) generate more press for people to first hear about the movement and then later find out that they can do a lot of good without being as extreme.
Also (and I’m less sure about this), I think in some sense anchoring people to “large sacrifice” and then learning about how you can do a lot of good while making a smaller sacrifice, or being able to do good in ways that don’t feel like sacrifices at all, is a better recruitment measure than anchoring people to “ridiculously awesome ways to make an impact.” and then hearing that you can do much less, but still a lot of good.
My perspective is that telling people “hey, you can take these small steps to do awesome good things” is a highly beneficial step to take, but not necessarily a recruitment mechanism—that requires more consideration about the kind of people we’re attracting to the movement.
I agree about respecting the widow’s mite—thanks for that term, David, didn’t know about it before and had to look it up, appreciate the knowledge gained :-)
I think it may be better to phrase contributions in terms of resources rather than money. If one can use one’s time to influence others to donate to EA causes, for example, this can be a much more useful activity for advancing flourishing than donating money. This way of framing things also addresses the talent gap in EA better.
Yeh the use of “diehard EAs who will donate their last penny” is purely an example, I don’t mention money other than that (and the proverbial mite of course).
Same page, then :-)
But EA is about doing the most good that you can.
So anyone who is doing the most good that they could possibly do is being an amazing EA. Someone on £1million who donates £50K is not doing anywhere near as much good as they could do.
The rich especially should be encouraged to make big sacrifices, as they do have the power to do the most good.
But this will tend to neglect the fact that people can make choices which make them richer, possibly at personal cost. If we systematically ignore this, we will probably encourage people too much into careers which they enjoy with low consumption levels. I think it’s important to take both degree of sacrifice (because the amount we can do isn’t entirely endogenous) and absolute amount achieved (because nor is it entirely exogenous) into account.
Yeah good point.
If people choose a job which they enjoy less then that’s a huge sacrifice, and should be applauded.