i’m confused about tithing. I yearn for the diamond emoji from GWWC, and I’m not comfortable enough to do it since I took like a 50% pay cut to do AI safety nonprofit stuff. Seems weird to make such a financial commitment, which implicates my future wife, who I have presumably not met yet, especially when I’m scraping by without too many savings per paycheck.
Is there a sense in which I already am diamond emoji eligible, because I’m “donating 50% of my income” in the sense of opportunity cost? 50 is, famously, greater than 10.
No, sorry. The diamond emoji (🔸) is specifically for people who donate 10% of their earnings.
But taking a 50% pay cut for altruistic reasons is incredibly based, so you should use the square emoji instead (🟧). It’s also larger, which seems fitting.
Wow, that’s a terrible policy IMO, and the linked forum comment feels like it totally misses the point—I personally think Quinn should go ahead and use the diamond emoji if he’s confident he would be earning far more if he wasn’t making altruistic career choices.
GWWC shouldn’t try to attach a sense of status and altruism to the diamond emoji and then tell people they need to do less good if they want to keep it, that seems deeply against the principles of EA to me, and the incentives we should create as a functional community of altruists
EDIT: Do the people disagree voting disagree that GWWC’s rules incentivise pledgers to do less good, or think this is an acceptable sacrifice on a difficult to solve problem, or some other disagreement with my comment?
I disagree voted, because I don’t think it is a terrible policy / think it is a hard problem and they’ve solved it in probably the most reasonable way.
I think that it probably isn’t perfect and has a lot of issues, but pledged donations are counterfactual (no one would donate otherwise), while doing a direct work role is not as clearly counterfactual (the organization would usually probably hire someone else, but maybe they’d be less good than you, etc). I think that feels messy to litigate properly—in some cases doing direct work is way better than the counterfactual, but in others it might not be obvious, etc.
It just doesn’t seem clear cut how to resolve, and I think the explicit line of “you give away money that would otherwise be yours at this particular moment” seems like a fine way to slice it. If the pledge was “do the most good” pledge, I might agree, but then lots of other things besides taking a lower paying job or giving away money might count.
I’m fairly sympathetic to that, but it also feels like one needs to draw a line somewhere and where they have currently drawn it seems not unreasonable to me. Though another place to draw the line kind of on the opposite extreme which could also work is just anyone who supports effective giving and is planning to donate/salary sacrifice a lot of their money. Maybe the worry is that is too fuzzy and diluting the core 10% message though. fyi @Luke Moore 🔸
I’m sympathetic to the argument that it would be hard to operationalise a salary sacrifice pledge in ways that are hard to game, but true to the spirit of it.
But I feel annoyed that the tone of the FAQ and Luke’s comment is not “this is a meaningful flaw in the pledge, we don’t see a good way to fix it, but acknowledge it creates bad incentivises”. Eg it seems terrible that the FAQ frames this as “resigning from your pledge”, which I consider to have strong connotations of giving up or failing.
In many cases, the above conclusion is based on misunderstandings about the 10% Pledge which are resulting in opportunities for impact being missed by people like yourself not pledging.
For example, this part of Luke’s comment rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt like it was saying that actually people are misunderstanding the pledge, and it’s totally consistent with taking a massive pay cut to pursue direct altruistic work. But it is clearly, by design, not, and his comment felt like it was missing the point. Eg someone who leaves a job in finance or tech to take a job at half the salary to do direct work, and intends to remain in that new role for the rest of their career, is making far more of a sacrifice than if they just donated 10%, and I consider them to have no obligation to donate further. But I don’t see the conditions of Luke’s comment applying, as the salary sacrifice comes from switching industries not an arrangement with their employer. And they may never be able to donate later, if they just postpone their pledge. So they would need to resign. Which is a terrible incentive!
One thing I didn’t expand on in that thread is some uncertainty I have around ‘You think your sacrificed money is best spent on the non-profit you are working for’.
Right now my charity is definitely not that cost-effective, but I’m confident it will be one day. In my head, saving money for this charity is the best way to spend that money, but not the most cost-effective today.
I don’t nearly have the arrogance to believe that my charity is going to be the most cost-effective giving opportunity of all time, so donating 100% of my sacrificed earnings to this charity probably goes against the spirit of the pledge. On the other hand, it does feel like something would be lost by not incentivising people to make this kind of sacrifice in their careers.
(But ultimately I don’t care much for the status of a pledge or whatever, because I know I’m doing the right thing here)
For these reasons I haven’t considered my sacrifice as a GWWC pledge so far, but I’m uncertain about it.
GWWC doesn’t need your giving to be “the most cost-effective… of all time” so I think your sacrificed earnings is well within the spirit of the pledge. I’m interested so many people disagree with @Neel Nanda here on that front as well!
If your non profit will eventually be extremely cost effective, and donations now help it reach that point, then that would make donations now highly cost effective. Of course, you’re likely positively biased in favour of your non profit, so could easily be wrong in this assessment, but I am generally pro people making high conviction altruistic bets with their donations
More importantly, you are, in fact, choosing to take a lower salary in order to spend your labour on your non profit. This means you are choosing actions that lead to you not donating to other charities. If you think this is the correct thing to do, altruistically speaking, then you think this achieves more good than taking a higher paying job and donating that money. I think it would be perverse if the GWWC pledge obliged people to make ineffective decisions that did less good by their lights
This sounds right to me (although maybe easier to game if someone isn’t earnest) and EA really needs to get better at social incentive alignment like this
It’s kinda funny (and I think sub-optimal) that a group of mostly-libs landed on a flat tax tithing system (ie the GWWC pledge)
but this isn’t totally a joke—I thik there really are big gains (mostly for the rest of the world but also partially for EAs themselves) to be had from changing social norms and incentives around this stuff
In your case, the answer might be to have a new, different symbol/indicator tbc for this type of sacrifice—I’m not sure what the best system is but it’s probably not the status quo
Hey, I like your progressive pledge tool. How hard would it be to include places outside the US? And more currencies?
I sometimes check this place out for cost of living comparisons around the world, it’s not perfect but it gives you some idea for at least big cities: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/
At the same time, the good thing of 10% is that it is a way stronger Schelling point than a progressive tax, so I suppose it’s better for signaling.
Kudos to you for taking such a serious pay cut to work on something you feel is important. ‘Made me laugh’ reacting only because reading ‘I yearn for the diamond emoji’ did make me chuckle.
i’m confused about tithing. I yearn for the diamond emoji from GWWC, and I’m not comfortable enough to do it since I took like a 50% pay cut to do AI safety nonprofit stuff. Seems weird to make such a financial commitment, which implicates my future wife, who I have presumably not met yet, especially when I’m scraping by without too many savings per paycheck.
Is there a sense in which I already am diamond emoji eligible, because I’m “donating 50% of my income” in the sense of opportunity cost? 50 is, famously, greater than 10.
No, sorry. The diamond emoji (🔸) is specifically for people who donate 10% of their earnings.
But taking a 50% pay cut for altruistic reasons is incredibly based, so you should use the square emoji instead (🟧). It’s also larger, which seems fitting.
The relevant GWWC FAQ is here and there was also a more detailed discussion here.
Wow, that’s a terrible policy IMO, and the linked forum comment feels like it totally misses the point—I personally think Quinn should go ahead and use the diamond emoji if he’s confident he would be earning far more if he wasn’t making altruistic career choices.
GWWC shouldn’t try to attach a sense of status and altruism to the diamond emoji and then tell people they need to do less good if they want to keep it, that seems deeply against the principles of EA to me, and the incentives we should create as a functional community of altruists
EDIT: Do the people disagree voting disagree that GWWC’s rules incentivise pledgers to do less good, or think this is an acceptable sacrifice on a difficult to solve problem, or some other disagreement with my comment?
I disagree voted, because I don’t think it is a terrible policy / think it is a hard problem and they’ve solved it in probably the most reasonable way.
I think that it probably isn’t perfect and has a lot of issues, but pledged donations are counterfactual (no one would donate otherwise), while doing a direct work role is not as clearly counterfactual (the organization would usually probably hire someone else, but maybe they’d be less good than you, etc). I think that feels messy to litigate properly—in some cases doing direct work is way better than the counterfactual, but in others it might not be obvious, etc.
It just doesn’t seem clear cut how to resolve, and I think the explicit line of “you give away money that would otherwise be yours at this particular moment” seems like a fine way to slice it. If the pledge was “do the most good” pledge, I might agree, but then lots of other things besides taking a lower paying job or giving away money might count.
I’m fairly sympathetic to that, but it also feels like one needs to draw a line somewhere and where they have currently drawn it seems not unreasonable to me. Though another place to draw the line kind of on the opposite extreme which could also work is just anyone who supports effective giving and is planning to donate/salary sacrifice a lot of their money. Maybe the worry is that is too fuzzy and diluting the core 10% message though.
fyi @Luke Moore 🔸
I’m sympathetic to the argument that it would be hard to operationalise a salary sacrifice pledge in ways that are hard to game, but true to the spirit of it.
But I feel annoyed that the tone of the FAQ and Luke’s comment is not “this is a meaningful flaw in the pledge, we don’t see a good way to fix it, but acknowledge it creates bad incentivises”. Eg it seems terrible that the FAQ frames this as “resigning from your pledge”, which I consider to have strong connotations of giving up or failing.
For example, this part of Luke’s comment rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt like it was saying that actually people are misunderstanding the pledge, and it’s totally consistent with taking a massive pay cut to pursue direct altruistic work. But it is clearly, by design, not, and his comment felt like it was missing the point. Eg someone who leaves a job in finance or tech to take a job at half the salary to do direct work, and intends to remain in that new role for the rest of their career, is making far more of a sacrifice than if they just donated 10%, and I consider them to have no obligation to donate further. But I don’t see the conditions of Luke’s comment applying, as the salary sacrifice comes from switching industries not an arrangement with their employer. And they may never be able to donate later, if they just postpone their pledge. So they would need to resign. Which is a terrible incentive!
One thing I didn’t expand on in that thread is some uncertainty I have around ‘You think your sacrificed money is best spent on the non-profit you are working for’.
Right now my charity is definitely not that cost-effective, but I’m confident it will be one day. In my head, saving money for this charity is the best way to spend that money, but not the most cost-effective today.
I don’t nearly have the arrogance to believe that my charity is going to be the most cost-effective giving opportunity of all time, so donating 100% of my sacrificed earnings to this charity probably goes against the spirit of the pledge. On the other hand, it does feel like something would be lost by not incentivising people to make this kind of sacrifice in their careers.
(But ultimately I don’t care much for the status of a pledge or whatever, because I know I’m doing the right thing here)
For these reasons I haven’t considered my sacrifice as a GWWC pledge so far, but I’m uncertain about it.
GWWC doesn’t need your giving to be “the most cost-effective… of all time” so I think your sacrificed earnings is well within the spirit of the pledge. I’m interested so many people disagree with @Neel Nanda here on that front as well!
If your non profit will eventually be extremely cost effective, and donations now help it reach that point, then that would make donations now highly cost effective. Of course, you’re likely positively biased in favour of your non profit, so could easily be wrong in this assessment, but I am generally pro people making high conviction altruistic bets with their donations
More importantly, you are, in fact, choosing to take a lower salary in order to spend your labour on your non profit. This means you are choosing actions that lead to you not donating to other charities. If you think this is the correct thing to do, altruistically speaking, then you think this achieves more good than taking a higher paying job and donating that money. I think it would be perverse if the GWWC pledge obliged people to make ineffective decisions that did less good by their lights
incorrect order of operations, you should be selecting for a future wife who is also down to donate 10% of her income
This sounds right to me (although maybe easier to game if someone isn’t earnest) and EA really needs to get better at social incentive alignment like this
A while back I tweeted[1]
but this isn’t totally a joke—I thik there really are big gains (mostly for the rest of the world but also partially for EAs themselves) to be had from changing social norms and incentives around this stuff
In your case, the answer might be to have a new, different symbol/indicator tbc for this type of sacrifice—I’m not sure what the best system is but it’s probably not the status quo
(and vibecoded a tool for exploring how this might be different)
Hey, I like your progressive pledge tool. How hard would it be to include places outside the US? And more currencies?
I sometimes check this place out for cost of living comparisons around the world, it’s not perfect but it gives you some idea for at least big cities:
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/
At the same time, the good thing of 10% is that it is a way stronger Schelling point than a progressive tax, so I suppose it’s better for signaling.
Thank you! I can’t verify this is perfect but added all the numbeo.com cities: https://pledge.up.railway.app/
Nice. I don’t think it’s perfect but it’s mostly in the right ballpark.
Kudos to you for taking such a serious pay cut to work on something you feel is important. ‘Made me laugh’ reacting only because reading ‘I yearn for the diamond emoji’ did make me chuckle.
my unresearched, undercooked and based opinion is that of course you are eligible for the diamond!