I agree with the thrust of the argument but I think its a little too pessimistic. A lot of EAs aren’t especially altruistic people. Tons of EAs got involved because of Xrisk. And it requires very little altruism to care about whether you and everyone you know will die. You can look at the data on EA donations and notice they aren’t that high. EAs dont donate 10% until they have a pre-tax income of around one million dollars per year!
I think your graph actually agrees with what sapphire’s comment was arguing? Among the GWWC pledgers, donations don’t actually hit the pledged 10% of income until well past an income of $100k/year. It’s hard to eyeball the combined pledger/non-pledger average donation percentage from the graph, but it seems fair to say it’s under 10% at the vast majority of income levels.
I mean that ‘at what income do GWWC pledgers actually start donating 10%+‘. Or more precisely ‘consider the set of GWWC pledge takers who make at least X per year, for what value X does is the mean donation at least X/10’. The value of X you get is around one million per year. Donations are of course even lower for people who didn’t take the pledge! Giving 10% when you make one million PER YEAR is not a very big ask. You will notice EAs making large, but not absurd salaries, like 100-200K give around 5%. Some EAs are extremely altruistic, but the average EA isn’t that altruistic imo.
Looking at the chart henrith posted, it looks to me like the GWWC=yes line crosses 10% just below $300k/y, which is still high but well below $1M/y.
Additionally, eyeballing the points on the chart, it looks to me like there’s an issue with the way the fit works, where people earning less donating less makes it look like people who earn more also donate less?
https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/ea_data_public has “The actual code and data is in the EA-data private repo. A line in the main_2020.R file there copies the content to this repo in a parallel folder on one’s hard drive, to be pushed here. … No data will be shared here, for now at least.”
I agree with the thrust of the argument but I think its a little too pessimistic. A lot of EAs aren’t especially altruistic people. Tons of EAs got involved because of Xrisk. And it requires very little altruism to care about whether you and everyone you know will die. You can look at the data on EA donations and notice they aren’t that high. EAs dont donate 10% until they have a pre-tax income of around one million dollars per year!
Emm sorry, what? Out of 8,000 GWWC pledgers, who have at least pledged to give 10%, very few earn $1M?
I think your graph actually agrees with what sapphire’s comment was arguing? Among the GWWC pledgers, donations don’t actually hit the pledged 10% of income until well past an income of $100k/year. It’s hard to eyeball the combined pledger/non-pledger average donation percentage from the graph, but it seems fair to say it’s under 10% at the vast majority of income levels.
I mean that ‘at what income do GWWC pledgers actually start donating 10%+‘. Or more precisely ‘consider the set of GWWC pledge takers who make at least X per year, for what value X does is the mean donation at least X/10’. The value of X you get is around one million per year. Donations are of course even lower for people who didn’t take the pledge! Giving 10% when you make one million PER YEAR is not a very big ask. You will notice EAs making large, but not absurd salaries, like 100-200K give around 5%. Some EAs are extremely altruistic, but the average EA isn’t that altruistic imo.
Looking at the chart henrith posted, it looks to me like the GWWC=yes line crosses 10% just below $300k/y, which is still high but well below $1M/y.
Additionally, eyeballing the points on the chart, it looks to me like there’s an issue with the way the fit works, where people earning less donating less makes it look like people who earn more also donate less?
It looks like the chart came from Rethink Priorities EA Survey 2020 Series: Donation Data. Maybe the data is public and I can check this...
https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/ea_data_public has “The actual code and data is in the EA-data private repo. A line in the main_2020.R file there copies the content to this repo in a parallel folder on one’s hard drive, to be pushed here. … No data will be shared here, for now at least.”