Yeah, I don’t expect to be passing on a nontrivial inheritance to kids. Pledging to do something specific here currently seems unfeasible, though; I have no idea what the world will be like when I’m in my 70s. Examples of weirdness (even setting aside AI developments): maybe we’ve made serious medical breakthroughs and I’m still expecting to work for a long time, maybe money works in seriously different ways, etc. I haven’t thought about this much, though, and it might be worth thinking about (e.g. maybe there’s a nicely operationalized pledge that could work).[1]
Thanks!
I think I fairly strongly disagree here, and might have been unclear in the original post. My runway-helps-epistemics point was not meant as a security measure for myself/personal protection against hardship, but rather as a point about potentially dangerous biases. My broad argument here is something like this:
(A) Organizations sometimes turn sour/I might discover things about organizations that employ or fund me that are not ok (at least according to me)
(Note that I don’t think readers should infer things about my current employers and funders from this comment. I’m still at CEA for a reason! But I’ve heard stories that make me aware of this problem.)
(B) If I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders, I will be afraid to do things like the following:
Quit in order to voice protest or speak more freely, if I find out something very bad
Do things that might upset my employers/funders (over which they might fire me), like asking questions they might not want asked, etc.
Actually investigate worries I have, knowing that I might discover things that mean I can no longer endorse continuing my current work
Etc.
(C) It seems plausible that I should still do the things above even if I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders. But it’s very scary, and it might make me mentally flinch away from considering actions like this. I.e. it might make me biased against doing the above in worlds where I should. I think this is quite bad.
While we’re talking about alternative pledges; I’ve considered taking a more general pledge to use some significant portion of the resources I have (and will have) for impartially altruistic purposes, with some carve-outs for other important values (like supporting family if something happens). I’d obviously need to operationalize it a lot better, and I haven’t dedicated much time to thinking about it yet, but this seems more plausible to me right now.
I guess that if I were to prioritize thinking about this, I’d probably want to first think through the main goals of pledges and make sure a pledge like this is actually accomplishing something I think is important, instead of just allowing me to say something when pledges come up, etc. E.g. maybe the main benefit of a donation pledge is its public+memetic quality—it encourages others to donate more. Or maybe it’s about value drift, or something else, etc.
Thanks for clarifying, Lizka. Just for clarity on what follows—I absolutely don’t think you’re thinking this through in bad faith, so I don’t want to come across as suggesting that. I do wonder if there might be some blind spots in your reasoning though, so I’m testing out the following to shine a light into those grey areas.
-
On your point 1 - what if was just “before my expected natural death/in my will”? I guess my point is: would you accept that it’s reasonable to pledge to give away financial resources that you ultimately didn’t need, after they had provided you with a safety net throughout your life?
More generally: I see your reasoning here but I think my reaction is still as follows. You want financial security to protect you in various scenarios, one of which is to protect against biases. There might be other ways to protect against these biases (your point 3.c is basically my point of view, for example—you definitely could blow the whistle on your employer anyway, even if you’ve donated some portion of your income over time, although I agree that this is harder on the margin if you’re more financially dependent on your employer).
Ultimately, in each of the scenarios you outline, you’re deciding whether to donate based on how you weigh one set of benefits (e.g. avoiding bias if your employer goes rogue) over another one (donating the money effectively).
Some of your scenarios seem completely reasonable to me (e.g. “I could donate but I want to make sure I can provide financial security to my family first.”). Candidly, though, I think there is a strong whiff of motivated reasoning when the argument is something like “I could pledge to donate my money, but what if life expectancy has gone up to 150 in the future and I might need it?”, or “I could pledge to donate my money, but what if my employer turns out to be net negative and I don’t feel able to do anything about it because I didn’t keep my resources to get financial security?”.
It seems to me that if we allow this level of speculation in the justifications for not donating, we have to conclude that no one should ever be expected to donate anything, because clearly we could always construct some plausible scenario where they later regret doing that. (To put it a different way, this line of reasoning seems very vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum.)
In reality, lots of people donate 1-10% of their income, and I have never actually heard of someone who suffered significant hardship and said “if only I had not donated that money, I’d have been fine” (although NB: these people clearly could exist—I’m just sceptical that it’s true in the vast majority of cases).
For one thing, most affluent people in high-income countries spend at least 1-10% of their income on stuff they clearly don’t need. So for these arguments to be convincing, I’d also need to be convinced that you are spending 100% of your income either on essentials or on savings or investments. I have no idea about your financial circumstances, so that could be true. In my own life, it definitely isn’t true. So if I said “well, I could donate 10% of my income, but that would undermine my financial security”, this would be a false choice. I’d be better off not getting Ubers or takeaway food so often, joining a cheaper gym, drinking less wine and putting that money into savings; and donating the final 10% anyway. (Another way of putting this—people tend to theorise about this as if they are making decisions on the margin, but we are almost never, ever, ever actually acting on the margin.)
In summary, I guess every time we decide to keep a unit of resources to ourselves rather than donate it, we tell ourselves some form of justification for that. It’s just that I tend to view justifications that are second- or third-order insurances with suspicion, because they look and sound a lot like “I’m going to keep even the final 1% of my income to myself but it’s not for my own benefit, it’s for impact”.
One potential crux here is: in what percentage of potential universes should my runway be long enough? 100 percent is impossible, and 99.999999 percent is impossible too, with a possible exception for HNW individuals.
One potential diagnostic here (in general, not commenting on anyone’s particular situation): if someone concludes that they need a very high coverage runway, how much of their current income are they devoting to getting there?
If I conclude that I needed 99 percent coverage, the risk of the runway not being complete when I needed it would be significantly higher than the risk of the completed runway proving insufficient. Is the amount I’m contributing to my runway fund consistent with that risk assessment, or am I spending a lot on Ubers and takeout, nice gyms and wines, etc.? If someone who is currently earning is stowing away a large fraction of their current income into runway, that is a costly signal that they really do prioritize the risk of insufficient runway, and are less likely to be engaged in motivated reasoning when they decide not to donate much now due to runway concerns.
Thanks for engaging! Quick thoughts:
Yeah, I don’t expect to be passing on a nontrivial inheritance to kids. Pledging to do something specific here currently seems unfeasible, though; I have no idea what the world will be like when I’m in my 70s. Examples of weirdness (even setting aside AI developments): maybe we’ve made serious medical breakthroughs and I’m still expecting to work for a long time, maybe money works in seriously different ways, etc. I haven’t thought about this much, though, and it might be worth thinking about (e.g. maybe there’s a nicely operationalized pledge that could work).[1]
Thanks!
I think I fairly strongly disagree here, and might have been unclear in the original post. My runway-helps-epistemics point was not meant as a security measure for myself/personal protection against hardship, but rather as a point about potentially dangerous biases. My broad argument here is something like this:
(A) Organizations sometimes turn sour/I might discover things about organizations that employ or fund me that are not ok (at least according to me)
(Note that I don’t think readers should infer things about my current employers and funders from this comment. I’m still at CEA for a reason! But I’ve heard stories that make me aware of this problem.)
(B) If I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders, I will be afraid to do things like the following:
Quit in order to voice protest or speak more freely, if I find out something very bad
Do things that might upset my employers/funders (over which they might fire me), like asking questions they might not want asked, etc.
Actually investigate worries I have, knowing that I might discover things that mean I can no longer endorse continuing my current work
Etc.
(C) It seems plausible that I should still do the things above even if I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders. But it’s very scary, and it might make me mentally flinch away from considering actions like this. I.e. it might make me biased against doing the above in worlds where I should. I think this is quite bad.
What Elizabeth says here resonates with me/seems reasonable: getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap is an underrated strategy
This section of a recent post is probably also relevant, as well as this one.
While we’re talking about alternative pledges; I’ve considered taking a more general pledge to use some significant portion of the resources I have (and will have) for impartially altruistic purposes, with some carve-outs for other important values (like supporting family if something happens). I’d obviously need to operationalize it a lot better, and I haven’t dedicated much time to thinking about it yet, but this seems more plausible to me right now.
I guess that if I were to prioritize thinking about this, I’d probably want to first think through the main goals of pledges and make sure a pledge like this is actually accomplishing something I think is important, instead of just allowing me to say something when pledges come up, etc. E.g. maybe the main benefit of a donation pledge is its public+memetic quality—it encourages others to donate more. Or maybe it’s about value drift, or something else, etc.
Thanks for clarifying, Lizka. Just for clarity on what follows—I absolutely don’t think you’re thinking this through in bad faith, so I don’t want to come across as suggesting that. I do wonder if there might be some blind spots in your reasoning though, so I’m testing out the following to shine a light into those grey areas.
-
On your point 1 - what if was just “before my expected natural death/in my will”? I guess my point is: would you accept that it’s reasonable to pledge to give away financial resources that you ultimately didn’t need, after they had provided you with a safety net throughout your life?
More generally: I see your reasoning here but I think my reaction is still as follows. You want financial security to protect you in various scenarios, one of which is to protect against biases. There might be other ways to protect against these biases (your point 3.c is basically my point of view, for example—you definitely could blow the whistle on your employer anyway, even if you’ve donated some portion of your income over time, although I agree that this is harder on the margin if you’re more financially dependent on your employer).
Ultimately, in each of the scenarios you outline, you’re deciding whether to donate based on how you weigh one set of benefits (e.g. avoiding bias if your employer goes rogue) over another one (donating the money effectively).
Some of your scenarios seem completely reasonable to me (e.g. “I could donate but I want to make sure I can provide financial security to my family first.”). Candidly, though, I think there is a strong whiff of motivated reasoning when the argument is something like “I could pledge to donate my money, but what if life expectancy has gone up to 150 in the future and I might need it?”, or “I could pledge to donate my money, but what if my employer turns out to be net negative and I don’t feel able to do anything about it because I didn’t keep my resources to get financial security?”.
It seems to me that if we allow this level of speculation in the justifications for not donating, we have to conclude that no one should ever be expected to donate anything, because clearly we could always construct some plausible scenario where they later regret doing that. (To put it a different way, this line of reasoning seems very vulnerable to reductio ad absurdum.)
In reality, lots of people donate 1-10% of their income, and I have never actually heard of someone who suffered significant hardship and said “if only I had not donated that money, I’d have been fine” (although NB: these people clearly could exist—I’m just sceptical that it’s true in the vast majority of cases).
For one thing, most affluent people in high-income countries spend at least 1-10% of their income on stuff they clearly don’t need. So for these arguments to be convincing, I’d also need to be convinced that you are spending 100% of your income either on essentials or on savings or investments. I have no idea about your financial circumstances, so that could be true. In my own life, it definitely isn’t true. So if I said “well, I could donate 10% of my income, but that would undermine my financial security”, this would be a false choice. I’d be better off not getting Ubers or takeaway food so often, joining a cheaper gym, drinking less wine and putting that money into savings; and donating the final 10% anyway. (Another way of putting this—people tend to theorise about this as if they are making decisions on the margin, but we are almost never, ever, ever actually acting on the margin.)
In summary, I guess every time we decide to keep a unit of resources to ourselves rather than donate it, we tell ourselves some form of justification for that. It’s just that I tend to view justifications that are second- or third-order insurances with suspicion, because they look and sound a lot like “I’m going to keep even the final 1% of my income to myself but it’s not for my own benefit, it’s for impact”.
One potential crux here is: in what percentage of potential universes should my runway be long enough? 100 percent is impossible, and 99.999999 percent is impossible too, with a possible exception for HNW individuals.
One potential diagnostic here (in general, not commenting on anyone’s particular situation): if someone concludes that they need a very high coverage runway, how much of their current income are they devoting to getting there?
If I conclude that I needed 99 percent coverage, the risk of the runway not being complete when I needed it would be significantly higher than the risk of the completed runway proving insufficient. Is the amount I’m contributing to my runway fund consistent with that risk assessment, or am I spending a lot on Ubers and takeout, nice gyms and wines, etc.? If someone who is currently earning is stowing away a large fraction of their current income into runway, that is a costly signal that they really do prioritize the risk of insufficient runway, and are less likely to be engaged in motivated reasoning when they decide not to donate much now due to runway concerns.