I do think we should promote both giving and career change. I think it’s even more important that we promote recognition of the harsh reality of trade-offs.
For example, as there are many situations in which starting to give >10% effectively will only trade off with (various levels of) personal comfort and not (in any significant way) with how well you are able to optimise your career for impact.
Okay. But even when the 10%+ comes out of someone’s ‘personal comfort’ pot, it’s still the case that it could go into a ‘career’ pot rather than a ‘donation’ pot.
I think it’s the “need to” part that doesn’t sit right with me.
″...which doesn’t always trade off [in any significant way] with career change...”—sure. Lots of people feel like they have a healthy amount of financial runway for any career breaks they might realistically want/have to take, similarly for any training/studying they might want to do, a move to a more expensive city for a job, taking a pay cut, keeping up with spending habits of colleagues to fit in, paying for productivity-enhancing goods/services etc—lots of people already have a lot of savings and/or are fairly confident they won’t want to make any drastic career changes. There is a point at which donating is the more altruistic move than investing in one’s own career. And donating is a good signal of moral commitment that I think only becomes more important as EA grows.
But to me, “doesn’t need to trade off” sounds more like there’s this general way of looking at things or this general thing people can do to make it so that they don’t have to choose between donations or career change. Which I don’t think is true.
Maybe we’re actually on the same page. I just think confronting trade-offs is one of the best things about EA and I’m worried that feature is starting to slip a bit.
How?[1]
I do think we should promote both giving and career change. I think it’s even more important that we promote recognition of the harsh reality of trade-offs.
For example, as there are many situations in which starting to give >10% effectively will only trade off with (various levels of) personal comfort and not (in any significant way) with how well you are able to optimise your career for impact.
Okay. But even when the 10%+ comes out of someone’s ‘personal comfort’ pot, it’s still the case that it could go into a ‘career’ pot rather than a ‘donation’ pot.
I think it’s the “need to” part that doesn’t sit right with me.
″...which doesn’t always trade off [in any significant way] with career change...”—sure. Lots of people feel like they have a healthy amount of financial runway for any career breaks they might realistically want/have to take, similarly for any training/studying they might want to do, a move to a more expensive city for a job, taking a pay cut, keeping up with spending habits of colleagues to fit in, paying for productivity-enhancing goods/services etc—lots of people already have a lot of savings and/or are fairly confident they won’t want to make any drastic career changes. There is a point at which donating is the more altruistic move than investing in one’s own career. And donating is a good signal of moral commitment that I think only becomes more important as EA grows.
But to me, “doesn’t need to trade off” sounds more like there’s this general way of looking at things or this general thing people can do to make it so that they don’t have to choose between donations or career change. Which I don’t think is true.
Maybe we’re actually on the same page. I just think confronting trade-offs is one of the best things about EA and I’m worried that feature is starting to slip a bit.