I think we can both agree that the way you say things is very important. Saying “come back when you make more money” is very different from saying “if you are interested in helping people as effectively as possible it may be wise to consider looking out for yourself first before turning your motivations outward.” There are a lot of reasons for people to worry that their lives are too good in comparison to others’ and therefore they have a moral obligation to help. I think a lot of EA’s have felt this way before. When faced with this sentiment, I think it can be a mistake with regard to actually being effective to devote significant effort into explicit donation rather than personal development.
I think you are also framing the argument to make “making more money” sound like a bad thing that most people don’t want to do. A lot of people already want to make more money, and they feel a conflict between trying their best to become successful VS using the resources / leverage they already have to help others. My argument is that focusing on personal goals and development could kill two birds with one stone for a lot of people and I don’t think it’s as off-putting as you make it sound.
Speaking from my own experience, I have a very high propensity to think about others before myself and I think this can be a flaw and limit productivity in many ways. I think I would ultimately be a more effective altruist if I had spent more of my time pondering “how can I become really good at something / develop valuable skills” rather than “how can I do the most good.”
There was a great thread in the facebook group on whether people making a modest wage (around or below $30k/yr in US terms) should be donating to effective charities or saving money. I’d like to weigh in on this but that thread is already pretty crowded and unstructured.
The proposition here is “People with average or below average income should save money rather than donate to effective charities”
One thing that it looks like almost nobody mentioned is the opportunity cost of worrying about other people over yourself and how this corresponds to effective altruistic output. It seemed from facebook that most EA’s were against the proposition, claiming that most people in the developed world are still far better off than X% of the global population and therefore they should still be donating some percentage of their wealth. I believe there is a strong case to be made that focusing on optimizing one’s own career capital, not just making smart personal finance decisions, will enable one to earn substantially higher income in the future and thus be a more “E” EA. Any intellectual power devoted to understanding the EA argument (doing the relevant research, picking an EA organization or EA-organization-recommended charity to donate to, and “stretching your EA muscles” by donating a small amount over a regular period of time) is a small investment in terms of money but a large investment in terms of intellectual capital that I think dedicated EA’s tend to discount because they have already invested this capital. This is a CFAR-esque argument that advocates focusing on personal development and improvement until one is at a level to reasonably maximize one’s own output both in terms of income and effectiveness of donations.
I am still uncertain about my position in this debate, but it seemed that most EA’s (at least on facebook) were strongly against the proposition so I would like to see more discussion taking the above points into consideration.