Andy is a software engineer donating to long term future and EA meta causes, and investing to give later.
Andy_Schultz
Karma: 113
[Question] What’s the best way to convince business/community leaders to take action now against COVID-19?
It seems like Ben Todd is saying that increasing one’s exposure to stocks increases risk, but Lifecycle Investing is saying this decreases risk when done early on. How should we reconcile these two views?
I gave my 2018 quota of donations in early January 2019 in order to bunch my donations. I’m planning on doing this every other year, giving near the end of the alternate years. Should I report those donations in this survey or wait until next year?
Just wanted to give a quick note of encouragement that earning to give for long term future or EA meta causes can be very impactful. According to a survey of community leaders last year, donations to the long term future and EA meta EA funds were usually considered even more cost effective than donations to the animal welfare and global poverty funds.
There was another discussion about this on the forum a couple of years ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ebjm8rNFP4mGEjtFD/is-the-community-short-of-software-engineers-after-all
To automatically invest money each paycheck so that you don’t have to remember, mutual funds are another option besides ETFs (it’s not always possible to automatically invest in an ETF). Mutual funds have higher account minimum balances, though.
[Question] Should EAs participate in the Double Up Drive?
Interesting that the Long Term Future Fund is thought of as the most cost effective fund, even though the cause area is considered one of the least funding constrained. Sounds like there are still some pretty amazing opportunities for donations in that area!
Donation timing with U.S. tax reform
In the linked Summary of Evidence document, in the section “Farmed animal vs. wild animals vs. general antispeciesism focus”, some of the rankings in the grid do not match the explanations below. For example, under Scale, the grid has Farmed animal focus as rank 1, but the explanation below has General antispeciesism as rank 1.
How much more helpful would it be to take the full survey vs the abridged one, for those who have taken the survey in prior years? I’m willing to take the full survey if it’s helpful.
Any word on the global health budget decisions?
One argument for saving more is that it could allow you to have a higher risk tolerance, since you could afford to lose some of the money. If you planned to donate any excess savings after some time, this could increase the expected value of your donations. I wrote about this here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rz/increasing_risk_tolerance_by_growing_your/
Let me know if you have any questions about this.
Thanks, I’ve written letters to my senators.
One consideration is that you should have enough saved to live on in case you temporarily stop working. Here is 80,000 Hours’ view on this: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-everyone-even-our-readers-should-save-enough-to-live-for-6-24-months/
It looks like 2 posts that were created while the bug was occurring are not showing up on the main page: “Donor coordination under simplifying assumptions” and “What does the election of President Trump mean for EA?”
If you waited until Jan 2017, would you ask about both 2015 and 2016 donations?
The section “Where does the money go?” says it goes to AMF, but it says the charity treats parasitic worms.
I had to click on View More under Add a section to your profile, and then a tile appeared called Causes you care about. I checked the Other checkbox and typed effective altruism.
OK that makes sense, thanks.