Hi Jason, thank you for your response.
To the extent “you should only donate to effective charities” is being conveyed in practice, it’s not clear to me why deploying a 2⁄8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging.
It’s certainly not the most effective way in all circumstances. I think that, on a substantial the margin, a 2⁄8 message would be more effective in many circumstances. I think a sophistated EA take would be that the real goal is to find a substantial yet isustainable level of giving to effective causes, one that is tailored to the individual’s material situation and the constituency of their moral parliament.
For people who haven’t encountered this complex bundle of ideas and aren’t going to give us a huge amount of time before writing us off, a 2⁄8 message gestures at subtlety of thought, implying moral parliamentarian ideas, the idea of distinguishing effective causes from personal passions, the idea of a substantial habit of charitable giving.
A 10% message hits the latter two points, but implies that we’re trying to frame the personal passions of the target of our giving appeal as unworthy targets of charitable giving. This is indeed the direct implication of the idea that altruistic efficiency follows a power law distribution—ineffective charities are massively worse than the best, and we lose huge value on the margin when we direct funds and energies to suboptimal causes.
But this totalizing view is one of the major reasons why even people who see the sense of cost-benefit calculations resist thinking in this manner. The implications are profoundly destabilizing if you don’t moderate them. So we moderate them. But when you get hit with that realization that there’s a whole community of people whom you haven’t met, who think in terms of cost/benefit altruistic calculations, and that the straight-line calculation is that you ought to give everything to a narrow band of super-effective causes and live on the level of the global poor, that borks the brain and causes people distance themselves.
A 10% standard addresses many of those concerns and is much better than the straight-line calculation by protecting people from utilitarian ravages and promoting movement growth. But its limit is that it seems to imply that symbolically, every other area in life is valueless and that our aim is to reduce the amount of non-EA charitable giving you engage in to zero. This is a bad argument but one that people reliably seem to come up with, because people aren’t all mathematically literate or careful reasoners the first time they encounter an idea. A 2⁄8 message addresses this specific way that the thought process and conversation can go wrong by saying: “Yes, your passion causes are valuable and we do approve of them, and you can keep giving to them, and that is a positive thing that you do. We are also asking you to recognize the sheer magnitude of clear, unambiguous good you can do by donating to things like X-risk prevention or malaria bednets and to really step up your donating in order to support these causes.” Putting hard numbers on it gives people a sense of the proportions we might consider appropriate as a community standard, which is why “2%/8%” and not just the qualitative description is a necessary part of the message, just as “10%” is necessary rather than “a very substantial level of giving.”
I struggle to come up with a rationale that gives someone the green checkmark of moral approval for giving 8% to effective causes + 2% for music for predominately rich people (i.e., opera) but denies the checkmark for just the 8% to effective causes.
I originally meant to include a metaphor that I think is a helpful reframing of the idea of a community standard/line in the sand/Schelling point, but apparently I never worked it into the main post.
I think of a community standard not as a rigid number that’s a pass/fail, but an elastic tether. We have anchored it at 10%. Obviously, for a solid earner in a country like the USA, being at 9% is a little worse, 11% a little better, but we don’t encourage you to “stretch the standard” all the way up to 50% (because it can set an intimidating or extremely demanding-sounding image of what our standard is and provoke a sense of being not good enough in ways that are bad for community growth) or all the way down to 0%. But a little variability around 10% really doesn’t matter much. The idea of the “elastic” standard is that it resists further deformation the further you try and move away from it. Having elasticity built into the standard makes it a better standard because it emphasizes the ways our community embraces flexibility and personal fit whlie still having actual, meaningful standards.
So yeah, full agree, no “green checkmark” mentality. More like a “green tether” or something like that.
In fact, ignoring concerns about message complexity and not trying to be too fancy, I might suggest we eliminate any hard percentage standard in favor of a recommended % donation that scales with income. So somebody earning < $10,000-$20,000/year might be advised not to donate. Someone earning $80,000 might be asked to donate 10%. Someone earning $10,000,000/year might be asked to donate 90%. These are just rough numbers. But I think this might be better treated in book form or in tailored appeals to individual people. In the EA community I think it would be nice if we often discussed specific ways we could refine and tailor this community standard in a way that’s optimized for “it’s easy to understand how this number was computed yet it makes sense for me” rather than being optimized for compatibility with a sound bite in a media appearance.