I’ve been following the reports you and Xio and Joey have been writing on all the different fundraising methods you’ve explored, and will consider a substantial donation (since I’d want to keep you running and pay for a sizeable chunk of time experimenting). It would be a shame for effective altruism if you guys had to shut down abruptly given your demonstrated commitment to measure results and shut projects down if they don’t raise money. I assume it would be a waste of knowledge and expertise and contacts you’ve built up too. It’d be helpful if you could comment on that. In particular is there a way to invest to create potential for more money raised in the future, or build up resources of any sort that can be used for whatever seems highest impact?
Ervin
I could see situations where it’s not best for me to donate >=10% (like this year since I’m a student)
If you’re a student you’re not counted as having an income, and I believe you only have to give 1% of living costs (someone from GWWC can correct me if I’m wrong!). Besides that, having a pledge you have to fulfil every year seems like a valuable thing—it’s good to be a stickler for honesty. If you’re planning to donate or already donating but can’t commit to 10% every year yet, you could always declare that rather than taking the pledge yet, and then decide whether to take it later.
I’m not sure these people are much more easily excluded by the current pledge. You could still get people who have very bizarre beliefs about the best way to help people in poverty.
Technically that’s possible but in practice GWWC members don’t currently tend to have those beliefs—the pledging community has a clear feel of being focused on evidence-based poverty charities. The new pledge that’s being consulted about would certainly include more people, and AlasdairGives is right that there’s nothing in it that’d exclude the large numbers of people who tithe to their churches. If they joined in mass (which is unlikely absent a concerted effort to sign them up) that would certainly change the feel of the community to me.
Are you saying that you genuinely care more about people alive today than people who will live in the future?
It’s worth noting that many people do, and that this isn’t obviously indefensible. So people can genuinely care more about existing people or existing creatures :-)
I think that cause agnosticism is probably the most important novel ingredient of effective altruism, so seeing this kind of sentiment is disheartening. (I don’t have strong views on the pledge itself.)
As I said to Jess Whittlestone, it’s worth being clear that the attitude that AlasdairGives expresses isn’t a narrow-minded rejection of people who favour other causes and more general EA types. If you read him charitably, he’s saying that he joined because he sincerely thought that GWWC-recommended charities were the ones which he should support, and that he wanted to express this rather than joining a club for EA types in general. Not that he favours a commitment to a narrow cause for its own sake.
I’m glad that you’re open to GWWC being a poverty-focused community, so this may not ultimately be an important disagreement :-)
Saying you wouldn’t want to take the pledge for this reason seems a bit like saying you don’t want to be part of the EA community because it contains those people.
I see why you might say that, and understand your position, but I hope you can see how it could be a little uncharitable to those of us who feel crowded out of what was originally an organisation that made a compelling case about our obligation to help people in the developing world (with things like the calculator showing that many potential GWWC members were in the richest 1-5% of the world). You say that changing the pledge would just include additional groups, and that this wouldn’t define it. But—without having anything against people who are focused on different causes! - I don’t think we should broaden the pledge (or other global poverty pledges/groups) just because we can do so without technically excluding people who took the old version.
You make it sound a bit like I’m being unwelcoming to other groups. But I think that they have their own venues (look at the size of LessWrong and its meetups), and that there’s merit in having multiple venues with clear purposes. Being “part of the EA community” is more amorphous than having taken a pledge to help those in the developing world, so I’m happy to be in a (non-formal sense) part of a community that contains singularitarians, animal welfare activists and many others. But if I found that I’d taken a pledge which was then changed to drop its original focus on the developing world and stated rationale, I’d see that as a broadening which wasn’t automatically good.
[It] could include singularitarians and rationalists, but certainly wouldn’t be defined by it
This is true in one sense—if I’ve committed to doing X as the best way to do Y, then however many other people then commit to Z as the best way to do Y, that doesn’t change the definition of my commitment. But, purely as a hypothetical, imagine that GWWC central made a big effort to sign up lots of new members from a particular group—either singularitarians or vegan outreach activists or something else. And imagine that they dwarfed the original member base, which might be seen as a big success. That would ‘define’ GWWC in _a_ sense.
Also, note that the current pledge doesn’t actually exclude singularitarians, rationalists etc.: “The change is not likely to make a difference to people who think that the best way to help others is to ensure that the future will go well, since the pledge already explicitly includes people who will live in the future, as well as those alive now.”
I was initially puzzled by this, as the text of the pledge is:
“I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that for the rest of my life or until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organisations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries, now and in the years to come. I make this pledge freely, openly, and sincerely.”
I’m guessing that a singularitarian could read that as something she could sign up to as she’s technically aiming to “help people in developing countries”—just by helping the entire population! It seems a bit of a stretch, but I can see that. It’s less obviously something that CFAR does.
Anyway, I’ve violated my original plan not to comment more until I had extra time, but I hope this helps you understand where I’m coming from :-)
I’m unsure, as I don’t know how many people see late additions to the open threads. It’s the sort of thing which’d go in LessWrong Discussion versus. LessWrong main so maybe its a data point for creating a discussion section.
To answer this question:
if you aren’t yet a member of Giving What We Can, would you join if this change was made?
I’m not a member, but I’ve been seriously considering joining for a while, and probably wouldn’t join if this change was made, as a large part of the appeal of publicly joining GWWC is being part of a community focused on global poverty, rather than of singularitarians, rationalists and the like (who have their own communities).
I find myself really quite strongly against this. I’ll try to find the time to compose a comment explaining why, but for now I’ll simply state this as a data point.
Could you say more about particular plans, like the “large sponsored fundraiser which will be run simultaneously by local EA groups around the world”?