I feel like @Zvi put it well when he wrote,
I don’t see any wolves. So why are you proposing to have a boy watch the sheep and yell ‘wolf’ if a wolf shows up? Stop crying wolf.
Ian Turner
Karma: 893
Open Philanthropy: Economic Growth in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Thanks Julia for writing this. It’s correct all the way around.
I can’t help but feel though that there is something a little mean-spirited in targeting those donating to Notre Dame, the opera, etc. There is a common and (in my opinion) somewhat toxic pattern where if someone spends their money on yachts, mansions, etc., then nobody complains but as soon as they do something even a little bit public spirited then all of a sudden everyone feels free to criticize. Like, we can have plenty of objections to MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic choices, but shouldn’t Jeff Bezos get at least as much commentary for his non-philanthropic choices?
What is an HEA?
Can you give an example of the sort of prediction market you’re referring to, or what kind of consequences there have been?
Is donating via payroll deduction a simpler way to achieve this result?
Here’s a summary of UK tax treatment of charitable donations. As I understand it, donations are sometime deductible, and sometimes eligible for gift aid, but never both.
GWWC has a somewhat complicated treatment of gift aid; you can count gift aid towards your pledge, but
If you are counting Gift Aid towards your pledge it is recommended to calculate your pledge amount based on your pre-tax income. If you are not claiming Gift Aid or any tax benefit then it is recommended to calculate your pledge amount based on your post-tax income.
The evidence is quite strong. You can most likely get more detail than you ever wanted from the GiveWell review.
It is also highly controversial to state that charity doesn’t begin at home
Completely different scale. Not that we can determine what is true/correct by polling; but 29% of people chose to give internationally, while I would wager less than 1% would endorse the view that we should let humans suffer and die because otherwise they might eat animals.
My impression is that most EA oriented charities can already accept tax-advantaged donations from most countries via intermediaries. Is there a particular country/charity combination you are thinking of that is not currently possible?
New Incentives
Interesting idea. Even more so than for the 10% pledge, it seems to me that this one should be based on after-tax income, since otherwise getting more income could leave you with less spending money.
I disagree-voted, rather than downvoted, but I could understand downvoting on the basis that, like so many animal welfare pieces on the forum, this one smuggles in a ton of unstated and highly controversial beliefs about the value of animals. I feel like pieces like this should come with a disclaimer at the top saying, “warning: this essay rests on highly unconventional beliefs about the value of animal welfare”.
Personally I find repugnant the idea that we should let little kids suffer from malaria because of the chance they might grow up to eat chicken. The same logic could be used to justify school shootings.
Here’s a GiveWell blog post from 2009 that engages with this question.
Speaking for myself, this is the sort of thing that would make me more excited to sign a pledge.
Thanks for posting this.
Do we have an intuition for how to apply shapely values in typical EA scenarios, for example: • How much credit goes to donors, vs charity evaluators, vs object level charities? • How much credit goes to charity founders/executives, vs other employees/contractors? • How much credit goes to meta vs object organizations?
Hmm, I would argue than an AI which, when asked, causes human extinction is not aligned, even if it did exactly what it was told.
Is your question how we should think about meta vs object level work, excluding considerations of personal fit? Because, at least in this example, I would expect fit considerations to dominate.
Basically, it seems to me that for any given worker, these career options would have pretty different levels of expected productivity, influenced by things like aptitude and excitement/motivation. And my prior is that in most cases, these productivity differences should swamp the sort of structural considerations you bring up here.
Have you already solicited funding from government funders such as NIH or CDC, or philanthropic funders such as Open Philanthropy? If so, what did they say about this?
This question was also discussed in this other forum post, and probably in some other posts that I can’t find. Why Brain Drain Isn’t Something We Should Worry About