I work as Software Tester in the Railway Industry and donate a part of my income.
I got into EA in 2012, took the 10 Percent pledge in 2015.
As of autumn 2024, I am also mentor at Giving For Animals. Feel free to reach out if youād like to chat about donating or a giving pledge.
You donāt need to make a donation decision biweekly. That sounds incredibly tiring. You can also set up a recurring donation to the same charity or fund. Or save up and donate once or twice a year. That has the advantage that you can plan some time to think well about your decision.
I can relate a lot to your story.
My first experiences talking about effective giving were so negative that they discouraged me from doing it for years. Maybe it had a negative impact because I communicated so poorly that people were put off and stopped being open to the idea in the first place.
Every time I read on the internet that I should encourage others to give, it felt like yet another moral obligation that I was failing to fulfill.
āYou should give it to me insteadā
I got this one a few times, and I find it extremely dismissive and disrespectful. Even more so when I think about people in extreme poverty and animals in factory farms.
Another time, the other viewed donating as no better than giving in to beggarsā¦ a weakness that has nothing to do with doing good.
Surprisingly, the same people were very understanding or even positive about vegetarianism or veganism.
Nowadays, it has become a little easier to talk about effective giving since I can point to the website of the local effective giving organization. I still avoid being the first point of contact.
I like the post much more now ;) - clearer where you are coming from and, indeed, a conversation starter.
Edit: retracted the downvote.
I agree that preserving democracy is important, but I downvoted this post:
the ALL CAP title comes across as yellingāand is unclear
not facts, references to sources. Very little reasoning. Tell us based on what events you believe there is a short term collapse (and that can be in 1-2 paragraphs)
typos
no clear call to action. āthere is a range of solutionsāāwhy not mention what those solutions are?
Iāve listened to your podcast and there I learnt things. This post, however, does not provide me any information.
You are saying āGiven that these are recent grants, outcome data will not be included in the initial payout reports.āāwould it be possible for you to share some outcome data of earlier grants?
Question, just to check whether I havenāt misunderstood this post:
Are the EA Funds (Animal Welfare Fund, Long-Term Future Fund, etc.) ācharitable projectsā and not āhosted fundsā and will GWWC keep supporting them? The EA Funds website
Will you continue to maintain an ANBI (tax-deductibilty and tax exemption) in the Netherlands?
It would be very sad if we lost these two things without handover.
I made two small donations via Every.org and regret it. By default, your profile and donations are public, and itās not immediately obvious (a privacy issueāespecially if you make a potentially controversial donation as an individual), which I find unethical. Additionally, Every.org sends a lot of spam if you miss the opt-out button. These are known as UX dark patterns.
Next time, Iāll email the charity to ask if I can use conventional payment methods (if the donation is large enough) or simply refrain from donating.
Being public about oneās donations can be beneficial, but donors should have easy control over what they make public and what they donāt. I encourage organizations to think twice before using Every.org.
Thankfully, our local effective giving organization and the GWWC platform donāt have these issues.
FWIW: definitely not a world vision, but Ozyās blog is the most heart-warming thing Iāve read after the recent US elections.
Some thoughts on what would help. Some of them are already happening.
funding circles. Note that most official funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for mid-sized donors.
Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization. Donors could reach out to each other and organize themselves.
Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you donāt have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
EA funds can publish a more detailed public write-up of their grants, so that interested donors can follow up. Especially interesting when they canāt give as much as they want due to funding constraints.
Impact markets, if implemented well.
The two local effective giving organizations I know best (Effektiv Spenden and Doneer Effectief) offer donor advising. However, they might be limited to the cause areas they are working in themselves.
Agree with c)
Jeff Kaufmann posted a different version of the same argument earlier than me.
Some have argued that earning to give can contribute to funding diversification. Having a few dozen mid-sized donors, rather than one or two very large donors, would make the financial position of an organization more secure. It allows them to plan for the future and not worry about fundraising all the time.
As earn to giver, I can be one of those mid-sized donors. I have tried. However, it is challenging.
First of all, I donāt have expertise, and donāt have much time to build the expertise. I spend most of my time on my day job, which has nothing to do with any cause I care about. Any research must be done in my free time. This is fine, but it has some cost. This is time I could have spent on career development, talking to others about effective giving, or living more frugally.
Motivation is not the issue, at least for me. Iāve found the research extremely rewarding and intellectually stimulating to do. Yet, fun doesnāt necessarily translate to effectiveness.
Iāve seen peer earn to givers just defer to GiveWell or other charity evaluators without putting much thought into it. This is great, but isnāt there more? Others said that they talked to an individual organization, thought āsounds reasonableā, and transferred the money. I fell for that trap too!
There is a lot at stake. Itās about hard-earned money that has the potential to help large numbers of people and animals in dire need. Unfortunately, I donāt trust my own non-expert judgment to do this.
So I find myself donating to funds, and then the funding is centralized again. If others do the same, charities will have to rely on one grantmaker again, rather than a diverse pool of donors.
What would help to address this issue? Here are a few ideas, some of them are already happening.
funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for most earn to givers.
Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization.
Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you donāt have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
EA funds can publish a more detailed public write-up of their grants, so that interested donors can follow up. Especially interesting when they canāt give as much as they want due to funding constraints.
Impact markets, if implemented well.
Thank you for updating the article with 2023 numbers!
(Commenting this as a signal boost for potential readers.)
Question: Donāt Founderās Pledge and Longview also direct funding to AI safety? There might be more. ECF is small but Longview might advise donors who donāt use the fund.
One element in 80kās definition of ETG that I like a lot is:
Work a job thatās higher earning than they would have otherwise
In my view, ETG is a career choice. If you choose to ETG, you choose to spend your time on acquiring money to donate and you choose not to do something else with that time.
You may choose to:
not volunteer or become politically active and spend your time on paid work instead
not take lower paid direct impact job
ā¦ and you donate (roughly) the difference in income. This can be a high amount or a low amount, depending on your circumstances.
This may work for the US, but tax rates and caps differ per country. Also, exceeding the cap can make a lot of sense.
I am looking forward to pick a charity once I received an allocation and weigh in the opinion of others and myself. It may not be to my preferred cause, but I still have the freedom to pick a charity within the cause.
Thatās a great way to learn.
I can see myself recommending EH to beginner donors, donors who havenāt thought through their cause prioritization yet, and donors who are very thoughtful relative to their budget.
Yes, but at a different margin.
I live in a culture where working part-time (even among people who are healthy and are not parents, and have comfortable office jobs) is quite common. I sometimes feel that I need to justify myself that I choose to work full time. People talk about their vacations and hobbies all the time. That can trigger FOMO, but I do a lot of fun things myself too. My bar for unpaid leave is high (twice in my career a month in between jobs to find a new place and move).
Reducing my work hours from 40 to 32 would increase my happiness slightly but reduce my donation budget by a lot. I DO feel obliged to maintain my ability to work 40 hours. It is sustainable for me. Sometimes I struggle to work 40 hours and I feel bad about myself. As long as this recovers quickly, itās fine.
I DO NOT feel obligated to work more than 40 hours on my day job. Why:
cultural reasons
overworking is discouraged by my colleagues
longer presence at work does not make pay rises and promotions more likely
I tried and failed: experienced productivity loss and other issues when I worked more.
Note: for me ābeing the change I want to seeā is actually working 40 hours rather than 32, given the circumstances I am in. YMMV.
Signed up. I am a little concerned about voters who donāt think through their cause prioritization carefully enough and the causes being not granular enough so voter canāt indicate their priority well.
You could have āwild animal welfareā, āalternative proteinsā,āfish and invertebrate welfareā, āimproving wellbeing on farmsā and āreducing animal consumptionā instead of just āanimal welfareā. That makes everything more complex though.
Thank you, Luke, for your contribution to what GWWC has become todayā¦ with so many pledgers and and all the local initiatives I have seen appear around me. It is the community I feel most at home in (of all EA-adjacent groups).
I wish all the best for you and your son (I had the honor to meet him in a recent video call).
Besides my more cold-hearted response below: I agree that EtG is lonely. You are lucky if you have one other EtGāer in the same city. EtG is rare. EtG and feeling committed to it, is even rarer.