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.
In the early years of my EA journey, I tried to live on a small budget so I could donate more. I learned that I could be productive on a small budget.
There were times I worked on an old laptop. Some actions might have taken a few seconds longer, and I did not have much screen space. It was fine. What matters most about productivity is to do the right things, not to do the things slightly faster.
I exercise to keep my mind fresh. I donāt go to the gym or take sports classes. I just do a bodyweight workout at home. Completely free. I also cook my own meals. I can only spend so many hours working behind a computer screen. Ordering food delivery or buying pre-prepared food does not save me time.
The biggest problem with frugality is socializing. To meet people, I need to travel and participate in the activities that they do. Sometimes it may be better to not be too frugal.
For example, my team works in the office one day per week. We have lunch in a restaurantāwhich is quite expensive where I live. When I joined the team, I brought my own food and ate it alone in the office. I felt unhappy about this. After a while, I decided to join and spend a lot of money on the āunnecessary luxuryā of not socially excluding myself.
Remember that most malaria cases are not fatal.
FWIW, I have a note from a Q&A with Leah Edgerton in 2021 mentioning that the funding gaps that Animal Charity Evaluators assigns to a charity typically does not get filled. The charities still donāt receive enough money. One could verify that by comparing the funding gap with the actual money moved a year later. (I did not do that work so far, but could imagine myself doing that if Iām interested enough in the charity).
If true, I would not be very concerned about funging in ACE-recommended charities.
The Humane Slaughter Association (HSA) is another option that not many EAs seem interested in. HSA received two large grants from Open Philanthropy, in 2017 and 2019, but those were earmarked for specific projects, so general HSA funding may not be funged by them.
That is already a while ago. It might be worthwhile to check what they did after they received this grant and whether they have good follow-up work to do. Maybe they have room for more funding again, but Open Philanthropy downprioritized re-evaluating them? Or they arenāt as promising as Open Philanthropy thought in 2019.
I briefly looked at their 2022 Annual Report. They were still working on fish and invertebrates, or funding research by others.
I once made a related mistake:
At uni, I needed to to interact with my supervisor multiple times. They were very busy. I had to discuss a problem with them, that would take, say, 15 minutes of their time, but also their attention. But 15 minutes was way too much to ask! So I shortened to 1 minute, and this one 1 minute conversation did not solve the problem. I was still stuck and had to return with a very similar question later. In the end, I took more of their time, rather than less.
I would have wasted much less of their time if I had literally said to them: āI have a problem. Could we sit down for 15 minutes to discuss? Do you have a moment that works for you? It doesnāt need to be soon.ā
Guess how much of my own time this would have saved...
A relevant lesswrong post: The correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed
How to prevent that projects with large downside risk get funded?
LTFF might be able to detect and turn down those projects. But some members of your funder network might not.
A friend recently reminded me that itās possible (but not certain) that some humans have an impact on the world even after AI takeover. If true, careers can be long.
This comment might be relevant, by someone who donates based on collective decision making, I guess via voting.
Cool initiative. Looking forward to hearing the outcome.
The participants will be introduced to EA concepts (such as cause prioritisation and GiveWell) as part of the deliberation
Why do you want to do this? I wonder if that nudges the participants already towards EA-like thinking, and has the risk to impose values on them. Maybe something more value neutral like the Clearer Thinking Intrinsic Value Test is relevant? There might also be value neutral giving oriented guides available on the internet.
Giving circles are a different thing.
Giving circles like the Mental Health donor circle or the Farmed Animal Funders are a group of donors who give their own money, and often a significant amount. These kind of giving circles are inaccessible to most people.
Giving circles also exist in the broader philanthropic sector (see wikipedia) and outside of Anglosaxon countries.
Good to read this.
I am 32 and had a slow career start. I did a masterās degree in a field I was not a fit for. It was was a struggle at times, but ok enough to continue, but it went painfully wrong near the end. I left university unprepared, unemployed, with no plan, almost zero work experience, and feeling worthless as sh*t. I knew about EA and 80k, but that did not help. In fact, EA made it worse.
And I was so happy to take on a temporary job at a printer manufacturer in a small town far away from my social circle. At uni, I sometimes felt that I learned too slow and wasnāt worth other peopleās time. This was not the case here. On the contrary, they were friendly, patient, and talked in clear language (or dialect). I could ask dumb questions thereābut did not need to. I was productive on day 3. I felt I could contribute something to my team.
Career capital from this job: zero. Unless getting back my self-worth is ācareer capitalā.
It would take me another 7(!) years to find another job that I am truly happy about (though I had many positive experiences on the way), though the impact is mediocre. I still have a long way to go. All I can do is to keep trying and learning, and maybe, with a lot of luck, do something good for the world before AI takes over.
I wish I could believe in career longtermism. AI timelines are probably too short. Itās just that career progress is slow, at least for some people.
Elsewhere, Holden makes this remark about the optimal timing of donations:
Right now there arenāt a lot of obvious places to donate (though you can donate to the Long-Term Future Fund12 if you feel so moved).
Iām guessing this will change in the future, for a number of reasons.13
Something Iād consider doing is setting some pool of money aside, perhaps invested such that itās particularly likely to grow a lot if and when AI systems become a lot more capable and impressive,14 in case giving opportunities come up in the future.
You can also, of course, donate to things today that others arenāt funding for whatever reason.
And in footnote 13:
I generally expect there to be more and more clarity about what actions would be helpful, and more and more people willing to work on them if they can get funded. A bit more specifically and speculatively, I expect AI safety research to get more expensive as it requires access to increasingly large, expensive AI models.
Iām taking the quote out of context a little bit here. I donāt know if Holdenās guess that giving opportunities will increase is one of OpenPhilās reasons to spend at a low rate. There might be other reasons. Also, Holden is talking about individual donations here, not necessarily about OpenPhil spending.
Iām adding it here because it might help answer the question āWhy is the spending rate so low relative to AI timelines?ā even though itās only tangentially relevant.
If you donāt want to (fully) rely on ACE, you might want to look at the Animal Welfare Fund or Founderās Pledge. Also Open Philanthropy Project works on animal welfare.
You can also publish this post as a question :)
In 2018, someone expressed concerns with ACEās research (link) and ACE responded to these concerns (link). I vaguely remember they were relying too heavily on the cost-effectiveness of things like leafletting and online ads, which later turned out to be not as cost-effective as initially thought. There was also the criticism that they did not independently check the charityās claims about how successful corporate campagins are. (e.g. if corporates follow through)
ACE has a more challenging task than GiveWell regarding evidence-based charity. There has been much more research from RCTs and other studies in global health and development, than in animal welfare. However, has been a lot of progress in corporate campagns in recent years, so I guess ACE can build upon a larger evidence base now than they could back in 2018.
There was also criticism about ACEās approach to social justice. See here and please also note the edits and responses linked on the top. As always, social justice is a sensitive topics.
I personally decided to trust ACEās assessment of charities.
See also this recent comment .
It is really unfortunate that the existing evidence about work hours as mentioned in Lynetteās post is so weak and we need to make decisions based on anecdotical evidence because there is nothing better. It seems to me quite an important topic to study and I wonder why it is not happening.
Maybe itās just really hard to study properly but even then it might be worth it.
I am impressed and wish I could do that!
This may not apply to highly intellectual or creative work (as in David__Althausā comment), but I donāt have that kind of job. Tunnel vision is still a potential downside, but that may be mitigated by devoting a part of your work time to maintaining your epistemics.
Something happens when you start working 60+ hours a week where (in my experience) you begin to have blinders to everything else outside of that work.
Maintaining strong mutually beneficially relationships is underrated. And eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables is underrated.
Do you still do the latter when you are in a 60+ h/āweek period?
I canāt agree more. Iāve been to 5 in-person EAG(x) events in total and none of them without problems.
During the conference, I am usually fine. The emotional stuff hits me afterwards, on my way home or the day after.
What to do about it? My plan for the next EAGx is to take at least two days off afterwards, probably even three. Last time I went back to work too quickly, I was very distractable for more than a week. I donāt want to repeat this mistakeāI have responsibilities outside of EA.