I’m a researcher at Forethought; before that, I ran the non-engineering side of the EA Forum (this platform), ran the EA Newsletter, and worked on some other content-related tasks at CEA. [More about the Forum/CEA Online job.]
Selected posts
Background
I finished my undergraduate studies with a double major in mathematics and comparative literature in 2021. I was a research fellow at Rethink Priorities in the summer of 2021 and was then hired by the Events Team at CEA. I later switched to the Online Team. In the past, I’ve also done some (math) research and worked at Canada/USA Mathcamp.
Thanks for engaging! Quick thoughts:
Yeah, I don’t expect to be passing on a nontrivial inheritance to kids. Pledging to do something specific here currently seems unfeasible, though; I have no idea what the world will be like when I’m in my 70s. Examples of weirdness (even setting aside AI developments): maybe we’ve made serious medical breakthroughs and I’m still expecting to work for a long time, maybe money works in seriously different ways, etc. I haven’t thought about this much, though, and it might be worth thinking about (e.g. maybe there’s a nicely operationalized pledge that could work).[1]
Thanks!
I think I fairly strongly disagree here, and might have been unclear in the original post. My runway-helps-epistemics point was not meant as a security measure for myself/personal protection against hardship, but rather as a point about potentially dangerous biases. My broad argument here is something like this:
(A) Organizations sometimes turn sour/I might discover things about organizations that employ or fund me that are not ok (at least according to me)
(Note that I don’t think readers should infer things about my current employers and funders from this comment. I’m still at CEA for a reason! But I’ve heard stories that make me aware of this problem.)
(B) If I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders, I will be afraid to do things like the following:
Quit in order to voice protest or speak more freely, if I find out something very bad
Do things that might upset my employers/funders (over which they might fire me), like asking questions they might not want asked, etc.
Actually investigate worries I have, knowing that I might discover things that mean I can no longer endorse continuing my current work
Etc.
(C) It seems plausible that I should still do the things above even if I’m extremely financially dependent on my employers/funders. But it’s very scary, and it might make me mentally flinch away from considering actions like this. I.e. it might make me biased against doing the above in worlds where I should. I think this is quite bad.
What Elizabeth says here resonates with me/seems reasonable: getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap is an underrated strategy
This section of a recent post is probably also relevant, as well as this one.
While we’re talking about alternative pledges; I’ve considered taking a more general pledge to use some significant portion of the resources I have (and will have) for impartially altruistic purposes, with some carve-outs for other important values (like supporting family if something happens). I’d obviously need to operationalize it a lot better, and I haven’t dedicated much time to thinking about it yet, but this seems more plausible to me right now.
I guess that if I were to prioritize thinking about this, I’d probably want to first think through the main goals of pledges and make sure a pledge like this is actually accomplishing something I think is important, instead of just allowing me to say something when pledges come up, etc. E.g. maybe the main benefit of a donation pledge is its public+memetic quality—it encourages others to donate more. Or maybe it’s about value drift, or something else, etc.