Thank you! This post is hyper relevant to me right now—I’m mid career in finance, earning to give, it’s OK but don’t necessarily love it, thinking of alternatives, part of what’s holding me back is the sense that I would do much less good elsewhere (and also a general risk aversion born of earlier-in-life relative poverty, admittedly). This has provided some helpful food for thought.
Paulindrome
Karma: 23
I work in energy and infrastructure financing for a large bank in the UK, and don’t have a background in business or finance.
This is amazing data, and not what I would have expected—I’ve just had my mind changed on the predictability of invention success. Thanks!
This, for me, is why I mainly engage with simple rules (give 10% of income through payroll giving to Givewell recommended charities, don’t eat meat) and only occasionally do deep dives into the fundamental philosophy or actual individual suffering.
I don’t so much disengage as just get really sad, which on the one hand, yes, the world has a ton of suffering in it, but also it’s hard to operate with that level of sadness constantly. The engagement/reading for me is more like a ‘sadness top-up’ once in a while to make sure I stick to my rules.
Thanks for writing this! I’ve just returned to work after six months off with my first child (my wife took the first six months, I took the second, we live in the UK where luckily that’s a protected right), and have been finding it extremely challenging, so good to hear from people who made it work. My wife and I also share 50⁄50, and the ability to take shifts has certainly made it more viable (and I don’t mind the long Sunday walks with baby and dog while she works!)
I’d agree with a few comments highlighted—there are maybe a few people who spend their time totally optimally, but for me, having a kid mainly meant less time drinking and playing video games. The quality and quantity of my friendships has suffered, but that is largely down to a combination of me not making an appropriate effort to make friends during the time off, and being a man at baby activities.
The cost of childcare is indeed not cheap, but in the context of earning-to-give (which I do) it’s a relatively straightforward trade-off.
Agree with you re: overpopulation (that, and most readers are likely to live in areas where the total fertility rate is well under 2), and adoption—if anyone is considering adoption as an alternative to conception (assuming the latter is an option), please be sure you’ve looked into it—improvements in medicine mean there just aren’t that many healthy-but-parentless kids around these days. I was relatively neutral on the conception-vs-adoption topic (I tend to have the impulse to take care of every baby/dog/bird/sad person I pass by anyway), but I had a realistic think to myself about my ability and willingness to look after a severely disabled child by choice.
With regards to my feelings about effective altruism, if anything, my feelings have become stronger. I actually cried while listening to an interview on 80k hours regarding malaria and imagining my own child going through that, and separately, that the year 2100 has suddenly become a real year, rather than just an abstraction of the future; my daughter, right here, is likely to be alive then!