postrat philanthropy
in my last semester of college i took an ethics class. in this class we read Singer's Famine, Affluence, and Morality (a).
the essay moved me. the essay troubled me. i didn't want it to be right, but it seemed conceptually correct every step of the way.
what i didn't see at the time is how Singer deploys the analytic philosopher's parlor trick of conjuring a strong emotion, then shuttling that emotion to domains where it doesn't intuitively apply. (this isn't an invalid move, it's just not an obviously correct move... but when done well it can feel obviously correct because of the emotional intuition. hence the parlor trick!)
within a few months, i had taken the Giving What We Can pledge. 10% of my income each year to effective charities!
a few months after that, i was working at GiveWell, a bright-eyed young Research Analyst. it felt like finding my people. it felt like coming home. (here are my "yearly giving" reports from that time: 2014, 2015)
within a year of starting at GiveWell, i had begun to feel some of the limitations of the EA way of being in the world.
for one, i noticed that my "human capital" was much more plastic than i had been previously modeling, and that i could use money to buy (in expectation) increases to my performance & abilities.
because of compounding, the benefits of increasing my human capital early in my career seemed probably enormous. but every dollar i gave to effective charities was a dollar i wasn't investing in myself!
Robin Hanson made a more general version of this point (a) long ago. given the returns to compounding, why not always just keep growing the pot?
the people around me didn't seem as troubled by this. perhaps they were able to navigate the tradeoff more gracefully. i began to feel somewhat alienated from the EA worldway. i retracted my GWWC pledge.
then a whole lot of things happened, all of which netted out in me being no longer an EA and instead being a dharmic tpot postrat technology brother.
for most of that stretch, i didn't donate any money to charity. i did invest a lot in personal development, which has turned out to be a tremendously good idea.
lately i've been resonating with this Nick Cammarata tweet:
the rats usually try their best to do what they believe is good, even if it’s done awkwardly, and I would love to see more of that from the postrats
the earnest desire to do good in a big way is a great virtue of the EA and rationality communities.
postrationality & tpot are in danger of getting sucked into a whirlpool of self-referential irony. i think some EA-flavored earnest do-gooder-ism would be a helpful corrective to those scenes.
but let's not kid ourselves... i don't believe that at my current level of charitable giving, the direct effects of money i donate are moving the impact needle to any meaningful extent. it's truly a drop in the ocean (cue "starfish on the beach" fable).
and i am still young! i am still quite early in my career! the gains to further investment in myself via personal development are likely very large (provided the world isn't snuffed out prematurely). compounding has a long way to run.
indeed i believe that at the current margin, dollar-for-dollar, the positive effects of investing in my human capital via personal development totally dominate the effects of donating to charity.
AND YET i think it is important that i donate some money to charity each year.
mostly it's important as a reminder to myself that this is a thing that i can do that does help other people (build the habit). and to a lesser extent it's important as a symbol, signal-boosting things that matter but aren't well-attended-to by markets or governments.
so this year i'm donating to the following places:
- GiveDirectly – you gotta love the purity of just giving very poor people cash. so fresh and so clean!
- archive.today – earlier this year, the Wayback Machine was attacked and taken down for a long stretch (happily i think they've recovered now). archive.today is the second-most-prominent archival service, maintained by some guy somewhere, and it has been punching way above its weight. who controls the past controls the future.
- Third Opinion – building infrastructure to support whistleblowers at frontier AI labs.
- Zen Community of Oregon – support your local church!
- LandPaths – basically everyone i know, myself included, lives in their head almost all the time and continually underestimates the value of the spending quality time with nature. i recommend visiting the Grove of Old Trees.
- Chaikuni Institute – interesting things are happening in the Amazon. i recommend visiting the Temple of the Way of Light.