Effective Altruism Forum
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by AlyssaVance
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Building effective altruismEffective givingCriticism of effective altruist organizationsCriticism of work in effective altruismDonation pledgeGiving PledgeGiving What We Can
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Yesterday, there was a Facebook thread discussing arguments against the Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledge, where people promise to donate 10% of all future income to charity (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge/). The thread didn't seem very productive, but I do think there are strong arguments against the pledge, at least as it exists now. Hence, I thought I'd write up some of the arguments against, and try to have a better discussion here. Of course, I only speak for myself, not any of the thread participants (though I'd welcome their endorsements if they agree). There are also arguments in favor of the pledge, but since many others have already covered them, I won't be including them here.

First, and most obviously, the pledge recommends a flat 10% donation, regardless of a person's income. The general consensus is that utility of money goes as log(income), so giving a fixed percentage is more painful per unit of good done at lower incomes than higher ones (hence, eg., progressive income taxes). Different professions also have dramatically different ratios of direct impact to money generated. Eg., an American congressman's salary is $174,000, but their votes in Congress are so important that even an 0.1% improvement in voting skill outweighs a $17,400 donation; hence, spending even a tiny amount of effort donating the 10% is likely not worth it. On the other extreme, a high-frequency trading job produces lots of money, but almost no direct impact. Therefore, the best donation percentage will vary hugely from person to person. Given the high human capital and low income of the median effective altruist, my guess is that for many people here, the best percentage is <1%; on the flip side, for a typical billionaire, it might be 90% or more. The GWWC pledge encourages most to donate too much, while lowballing a smaller number of large donors.

Second, the GWWC pledge uses the phrase "for the rest of my life or until the day I retire". This is a very long-term commitment; since most EAs are young (IIRC, ~50% of pledge takers were students when they took it), it might often be for fifty years or more. As EA itself is so young (under five years old, depending on exact definitions), so rapidly growing, and so much in flux, it's probably a bad idea to "lock in" fixed strategies, for the same reason that people who take a new job every month shouldn't buy a house. This is especially true for students, or others who will shortly make large career changes (as 80,000 Hours encourages). People in that position have very little information about their life in 2040, and are therefore in a bad position to make binding decisions about it. In response to this argument, pledge taker Rob Wiblin said that, if he changed his mind about donating 10% every year being the best choice, he would simply un-take the pledge. However, this is certainly not encouraged by the pledge itself, which says "for the rest of my life" and doesn't contemplate leaving.

Third, the number of GWWC pledge takers is used as a very prominent metric within EA. It's listed in bold, 72-point font on the GWWC homepage, was the very first thing mentioned in Will MacAskill's monthly CEA update, and is found in many other places discussing "the state of EA" or EA's growth rate. This is problematic because, as psychologist Dan Ariely says, "you are what you measure". GWWC pledge count is a bad metric for EA as a whole, because:

  • it doesn't account for efficacy of donations; while EA/GWWC encourages donating effectively, an ineffective donor is still included in the total
  • it doesn't account for amount of donations, so five small donors count more than one big donor, even though the big donor probably gives more
  • it doesn't account for direct work (eg. discovering a cure for cancer as a research scientist) at all
  • it creates weird biases regarding timing; possible future donations through ~2060 are totaled on the GWWC homepage, but no adjustment is made for the dramatic differences between 2016 EA/humanity vs. 2060 EA/humanity, creating the illusion of a "perpetual present"

It might be OK to use GWWC pledge count as one metric, measuring one aspect of EA, along with a suite of other metrics that captured what it missed. However, as far as I know, those other metrics more-or-less don't exist right now (I think 80,000 Hours is tracking "number of career changes" internally, but not sure if that's been published anywhere). Quantifying and highlighting this one metric, while not quantifying other things, creates quite a large bias. [EDIT: 80,000 Hours has indeed been publishing this metric, eg. here. However, I still think that it gets much less prominence than the GWWC pledge count. Even within 80K's own post, it's listed below other (IMO much less important) metrics, like web traffic and newsletter subscriber count.)

Fourth, although this isn't explicit in the pledge itself, I think many people taking the pledge intend to donate their 10% to GiveWell-recommended charities. (The GWWC pledge was originally specific to global poverty, and GWWC's charity recommendations largely overlap with GiveWell's.) This seems like a failure to propagate updates. For example, suppose your friend Joe is going camping in Nevada next week; he packs his RV with tents, clothes, food, water, and other equipment. The day before, Joe says he's changed his mind, and is actually camping in the mountains of Alaska. That's all well and good, but now that he's made this change, Joe needs to propagate that change through the other parts of his plan. He can't just buy a new map and drive to a different spot. A change like that will affect what clothes he needs to bring, how he should equip his vehicle, what emergency preparations he should take, what he'll do for fun, and probably even things like who will come with him or what food he carries.

Of course, I don't speak for GiveWell, but my impression is that the initial GiveWell focus was on upper-middle-class people making four-figure donations every holiday season. This has a bunch of implications, but the biggest is that the target audience is mostly busy with work, relatively risk-averse, and is giving away "spare cash" that won't be missed that much (if there's a lean year, they'll just donate less). In that context, the initial GiveWell model (in ~2007-2010) made a lot of sense. However, the GWWC audience is intrinsically different; almost all pledge takers are making a very serious commitment, since it's a substantial fixed fraction of income every year for decades. And since taking the pledge is still relatively "weird", the average pledge taker will be much less risk-averse. Given those assumptions, it makes much more sense to do a lot of research yourself, rather than "outsourcing thinking"; this is especially true given the current deep disagreements in EA on what "the most good" even means. (I also expect it would be much more motivating for the donor.)

Added: Michael Dickens also posted about this last month; I think the arguments largely overlap, but that he fleshes out some of them in more detail. H/T Kit

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AGB 🔸22
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I can think of ok arguments against the pledge, but many of these arguments seem a bit soft/poorly-informed to me. The biggest weakness, which runs throughout the piece, is the lack of a suggested alternative. Should we have no pledge? A pledge that scales with income? Some modifying to account for other substantive ways of contributing to the world (e.g. time)? Or something else entirely?

In general, without a counterfactual in the background all criticism is meaningless, except insofar as it helps point you in the right direction when you do go searching for alternatives.

Apart from that though, on the content itself:

First, and most obviously, the pledge recommends a flat 10% donation, regardless of a person's income.

This is only half-true. I pledged 20%. Some people, esp. those closer to the core of EA, have taken the further pledge (which mandates donating above some level) instead. 10% is the baseline though, and I certainly grant it's the most-talked-about number.

an American congressman's salary is $174,000, but their votes in Congress are so important that even an 0.1% improvement in voting skill outweighs a $17,400 donation; hence, spending even a tiny amount of effort

... (read more)
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MichaelDickens
Tip: If you put a greater-than symbol ">" before a text block, it will turn into a quote. That's much easier to read than using quotation marks for long quotes. > this is quoted text turns into
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AGB 🔸
Edited. Thanks
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AlyssaVance
"In general, without a counterfactual in the background all criticism is meaningless" This seems like a kind of crazy assertion to me. Eg., in 1945, as part of the war against Japan, the US firebombed dozens of Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. (The bombs were intentionally designed to set cities on fire.) Not being a general or historian, I don't have an exact plan in mind for an alternative way for the past US to have spent its military resources. Maybe, if you researched all the options in enough detail, there really was no better alternative. But it seems entirely reasonable to say that the firebombing was bad, and to argue that (if you were around back then) people should maybe think about not doing that. (The firebombing is obviously not comparable to the pledge, I'm just arguing the general principle here.) "This is only half-true. I pledged 20%." The statement was that the pledge recommended 10%, which is true. Of course other people can choose to do other things, but that seems irrelevant. "Citation needed?" The exact numbers aren't important here, but the US federal budget is $3.8 trillion, and the US also has a great deal of influence over both private money and foreign money (through regulations, treaties, precedent, diplomatic pressure, etc.). There are three branches of government, of which Congress is one; Congress has two houses, and there are then 435 representatives in the lower house. Much of the money flow was committed a long time ago (eg. Social Security), and would be very hard to change; on the other hand, a law you pass may keep operating and directing money decades into the future. Averaged over everything, I think you get ~$1 billion a year of total influence, order-of-magnitude; 0.1% of that is $1 million, or 57x the $17,400 personal donation. This is fairly conservative, as it basically assumes that all you're doing is appropriating federal dollars to GiveDirectly or something closely equivalent; there are
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Paul_Crowley
You have a philosopher's instinct to reach for the most extreme example, but in general I recommend against that. There's a pretty simple counterfactual: don't take or promote the pledge.
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Kit
Haven't you just chosen precisely the most extreme counterfactual? Now you have to defend the view that Giving What We Can, run by very smart people who test what they're doing, is causing net harm in expectation.
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Owen Cotton-Barratt
Re. firebombing, I think that the force of the argument there rests on the idea that everyone agrees that there were lots of reasonable alternatives that were better - - that it was unusually bad. I don't think you think that's true in the case of the GWWC pledge?
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AGB 🔸
We may have an intractable disagreement here and it's pretty tangential to the point at hand, but for posterity I'll state my general position below anyway*. More to the point at hand though, if you could actually spell out what you think should be done instead of the GWWC pledge, that'd really help direct the discussion. 'Maybe there should be no pledge at all' is a completely fine response, and for the avoidance of doubt I'm being completely not-sarcastic there. I did do the fermi myself. 0.1% improvement seemed crazy high to me for the time someone might spend deciding their annual donation, so I wouldn't exactly call your calculation 'conservative', but I certainly concede its not crazy. Re. outsourcing, your own calculation suggested a x57 difference. I had a x2 difference. rohinmshah elsewhere had a x3 difference. Given that I don't see why I need to cover more than a couple of orders of magnitude with outsourcing, and we both seem to think that outsourcing can credibly do that. I wouldn't expect outsourcing to help once we're above x50-ish and didn't mean to imply otherwise. So I think we basically agree on the limits of what outsourcing can do, you just seem to have a implied multiplier well in excess of x1000 (otherwise I don't know where 0.0001% and the 'orders of magnitude' comment come from), which I wasn't at all anticipating. Taking that for granted though, your position seems reasonable. Let's compromise by not promoting the GWWC pledge to congresspeople or anyone else who can credibly influence billions of dollars? I think the average federal dollar you can influence is quite a bit worse than Give Directly FWIW, though in my fermi I assumed they were equivalent as well. Why not? Seriously. It's not uncommon for people to move countries in the developed world and incur a 10% higher tax rate in the process. I really doubt most people in that situation ever think about that again after the first couple of years. Ok, sure. Givewell, money moved: h
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Rohin Shah
I disagree with your calculation, I independently made the same calculation below (before seeing yours), and mine comes out with $40,000, which is less than 3x the $17,400, and my confidence interval certainly would include $17,400. (It first came out with $10,000, but your calculation made me realize that I neglected an important factor.) In addition, it seems like a big assumption that you could improve voting skill by 0.1% with a "tiny amount of effort", I disagree pretty strongly there (again, more details in the other comment thread). "It basically assumes that all you're doing is appropriating federal dollars to GiveDirectly or something closely equivalent; there are probably lots of cleverer options." Say what? If I'm understanding you right, it would be better to donate to the US government than to donate to GiveDirectly?
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Kit
GWWC is not firebombing anything, happily. War crimes are obviously bad and need no counterfactual spelled out. The principle you outline does not apply to the pledge because many people (citation) don't think the pledge is obviously bad. To engage these people in productive discourse you need to suggest at least one strategy which could be better.
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Pablo
AlyssaVance isn't outlining a principle. AGB made a general claim about criticism being useless without a counterfactual. AlyssaVance's mention of firebombing was meant as a counterexample to that generalization.
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JoshYou
I'm still pretty confused about why you think donating 10% has to be time-confusing. People who outsource their donation decisions to, say, Givewell might only spend a few hours a year (or a few minutes, depending on how literally we interpret "outsourcing) deciding where to donate.
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Paul_Christiano
I think that donor lotteries are a considerably stronger argument than GiveWell for the claim "donating 10% doesn't have to be time-consuming." Your argument (with GiveWell in place of a lottery) requires that either (a) you think that GiveWell charities are clearly the best use of funds, or (b) by "doesn't have to be time-consuming" you mean "if you don't necessarily want to do the most good." I don't think you should be confused about why someone would disagree with (a), nor about why someone would think that (b) is a silly usage. If there were low-friction donor lotteries, I suspect that most small GiveWell donors would be better-served by gambling up to perhaps $1M and then thinking about it at considerably greater length. I expect a significant fraction of them would end up funding something other than GiveWell top charities. (I was originally supportive but kind of lukewarm about donor lotteries, but I think I've now come around to Carl's level of enthusiasm.)
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Julia_Wise🔸
One reason would be if you think the people should spend the money on saving themselves time.
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BenHoffman
Look out in the world and you'll see lots of people excited about things that don't work or don't do what they say they'll do. Anyone can say they're evidence-backed etc. On outside view, if you only spend a few minutes on your donations each year, how much of the optimization pressure influencing your donations should you expect was marketing skill on the part of the recipient or their patron, vs selecting for actual impact?
Kit5
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Does anyone have specific proposals for what kind of public pledge you would prefer to make, or ask people to make? Including guesses as to who would take or not take such a pledge would be helpful for assessing whether a change would be net positive.

I don't expect CEA to implement changes to the Giving What We Can Pledge any time soon due to the substantial momentum cost but think we should focus on actionable statements to best understand what's going on here.

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Elizabeth
"I pledge to spend N hours/year evaluating how I could do the most good in the world and what the personal cost to me would be, and publish my results." The N hours is still a cost rather than a result, which I dislike. I think the ultimate goal would be a moral aesthetic sense on when you've researched "enough", and pledge to satisfy that. But this gets you one of the main advantages of the GWWC pledge, that it prompts you to donate and to think about your donation, without the cost of locking you in to a numbers. Yes, the pledge is fine with you donating more, but there is no mechanism for deciding when you should do so.
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Eric_Bruylant
I like this! Especially if combined with a Schelling day for doing the thinking (possibly one winter and one summer?).
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Elizabeth
Seattle did this the last two years: https://jsalvatier.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/meetup-retrospective-donation-decision-day-2014/
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Eric_Bruylant
I have one in mind, though it's far from finished. I asked about how the GWWC pledge interacted with my current plans, and was told (by PM) by someone from GWWC that it was within the spirit of the pledge. But, I'd rather pledge something I can follow the letter of, so have been thinking about what I actually want to commit to. I'd like to give myself a north star of something close to: Put all available resources (both time and money), other than those required to maintain myself and those close to me as healthy, productive, and stable, humans, towards things I expect to have a large positive impact on the world. I expect I will end up doing much more good with this as my focus, rather than some fixed % income. I also expect this is true of many of the most consequentially important people, the ones who may start new projects and open up new cause areas.
Ben Pace5
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80,000 Hours does publish their metrics; here's their latest update. The post contains a link to a more thorough explanation of what the metric measures.

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AlyssaVance
Thanks! I'll add that to the post
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Benjamin_Todd
Hi Alyssa, Just to add: Significant plan are our key metric, even though they're listed below the others in that document. (I listed them in order of the conversion funnel rather than importance.) We publish updates about every 2 weeks here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/80k_updates Also, we rate the plan changes on "counterfactual impact", and track the quality adjusted total. This is very rough, but much better than just tracking the simple number.
Marcus_Aurelius4
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A couple of points:

First, and most obviously, the pledge recommends a flat 10% donation

That's not entirely correct. The pledge says "I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn".

The GWWC pledge encourages most to donate too much, while lowballing a smaller number of large donors.

I think someone who is a large donor and a GWWC member would realize that he or she easily could (and probably should) give a good bit more than 10%. My perception of GWWC's communication is that their primary target audience are not potential large donors b... (read more)

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Rohin Shah3
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Strong agree with the third point, weak agree with the second point (the difference between a house and the pledge is that a house costs a fixed amount of money every month, whereas the pledge is a percentage of income), weak disagree with the fourth point (I think the pledge isn't that weird, and that of those who give to GiveWell as a default, that would not be any different if GWWC were not around), and strong disagree with the first point (see below).

TL;DR of the rest: I disagree with the first criticism. I agree that the benefits to cost ratio changes... (read more)

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Rohin Shah
Reading the estimate in a different thread, it turns out I forgot one factor -- the laws passed by Congressmen can last decades into the future, and so have an impact there. This will in general tend to cancel out the effect where "most of the budget is already committed and can't be changed", so I should undo that, which was a multiplier of 4x, getting you to an estimate of $40,000, which is still at the point where my uncertainty includes $17,400. So like maybe 70% belief that 0.1% improvement in voting skill is better than $17,400 donated to the global poor. I still stand by my second claim that a "tiny amount of effort" would definitely not increase voting skill by 0.1%.
nysia2
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I think your third reason listed above makes a lot of presumptions about why the GWWC pledge is currently used as a key metric of GWWC and CEA. You appear to believe that the number of GWWC pledgers is currently being used as a catch-all proxy for the status of EA and its associated impact, which it isn’t. It makes perfect sense for GWWC (and by extension CEA) to use their own pledge figures as a metric for many purposes, including (but not limited to):

  • To generate interest in prospective new members of GWWC, or those who want to find out more, as a publ
... (read more)
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Benjamin_Todd2
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Thanks for moving this post to here rather than FB. I think it's a good discussion, however, I wanted to flag:

None of these criticisms are new to me. I think all of them have been discussed in some depth within CEA.

This makes me wonder if the problem is actually a failure of communication. Unfortunately, issues like this are costly to communicate outside of the organisation, and it often doesn't seem like the best use of time, but maybe that's wrong.

Given this, I think it also makes sense to run critical posts past the organisation concerned before posting... (read more)

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mmKALLL
Why are issues like these costly to communicate outside of CEA, and why don't they seem like the best use of time? I'm not sure about what amount of interest is there for something like that, but I would imagine that this could sharply reduce the amount of investigating people outside of these organizations need to do, allowing them to use their time better as well. Do you know whether there have there been any serious efforts to gauge the usefulness and cost of better communication?
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Benjamin_Todd
Topics like this are sensitive and complex, so it can take a long time to write them up well. It's easy to get misunderstood or make the organisation look bad. At the same time, the benefits might be slight, because (i) it doesn't directly contribute to growth (if users have common questions, then add them to the FAQ and other intro materials) or (ii) fundraising (if donors have questions, speak to them directly). Remember that GWWC is getting almost 100 pledges per month atm, and very few come from places like this forum. More broadly, there's a huge number of pressing priorities. There's lots of other issues GWWC could write about but hasn't had time to as well. If you're wondering whether GWWC has thought about these kinds of questions, you can also just ask them. They'll probably respond, and if they get a lot of requests to answer the same thing, they'll probably write about it publicly. With figuring out strategy (e.g. whether to spend more time on communication with the EA community or something else) GWWC writes fairly lengthy public reviews every 6-12 months.
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Benquo
Ben_Todd, it seems to me like you're saying both these things: * GWWC is very busy and can’t reasonably be expected to write up all or most of the important considerations around things like whether or not to take the GWWC Pledge. * Considerations around the pledge are in GWWC's domain, & sensitive, so people should check in with GWWC privately before discussing them publicly, and failing to do so is harmful in expectation. I'm having a hard time reconciling these. In particular, it seems like if you make both these claims, you're basically saying that EAs shouldn't publicly criticize the pledge without GWWC's permission because that undercuts GWWC's goals. That seems very surprising to me. Am I misunderstanding you?
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Benjamin_Todd
I feel like you're straw manning my position. For instance, this: Does not mean:
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BenHoffman
Do you disagree with the first bullet point? Or do you disagree with the second? Or do you disagree that they jointly imply something like the bit you quoted?
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Benjamin_Todd
I disagree with several parts. Most importantly, I don't think criticising GWWC publicly is harmful in expectation, just that it has costs, so is sometimes harmful. Second, I think a policy of discussing criticisms with GWWC before making them public reduces these harms, so is a reasonable policy for people to consider. But, I'm not saying you need GWWC's permission to post criticism.
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BenHoffman
That's good to hear. But I didn't think you were saying that criticism is generally harmful - I thought you were saying that failing to check in with GWWC first is harmful in expectation. If so, I'm curious what the most important scenarios are in which it could cause harm to start this sort of conversation in public rather than in private. If not, when do you think this advice does help? It additionally seemed like you thought that this advice should be applied, not just to criticism of GWWC's own conduct, but to criticism of the idea of the pledge itself - which is already public, and not entirely specific to GWWC, as organizations like The Life You Can Save and REG promote similar pledges. I got this impression because Alyssa's post is limited to discussion of the public pledge itself.
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Linch
EDIT: Ben H's comment below convincingly illustrated that I misunderstood him. I apologize for contributing to any misinformation. EDIT 2: Looking upwards of the comment chain, I think this is a very reasonable reading of Benquo's comment: "I'm having a hard time reconciling these. In particular, it seems like if you make both these claims, you're basically saying that EAs shouldn't publicly criticize the pledge without GWWC's permission because that undercuts GWWC's goals. That seems very surprising to me. Am I misunderstanding you?" I think my mistake is that in haste, I confused the different Bens with similar (but far from identical) opinions and formed an inaccurate model. Original post: Reposted from FB, I apologize if the language here is less polished than desired. 1) It's a common courtesy for journalists (and GiveWell) to message the organizations they're writing about for a response. 2) Sometimes said organizations are too busy, etc. to respond to said criticisms. 3) Ben Todd suggested that we have this norm in EA as well. 4) My interpretation of 1)+2) means you give people a chance to respond/comment to your criticism before airing it, especially if there are contexts that are missing. 5) Most others have taken 1), 2) and 3) to necessarily imply that orgs should have the right to waive criticism before they appear on air. I believe 5) is incorrect because it is very different from the base cases I am aware of (GiveWell asks charities to comment before publishing their charity reports, journalists asking for a comment from people they write about). Why are people taking 5) as the default interpretation here?
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BenHoffman
For what it's worth, your comment helped me clarify my position, and I wish I'd been able to express myself that clearly earlier. Also, somewhat embarrassingly, I am also Benquo (I think I accidentally signed up once via mobile, forgot, and signed up again via desktop.) Hopefully I'll remember to just use this login going forward.
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BenHoffman
I don't think that Ben Todd is proposing (5). I think he's proposing (4), and that this proposed norm would effectively be a tax on criticism. Taxes aren't as costly as bans, and can be good if they pay for something good enough, but in this case I don't think it's worth it. In particular, applying journalistic standards to criticism of, but not praise of, EA orgs' behavior seems like a weird position to take if what you're interested in is improving the quality of public information.
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Linch
Ah, I'm so sorry for misunderstanding you! I came here from another post which quoted Ben T's comment: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/ I think upon reflection that while my statement of 5) is too strong, it's a plausible reading even there, and one that these comments point to. ie, "shushing critics" isn't the same thing as explicit censorship, but it's not that far away. (Also, Benquo's comment implies this more directly) Ah, that's a good point about my inconsistency. I will need to think about this more clearly.
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mmKALLL
Upon revisiting this post and the comments it has garnered, I found myself wondering about another thing I'd like to ask from you: How would one go about getting involved with the work of CEA or, say, 80,000 Hours? What kinds of skill sets would be essential for having a high impact while doing such meta work? Do you consider the potential impact for doing meta work to be higher than when earning to give? Also, thanks for the detailed responses so far! I can see why it's not reasonable to place writing on topics like these on high priority, but it doesn't exactly give a sense of transparency either. Not that I would know how important or effective giving a sense of transparency would be, though.
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Robert_Wiblin
Do you mean it would save them time deciding whether to take the pledge given the pros and cons, or deciding what they think of Giving What We Can or CEA's strategy?
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Paul_Christiano
I assume this discussion is mostly aimed at people outside of CEA who are considering whether to take and help promote the pledge. I think there are many basic points which those people should probably understand but which CEA (understandably) isn't keen to talk about, and it is reasonable for people outside of CEA to talk about them instead. I expect this discussion wasn't worth the time at any rate, but it seems like sharing it with CEA isn't really going to save time on net.
RomeoStevens2
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I think this topic is confusing because it mashes together four different difficult considerations: doing the most good with your available resources, the opportunity/obligation distinction, the effects of various schemes for spreading ea memes (and which ones get spread more), and the issues with precommitments in a world with a short prediction horizon. Each of these issues has a range of reasonable positions, which means that the total space of positions on the gwwc pledge is large and difficult to enumerate cleanly.

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Eric_Bruylant2
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Why I'm hesitant to take the current pledge, and what I want to commit to instead.

I feel that added separation between people improving the world in ways other than donation from the ones focusing on donating is fairly bad, from the point of view of information exchange and movement dynamics (though I think GWWC is likely net-positive, despite this).

I'd love a version of GWWC which allowed people to customize a pledge (or pick from a selection, or switch between them, or something which lets people who want to do good and have reason to think that working ... (read more)

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Robert_Wiblin2
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"Rob Wiblin said that, if he changed his mind about donating 10% every year being the best choice, he would simply un-take the pledge. However, this is certainly not encouraged by the pledge itself, which says "for the rest of my life" and doesn't contemplate leaving."

Hi Alyssa - FYI, the FAQ about the pledge says the following:

"How does it work? Is it legally binding?

The Pledge is not a contract and is not legally binding. It is, however, a public declaration of lasting commitment to the cause. It is a promise, or oath, to

... (read more)
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Dawn Drescher
Huh, that’s not what “pledge” means to me. One important purpose of the pledge that I saw was as insurance against an evil future me. If I thought that working in some high-earning career might corrupt me, then I could take the pledge in order to force future me to comply with current me’s will. Since I learned of the pledge in 2014, I’ve been fully intent on donating at least 10% of my income throughout my life, but since my impression has always been that current me was smarter and cooler than past me, I only took the Try Giving pledge with a timeframe such that if I changed my mind about the pledge, I could pay off the remaining years from savings alone. If I take a pledge and call it a pledge, then it doesn’t matter if it ends up going contrary to my moral goals; I still have to follow through. So a pledge that you can un-take is incompatible with my understanding of what a pledge is, and I’m not sure if the FAQ can change that since it’s not part of the pledge text. I would feel iffy about taking it and calling it a pledge, since that would diminish the value of my word. A term like “statement of intent” may be more appropriate, right? I don’t think that’s sensible. Think of Parfit’s hitchhiker and suppose it’s not someone good at reading facial expressions but someone how see’s your T-shirt that says “Hi, I’m a consequentialist EA and GWWC pledge taker.” And you say “I pledge to give you $100 once we reach a town.” The driver is will be like “I know you EA folks: You’d much rather donate those $100 and produce much more utility than I ever would with them. And your pledge means nothing to me since you’ll just un-take it when we’re in town.” Un-taking pledges commits one to only ever cooperating with agents that are so highly value-aligned that there is no conceivable way you could defect against them.
-6
Robert_Wiblin
2
atucker
I think that people shouldn't donate at least 10% of their income if they think that doing so interferes with the best way for them to do good, but I don't think that the current pledge or FAQ supports breaking it for that reason. Coming to the conclusion that donating >=10% of one's income is not the best way to do good does not seem like a normal interpretation of "serious unforeseen circumstances". A version of the pledge that I would be more interested in would be one that's largely the same, but has a clause to the effect that I can stop donating if I stop thinking that it's the best way to do good, and have engaged with people in good faith in coming to that decision.
2
Benjamin_Todd
I'm sympathetic to this, and didn't fulfill the pledge for several years early in CEA when we paid ourselves very little (initially only £15k pa!). However, I'm now fulfilling it and intend to make up the years when I didn't.
vipulnaik2
0
0

"The general consensus is that utility of money goes as log(income), so giving a fixed percentage is more painful at lower incomes than higher ones"

Seems to me from the math that if it's literally log then giving a fixed percentage of income has exactly the same effect on utility regardless of income level.

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AlyssaVance
The personal utility cost of giving 10% is approximately constant, but the benefit/cost ratio definitely isn't, since benefit (the numerator) increases linearly with income. I've edited this sentence to make it clearer.
1
Rohin Shah
I think you mean benefit increases linearly with income? Alternatively, perhaps you meant that benefit increases exponentially with cost (since cost is log income)?
0
AlyssaVance
Yup, you're right, thanks
Larks1
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0

In response to this argument, pledge taker Rob Wiblin said that, if he changed his mind about donating 10% every year being the best choice, he would simply un-take the pledge. However, this is certainly not encouraged by the pledge itself, which says "for the rest of my life" and doesn't contemplate leaving.

I think this is a pretty strong argument. We would expect CEA leaders to be the people who take the pledge the most seriously; it is a very negative sign if they regard it as an artifice that can be discarded for convenience.

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Robert_Wiblin
I've taken the pledge because I think it's a morally good thing to do and it's useful to have commitment strategies to help you live up to what you think is right. I expect to follow through, because I expect to believe that keeping the pledge is the right thing for me to do. If it turns out to be bad, I will no longer do it, because there's no point having a commitment device to prompt you to follow through on something you don't think you should do. That's the only sensible way to act.
8
Elizabeth
What is the situation where: 1. Giving is the correct thing to do 2. You wouldn't give (or would give less) if you hadn't signed the pledge 3. You will would give (more) because you have signed the pledge. I think a disconnect here is that for many people, including myself, saying "I will do this for life" literally means "I will do this for life", with the compromise position being "I will do this unless it will end my life." It's not a commitment device, it's a commitment, and if you take it giving less than 10% becomes morally wrong, even if absent the pledge giving 10% would be a bad idea.
1
Robert_Wiblin
Easy - if some year I feel like spending the money on myself; or I'm just too lazy to figure out where to give and do it; or maybe I even forget about giving. Then the pledge reminds me that I thought in the past - and probably also on reflection think now - that I ought to donate the money, and makes me more likely to follow through. Just as if I'd agreed to go to the gym with a friend, etc. For me, being highly involved in the EA community, this commitment device is probably redundant, but it also doesn't do any harm. It's clear people have different attitudes to how bad it is to break a promise, and how strongly they take the pledge to bind them. For me it's a statement of my ideals, which I expect to be quite stable. But it's not a commitment that forces me to act against my better judgement at any future time. Nor would I want it to have that effect on others.
5
MichaelDickens
I disagree with this reasoning. The point of a commitment device is to, you know, commit you. If you can break a pledge whenever you want, it's not actually a pledge. If you commit yourself to something, it's because you think there's a possibility that you will change your mind in the future and you want to prevent that from happening. So the commitment serves no purpose if it doesn't actually prevent you from changing your mind. Perhaps there's value in publicly registering "I plan on donating 10%" without explicitly committing to it, in which case it shouldn't be framed as a commitment.
-1
Robert_Wiblin
There are different levels and types of commitment devices. One could use a pledge to bind oneself to continue giving even if in future you think it's the wrong thing to do - but I'm more skeptical that that is a good idea, for the reasons people have given. And I don't think most pledgers see themselves as binding their future behaviour this way. It's also not how I'm using it, and it is still useful to me as a more gentle reminder of what I think is morally desirable behaviour. Just as agreeing to go to meet your friends at the gym is helpful even though it won't (and isn't designed to) force you to go to the gym even if you are e.g. injured or decide that gymming actually harms your health.
4
Ben Pace
I think I'd be quite happy to have a public thing of the sort that Rob describes, but I don't feel that's what the GWWC pledge is.
Kit1
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Are there specific people who shouldn't take the pledge as-is other than the small minority MichaelDickens highlighted, plus the politicians proposed above?

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AlyssaVance
I don't think it's at all clear that the people Michael highlighted are a small minority as a percentage of deeply committed EAs. A small minority among all Westerners, sure, but that's not the relevant reference class. (Thanks for the link BTW, have added to the post)
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Kit
Strongly movement-affiliated EAs are not dominant in the pledge reference class. Evidence: * 2,294 people have taken the pledge already. (See current here.) * GWWC donations appear dominated by a handful of multi-millionaires who were drawn to the community by a meaningful pledge rather than first getting involved in the movement.
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MichaelDickens
If you take the reference class as people reading the EA Forum rather than people who've taken the GWWC pledge, Alyssa could be right. So it depends on whether the question is "should people who are reading this take the pledge" or "should the pledge exist/should we try really hard to promote it".
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Kit
Indeed. Knowing what the proposal is would help here.
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Ajeya
It seems like "deeply committed" is doing a lot of work there. In the last EA survey, it seemed like the median donation from a person who identified as "EA", listed "earning to give" as their career, was not a student, and believed they should give now rather than give later was $1933. At typical starting software engineer salaries (which I would guess is a typical career for a median "earning to give" EA), this represents a 1-5% donation. This suggests the pledge would increase the donations of over 50% of EAs who list their primary career path as earning to give (so the argument that the mental effort needed to keep the pledge would distract from their careers doesn't apply). Link to analysis here: https://www.facebook.com/bshlgrs/posts/10208520740630756?match=YnVjayBzaGxlZ2VyaXMsc2hsZWdlcmlzLHN1cnZleSxidWNr Edit: Speaking for myself only, not my employer.
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Dan_Keys
It appears that this analysis did not account for when people became EAs. It looked at donations in 2014, among people who in November 2015 were nonstudent EAs on an earning to give path. But less than half of those people were nonstudent EAs on an earning to give path at the start of 2014. In fact, less than half of the people who took the Nov 2015 survey were EAs at the start of 2014. I've taken a look at the dataset, and among the 1171 EAs who answered the question about 2014 donations: 40% first got involved in EA in 2013 or earlier 21% first got involved in EA in 2014 28% first got involved in EA in 2015 11% did not answer the question about when they got involved in EA This makes all of the analyses of median 2014 donation extremely misleading, unless they're limited to pre-2014 EAs (which they generally have not been). I'm hoping that the next EA survey will do better with this issue. I believe the plan is to wait until January in order to ask about 2016 donations, which is a good start. Hopefully they will also focus on pre-2016 EAs when looking at typical donation size, since the survey will include a bunch of new EAs who we wouldn't necessarily expect to see donating within their first few months as an EA. (Also speaking for myself only, not my employer.)
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Ajeya
Thanks Dan! I didn't know this, I'll look more closely at the data when I get the chance.
Daniel_Dewey0
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The pledge is really important to me as a part of my EA life and (I think) as a part of our community infrastructure, and I find your critiques worrying. I'm not sure what to do, but I appreciate you taking the critic's risk to help the community. Thank you!

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Sanjay0
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This post was prompted by some pretty strongly held opinions on a facebook thread. AlyssaVance has posted something here in language I can understand (thank you Alyssa). I would love to see those strongly held opinions from the facebook post shared here

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kbog0
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Second, the GWWC pledge uses the phrase "for the rest of my life or until the day I retire". This is a very long-term commitment; since most EAs are young (IIRC, ~50% of pledge takers were students when they took it), it might often be for fifty years or more. As EA itself is so young (under five years old, depending on exact definitions), so rapidly growing, and so much in flux, it's probably a bad idea to "lock in" fixed strategies, for the same reason that people who take a new job every month shouldn't buy a house. This is especial

... (read more)
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1
BenHoffman
How does it do that? Is that effect stable under conditions where people don't see the pledge as a binding promise?
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