Nov 10
Funding strategy week
Nov 17
Marginal funding week
Nov 24
Donation election
Dec 8
Why I donate week
A week to share the personal stories and reasons behind our donations. Read more.
Dec 15
Donation celebration
Executive summary: The author argues that, given the moral weight of conscious experience and the role of luck in determining life circumstances, a voluntary simplicity pledge tied to the world’s average income lets them meet their ethical duties while still maintaining a balanced and meaningful life.
Key points:
1. The author claims conscious moments have intrinsic importance and that ignoring others’ suffering amounts to endorsing harmful systems.
2. The author argues most advantages and disadvantages in life stem from luck, so they do not view their own wealth as morally deserved.
3. The author states that effective donations can do large amounts of good, citing estimates of $3,000 to $5,500 per life saved and 126,000 cage-free years for chickens per equivalent spending.
4. The author describes voluntary simplicity research, citing Hook et al. (2021) as finding a consistent positive relationship between voluntary simplicity and well-being.
5. The author explains they set their salary to roughly the world’s average income adjusted for London (£26,400 in 2025) and donate earnings above that.
6. The author reports that living this way feels non-sacrificial, supports long-term financial security, and aligns their actions with their values while recognizing others’ differing circumstances.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
"I don’t think there’s an especially important sense in which “my” money is mine; I think the state would be justified in expropriating and redistributing way more of my income.[3]"
I've been interested to see this (or a similar) sentiment expressed over a number of posts which was quite unexpected!
For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with the idea that I'm among the wealthiest people in the history of the human race. I have goals and life projects that most people would never even dream of having the opportunity to pursue. Who am I to have deserved such a privilege among other people? What makes me so special? I'm not special, and the fact that I have all this privilege and wealth fills me with guilt. By donating a portion of my income to charity and contributing to efforts to help make the world a better place, these feelings of guilt are substantially weakened. That's part of the reason why I give - to not feel as guilty.
Another part is that it makes my life more meaningful. By contributing to a cause greater than myself, my life feels purposeful; hopefully the good I do will have positive effects for long after I'm dead.
This year, I have given money to a range of EA cause areas. Most of it has either been towards global health and development, or EA infrastructure I believe does or could lead to effective fundraising for global health and development.
The following are a list of very selfish personal reasons why I like to do this. I feel the selfless reasons have been adequately covered elsewhere, so I'm intentionally leaving them off.
I get to ignore ineffective charity adverts.
In order to genuinely convince myself that I am helping, I want to see things like well-regarded cost-effectiveness metrics. I do not like heartstring-tugging advertising or vague statements of "should", particularly to do with orphanages. They make me feel a bit ill. So I am glad that donating effectively gives me a very good justification to ignore them.
It is a marker of my politics.
I don't believe that poor people I don't know in rich countries are 100× more worthy of my help [i.e. worthy of help that's 100× less cost-efficient] than poor people in poor countries. This is because I don't believe anyone is 100× more worthy than anyone. Choosing to donate based on the cost-effectiveness of helping is making a radical political statement about equality.
It's also quite anti-nationalist, and I like that, because I think excessive nationalism is wrecking havoc on my country right now.
Giving expresses abundance.
I earn approximately the median income in my country (the UK). This is not a lot, relatively, although it's high in absolute terms compared to the rest of the world. I earn less than my siblings, for example, and less than many people I interact with in my hobbies. I do, however, earn something that many people who earn more than me don't: "enough". So much enough, indeed, that 10% less is still "enough".
By stepping away from lifestyle creep and the related creeping beliefs of feeling personally put upon by not having enough to spend, I have found a sense of quiet abundance. I live my lif
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@Gemma 🔸 is hosting a co-writing session this Sunday, for people who would like to write "Why I Donate" posts. The plan is to work in poms, and publish something during the session.
They should call ALLFED's research "The Recipice".
The mental health EA cause space should explore more experimental, scalable interventions, such as promoting anti-inflammatory diets at school/college cafeterias to reduce depression in young people, or using lighting design to reduce seasonal depression. What I've seen of this cause area so far seems focused on psychotherapy in low-income countries. I feel like we're missing some more out-of-the-box interventions here. Does anyone know of any relevant work along these lines?
When thinking about the impacts of AI, I’ve found it useful to distinguish between different reasons for why automation in some area might be slow. In brief:
1. raw performance issues
2. trust bottlenecks
3. intrinsic premiums for “the human factor”
4. adoption lag
5. motivated/active protectionism towards humans
I’m posting this mainly because I’ve wanted to link to this a few times now when discussing questions like "how should we update on the shape of AI diffusion based on...?". Not sure how helpful it will be on its own!
----------------------------------------
In a bit more detail:
(1) Raw performance issues
There’s a task that I want an AI system to do. An AI system might be able to do it in the future, but the ones we have today just can’t do it.
For instance:
* AI systems still struggle to stay coherent over long contexts, so it’s often hard to use an AI system to build out a massive codebase without human help, or write a very consistent detective novel.
* Or I want an employee who’s more independent; we can get aligned on some goals and they will push them forward, coming up with novel pathways, etc.
* (Other capability gaps: creativity/novelty, need for complicated physical labor, …)
A subclass here might be performance issues that are downstream of “interface mismatch”.[1] Cases where AI might be good enough at some fundamental task that we’re thinking of (e.g. summarizing content, or similar), but where the systems that surround that task or the interface through which we’re running the thing — which are trivial for humans — is a very poor fit for existing AI, and AI systems struggle to get around that.[2] (E.g. if the core concept is presented via a diagram, or requires computer use stuff.) In some other cases, we might separately consider whether the AI systems has the right affordances at all.
This is what we often think about when we think about the AI tech tree / AI capabilities. Others are often important, though:
(2) Veri
I live in Australia, and am interested in donating to the fundraising efforts of MIRI and Lightcone Infrastructure, to the tune of $2,000 USD for MIRI and $1,000 USD for Lightcone. Neither of these are tax-advantaged for me. Lightcone is tax advantaged in the US, and MIRI is tax advantaged in a few countries according to their website.
Anyone want to make a trade, where I donate the money to a tax-advantaged charity in Australia that you would otherwise donate to, and you make these donations? As I understand it, anything in Effective Altruism Australia would work. Since my tax bill is expected to be about 1/3rd this year, I'm open to matching up to 4.5k USD for this instead of 3k, which will cost me about 3k in the long run. This will not funge against my existing 10% donations to global health, it's on top of them, so you get all that sweet, sweet counterfactual impact.
If he's still around, @Mitchell Laughlin🔸 can confirm that I've successfully done a match like this before across a longer timeframe and larger total amount.