Hide table of contents

I'll be interviewing Allan Saldanha on Tuesday December 10th. I'll release a podcast version of the interview and a transcript a few days after we record. Leave a comment here if you'd like me to ask Allan a question on your behalf!

A message from Allan:

My name is Allan Saldanha, I’m a 47 year old compliance testing manager at an investment bank and I’m married with a wife and twin 16 year old boys.

I have been a Giving What We Can member since 2014.

In my first year after taking the pledge, I gave away 20% of my income. However I had been able to save and invest much of my disposable income from my relatively well paid career before taking the pledge and so had built up strong financial security for myself and my family. As a result, I increased my donations over time and since 2019, have given away 75% of my income. 

Since taking the pledge- I’ve earned £1.2m and given away 60%. I’m full of admiration for the many young GWWC members who have taken the pledge as students or early in their working lives without any significant savings, and their generosity has also motivated me to increase my donations.

Initially I made all my donations to anti-malaria and deworming charities, however when I read about the scale of wild animal suffering I started donating to animal welfare charities. I have also donated to the EA infrastructure fund and EA organisations.

However when I read that Toby Ord and other experts believed there was a 1 in 6 chance of complete extinction of human life in the next 100 years I was shocked and decided that I should give almost all my donations to longtermist funds.

I currently split my donations between the Longview Philanthropy Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long Term Future Fund- I believe in giving to funds and letting experts with much more knowledge than me identify the best donation opportunities.

The best article I’ve seen on earning to give is this forum post by AGB.

I’m happy to take any questions on Earning to Give although I don't think I’d have many insights on picking good donation targets.

Some topics you might want to ask about:

  • How Allan first got into giving.
  • What helps Allan stay motivated after over a decade of giving.
  • How Allan decides where his money goes.

I'll ask a bunch of my own questions as well, if there aren't enough for an hour-long interview here. Thanks all!

83

0
0
3

Reactions

0
0
3
Comments13
Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

I'm curious how you first got interested in giving, especially as Giving What We Can skewed towards students and (very) young professionals at the time.

What motivated you to increase the percentages over time?

How do your wife and teenage children feel about your giving?

I'd be curious about the emotional journey of increasing the giving percentages.

I just made my 10% pledge very recently and am really struggling to find the right percentage to donate. Currently, with a 65k € base income, I just go with the 10% pre-tax and put 50% of my bonuses post-tax on top.

One month, I think I am donating too little. The next month, I'm scared of saving too little. It sometimes feels hard to justify to myself that increasing it further is the right thing to do, since everyone I know saves most of the money for themselves and there's essentially 0 positive feedback for donating. The money is just gone. 

Could you describe how these decisions to increase came to be and what it did to you emotionally? Did you have times of doubt, or did every step feel right?

Not a question, but simply: thank you, Allan! What you do is amazing, and really cool. Kudos! 

First just wanted to say that this:

In my first year after taking the pledge, I gave away 20% of my income. However I had been able to save and invest much of my disposable income from my relatively well paid career before taking the pledge and so had built up strong financial security for myself and my family. As a result, I increased my donations over time and since 2019, have given away 75% of my income. 


...is really inspiring :).

I'm interested in knowing more about how Allan decides where to donate. For example:

I currently split my donations between the Longview Philanthropy Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long Term Future Fund- I believe in giving to funds and letting experts with much more knowledge than me identify the best donation opportunities.

How did Allan arrive at this decision, and how confident does he feel in it? Also, how connected does Allan feel with other EtG'ers who are giving a similar amounts based on a similar worldview?

Where will the podcast be released?

It'll be on the EA Forum curated and popular podcast feed, but I'll post a transcript and links on the Forum as well. 

What are his thoughts on impact-based giving?

What do you mean by "impact-based giving"? Do you mean giving that considers effectiveness (like any effective giving), or do you mean high upside, low likelihood of success giving?

Hits based giving sorry! I wrote too fast.

Thanks, Toby and Allan.

However when I read that Toby Ord and other experts believed there was a 1 in 6 chance of complete extinction of human life in the next 100 years I was shocked and decided that I should give almost all my donations to longtermist funds.

@Allan_Saldanha, I encourage you to check David Thorstad’s series exaggerating the risks. I think Toby's and other experts' guesses for the risk of human extinction are unreasonably high. For example, I estimated a nearterm annual extinction risk from nuclear war of 5.93*10^-12, which is only 1.19*10^-6 (= 5.93*10^-12/(5*10^-6)) of the 5*10^-6 that I understand Toby Ord assumed in The Precipice.

1/6 might be high, but perhaps not too many orders of magnitude off. There is an interview in the 80000hours podcasts (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-karger-forecasting-existential-risks/) about a forecasting contest in which experts and superforecasters estimated AI extinction risk in this century to be 1% to 10%. And after all, AI is likely to dominate the prediction.

Thanks for sharing, Pablo. I had listened to that podcast discussing The Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT), but what I take from this is that there is huge dispersion in the extinction risk predictions. 

In addition, many forecasters predicted a probability of human extinction from 2023 to 2100 of exactly 0:

  • For extinction, 3.18 % (5/157).
  • For AI extinction, 4.29 % (7/163).
  • For nuclear extinction, 6.21 % (10/161).
  • Non-anthropogenic extinction excluding non-anthropogenic pathogens, 5.66 % (9/159).

A risk of exactly 0 is obviously wrong, but goes to show there are superforecasters and domain experts guessing the risk of human extinction is negligible. You can also qualitatively appreciate this from some comments in Appendix 7 of the report. Here are some I collected about the risk of nuclear extinction (emphasis mine):

  • “Most forecasters whose probabilities were near the median factored in a range of possible risks, including world wars, nuclear winters, and even artificial-intelligence-driven NERs [nuclear extinction risks], but concluded that even under worst case scenarios, the extinction of humanity (give or take 5000 people) would be near impossible...even if an NER [nuclear existential risk] had set humanity on a path that made eventual extinction a foregone conclusion, existing resources on earth would allow at least 5000 survivors to hang on for seventy-eight years”.
  • “For many, the thought of getting to less than 5000 humans alive was simply too far fetched an outcome and they couldn't be persuaded otherwise in what they saw as credible scenarios”.
  • “[T]he set of circumstances required for this to happen are quite low, though obviously not impossible. These circumstances are that there will be a nuclear conflict between 2 nations both capable and willing to fire at everyone everywhere between the two of them: 'very bad case scenarios' where India and Pakistan, or the US and Russia, or China and anyone else, fired everything they had at just each other, or even at each other and each other's close allies, would likely not cause extinction…it requires some of the big nuclear powers to decide to try to take literally everyone down with them, and that they actually succeed”.
  • “So we think that the probabilities in this question are dominated by scenarios of total nuclear war before 2050 which cause civilizational and climate collapse to the point where long-term survival becomes impossible to save for very well-prepared shelters. But even pessimistic scenarios seem unlikely to lead to a collapse that is fast enough to reduce the global population to below 5000 by 2100”.
  • There aren't compelling arguments on the higher end for this question again due to the fact that this is a very high bar to achieve”.
  • “The team predicts that there will be pockets of people who survive in various regions of the world. Their survival may be at Neolithic standards, but there will be tribes of people who band together and restart mankind. After all, many mammals survived the asteroid and ice age that killed the dinosaurs”.
  • “[A] certain number of team members feel that even if there was a full strategic exchange and usage of all of the world's nuclear arsenal still humanity would be able to keep its numbers over 5000. The argument for this is the number [a]nd population of uncontacted tribes, or isolated human populations like the Easter island population pre-contact, that have managed to hold numbers of over 5000 in extremely harsh conditions”.
  • [A]lmost certainly some people would survive on islands or in caves given even the worst of worst cases”.
  • “Southern Hemisphere likely to be less impacted – New Zealand, Madagascar, Pacific Islands, Highlands of Papua New Guinea, unlikely to be targeted and include areas with little global and technology dependence…Just the population of Antarctica in its summer is ~5000 people. Even small islands surviving could easily mean more than 5k people”.
  • [There are s]everal regions in the world that would not be affected by nuclear conflict directly and have decent climatic conditions to support 100 of millions even in a NW [nuclear winter]”.
Curated and popular this week
Relevant opportunities