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!
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:
...is really inspiring :).
I'm interested in knowing more about how Allan decides where to donate. For example:
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!
Thanks, Toby and Allan.
@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:
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):