I think it is a cool idea for people to take a giving pledge on the same day. For example, you and your friend both decide to pledge 10% to charity on the same day. It would be even more fun if you did it with strangers. Call it “giving twins” or “giving siblings”.

Imagine that you met a couple strangers and they pledged with you. Imagine that after pledging you all just decided to be friends, or at least a type of support group for one another. Like “Hey, you and I took the further pledge together on New Year’s Day last year. When I’m in your city let’s go have a pint or maybe we can email each other about our career plans to discuss ways we can help people more!”

Which leads me to my final bit here: would anyone be interested in being my giving sibling? Haha I am interested in taking the further pledge in 2022, and it would be fun to have the same ‘giving birthday’ as other people so I could befriend them, meet people in the community, and get a couple lifelong friends.

Giving what we can could even take this idea and run with it. They could assign you a giving sibling if you entered into the sibling program, this could help increase the feeling that we are a community.

Here’s the problem:

Some charities are not just multiple times better than others, some are thousands of times better than others. But as far as I can tell, we haven’t got a good way of signaling to others what this means.

Think about when Ed Sheeran sells an album. It’s “certified platinum” then “double platinum” peaking at “certified diamond”. When people hear this it makes them sit back and say “wow, Ed sheeran is on a different level.”

When a football player is about to announce his college, he says “I’m going D1”. You become a “grandmaster” at chess. Ah, that restaurant must be good it has won two Michelin stars. That economist writing about the tragedy of the commons is great, she won a Nobel prize.

We need nomenclature that goes beyond “High impact” charity. “Cost-effective” “High impact” “Effective” are all good descriptions, but we need to come up with a rating system or some method of giving high status to the best charities (possibly based on how much $ it costs to save one life).

It’s got to be something that we can bring into the popular conscience, and it can’t be something we just narrowly assign to all of our own EA meta charities. We need journalists popularizing the term and recognizing the 3-5 super charities that save lives like no ones business. We should work with marketing teams and carefully plan what the name would be. But it’s got to confer status to the charity and people like Jay Z can gain more status by donating to it, just like he gains status by eating at Michelin star restaurants.

(excuse me if I’m not the first to outline this idea)

Forecasters Bias

This may already be a bias, I haven’t really researched this. Excuse my ignorance. But perhaps there could be a new bias we could identify called forecasters bias.

This bias would be the phenomenon where forecasters have a tendency to place too much weight on the importance of or the effect of forecastable events versus events that are less forecastable. Thereby somewhat (or entirely) neglecting other improbable less forecastable events.

Example 1: Theres a new coronavirus variant called Omicron. It has not yet spread, but it will. We can track the spread of this virus going forward into the future. When forecasting Omicron’s effect we have a tendency to overemphasize its effect because this event is forecastable.

Another coronavirus example 2: Early in the coronavirus pandemic individuals tracked the spread of the virus, and the rate at which vaccines progressed. They predicted with a good degree of accuracy the amount of deaths. They did not predict, however, that the political whims of the populace would lead to an anti-vax movement. The less forecastable event (anti-vax sentiment) was under-predicted

Example 3: fictional market researchers notice dropping energy prices. They model this phenomenon and expect it to continue for 18 months. But in this fictional 18 months, major earthquakes destroy huge cities and the researchers systematically failed to consider the prospect of major earthquakes happening which raise energy prices.

Example 4: energy prices are rising drastically. Researchers expect this to continue for 18 months. Suddenly, commercially viable nuclear fusion becomes available and governments spread this throughout the world. Energy prices drop to “too cheap to meter”, researchers got this wrong because it was too hard to forecast the progress of nuclear fusion.

I don’t know if this idea is any good. Just a thought!

Do you prefer libertarian policy ideas, but you aren’t too sold on the deontological or rights-based reasoning which many libertarians use to justify their policy preferences?

Perhaps this new political identifier could work for you: introducing…. Consequentarian! You’re pretty much a consequentialist through and through, you value good outcomes more than liberty or rights based claims to things however it just empirically turns out that all the best policy ideas which lead to the best outcomes are libertarian. You recognize open borders, drug legalization, limited (or no) government, very low regulation, and competitive enterprise produce more human flourishing than all the alternatives. But you don’t find strict rights arguments compelling (like if a car is driving at you, you can jump on your neighbors lawn even if it violates his property rights).

Pronounced: Consequen-tarian

Associated schools of thought:

• Chicago school economics
• University of Arizona Tucson School of liberalism
• neoclassical liberalism
• Michael Huemer and Bryan Caplan’s anarchism

Has anyone ever thought of doing incentive based pledges with their charitable giving?

Incentive pledge: I will live off of X amount of money, but this figure increases by Y for every $100,000 I donate or pledge to donate.

Example: I will live off of $30,000 in 2020 dollars for the rest of my life and the rest will be donated to charity, however this amount increases by $1000 for every $100,000 I donate (or I will donate at some future date).

Under this incentive pledge, for every $1 million in 2020 dollars that the pledger earns (and donates), $10,000 dollars will be added to their yearly allowance. Then if you’re feeling confident you could cap it at a certain level. For example, this could max out at $100,000 yearly allowance or $70,000 or something like that.

This is for someone who wants to essentially take the further pledge, but they aren’t entirely comfortable confining themselves to a fixed amount to live on (adjusted for inflation) forever. Or this is for the person who could see themselves incentivized to give more if they knew their yearly allowance would raise the more they earned.