I'm sympathetic to the argument that it would be hard to operationalise a salary sacrifice pledge in ways that are hard to game, but true to the spirit of it.

But I feel annoyed that the tone of the FAQ and Luke's comment is not "this is a meaningful flaw in the pledge, we don't see a good way to fix it, but acknowledge it creates bad incentivises". Eg it seems terrible that the FAQ frames this as "resigning from your pledge", which I consider to have strong connotations of giving up or failing.

In many cases, the above conclusion is based on misunderstandings about the 10% Pledge which are resulting in opportunities for impact being missed by people like yourself not pledging.

For example, this part of Luke's comment rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt like it was saying that actually people are misunderstanding the pledge, and it's totally consistent with taking a massive pay cut to pursue direct altruistic work. But it is clearly, by design, not, and his comment felt like it was missing the point. Eg someone who leaves a job in finance or tech to take a job at half the salary to do direct work, and intends to remain in that new role for the rest of their career, is making far more of a sacrifice than if they just donated 10%, and I consider them to have no obligation to donate further. But I don't see the conditions of Luke's comment applying, as the salary sacrifice comes from switching industries not an arrangement with their employer. And they may never be able to donate later, if they just postpone their pledge. So they would need to resign. Which is a terrible incentive!

If your non profit will eventually be extremely cost effective, and donations now help it reach that point, then that would make donations now highly cost effective. Of course, you're likely positively biased in favour of your non profit, so could easily be wrong in this assessment, but I am generally pro people making high conviction altruistic bets with their donations

More importantly, you are, in fact, choosing to take a lower salary in order to spend your labour on your non profit. This means you are choosing actions that lead to you not donating to other charities. If you think this is the correct thing to do, altruistically speaking, then you think this achieves more good than taking a higher paying job and donating that money. I think it would be perverse if the GWWC pledge obliged people to make ineffective decisions that did less good by their lights

Wow, that's a terrible policy IMO, and the linked forum comment feels like it totally misses the point - I personally think Quinn should go ahead and use the diamond emoji if he's confident he would be earning far more if he wasn't making altruistic career choices.

GWWC shouldn't try to attach a sense of status and altruism to the diamond emoji and then tell people they need to do less good if they want to keep it, that seems deeply against the principles of EA to me, and the incentives we should create as a functional community of altruists

EDIT: Do the people disagree voting disagree that GWWC's rules incentivise pledgers to do less good, or think this is an acceptable sacrifice on a difficult to solve problem, or some other disagreement with my comment?

As far as I'm aware, coefficient giving may slightly adjust which global health causes they support based on how neglected those are, but it's less than a 1:1 effect, and the size of the global health funding pool at CG is fairly fixed. And there are a bunch of people dying each year, especially given the foreign aid cuts, who would not die if there was more money given to global health stuff, including GiveWell top charities (if nothing else, GiveDirectly seems super hard to saturated). So I don't really see much cause for despondency here, your donations can do a lot of good! (other than the fact that the world is like this being terrible). I think it would be accurate to say that GiveWell top charities are not obviously the most impactful thing to fund on the margin, but that is very different from not being impactful or not being neglected.

Concretely, I recommend funding the GiveWell all grants fund, which they can allocate to wherever it would do the most good in global health, including higher risk things. Given the foreign aid cuts there's likely a bunch of important but smaller and time sensitive opportunities, and as a non expert in global health, I'm happy to defer to GiveWell's recommendations here, in the same way that I used to be happy to give to their top charities, or am happy to invest my savings in index funds.

And yeah funding your own direct work seems totally fine to me

Note that Dominic Cummings, one of the then most powerful men in the UK, [credits the rationality community] (https://x.com/dominic2306/status/1373333437319372804) for convincing him that the UK needed to change its coronavirus policy (which I personally am very grateful for!). So it seems unlikely to have been that obvious

ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic

Google's donation match is $10k per person, and I would guess a bunch of donations from Googlers are unmatched

What do you mean by giving to Manifund's regranting program? It's not one place to donate to. It's a bunch of different people who get regranting budgets. You can give to one of those people, but how the money gets used depends a ton on who, which seems important

If you're looking for something x risk related then I think something like the Longview emerging challenges fund is better https://www.longview.org/fund/emerging-challenges-fund/

Seems reasonable, thanks! I feel generally more aligned with Coefficient/OP's judgement than Good Ventures', so seems fine by me

Thanks a lot for this post! I was not planning on going to EAGx India for unrelated reasons, but if I had been, this would probably have been enough to convince me to cancel

Are you able to share why you've been endorsed by OP/Coefficient, to the point that they are recommending you to other donors, but they haven't been able to fill your funding gap via Good Ventures?