Fake Charity Nerd Girl

Thoughts on 2019 donations:

Here are my current thoughts on 2019 donations. These aren’t final and I haven’t thought that much about it.

In general. this year I’ve been focused on generating value on a timescale of a few years. Almost all of my effort has gone into my job, with the goals of:

• increasing the long-term expected value of my company
• building my skills and getting career capital along the way

I haven’t been optimizing for short-term cash flow and haven’t spent any time looking for current donation opportunities, since I don’t think that whatever I can donate this year accounts for very much of my expected impact.

The first question: how much to donate?

Given that I’ve taken the Giving What We Can pledge, honoring that is a lower bound. My compensation is confusing, but 10% of the actual US dollars I got paid (plus taxes) seems reasonable for a lower bound.

The upper bound is my net worth, I guess.

Most of my wealth, as it were, is invested in an illiquid and volatile asset. I don’t think it makes sense to donate this now, as I don’t want to sell it. It’s also not any more tax efficient to donate this before year end.

I think it makes sense to have a decent amount of liquid savings. I’d like to have 2 years of runway; my job right now is pretty uncertain, I feel uncertain about my future career trajectory in general, and I want to make sure I can stay super flexible and unconstrained.

So the question is what to do with the money in between “GWWC pledge” and “2 years of runway.” I’m inclined to mostly donate it. It intuitively feels like just donating somewhere now compares favorably to the last dollar I’ll donate in the future, plus it just feels virtuous and stuff.

The second question: where to donate?

The obvious place given that I haven’t thought about this is a donor lottery. I’ll probably donate most of my 2019 donation to CEA’s donor lottery. I’m scared of committing time to things right now, but at $500k it doesn’t seem that bad to commit to spending a bit of time figuring out where to donate.

I’ll probably also give smaller donations to groups I like and/or have donated to in the past, just because it seems good:

• THL
• MIRI
• CEA
• political campaigns

There are currently hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens in cages in the US alone. Most consumers of eggs–grocery stores, restaurant chains, food service providers–have pledged to go entirely cage-free within the next decade.

Hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed every year in the US. American egg producers have pledged to stop this practice by 2020.

I was talking to @profhedonium about donations and I decided I should say publicly on tumblr that this year I plan to write a post about my donation decision and publish it here.

For the first time this year I’ll have quite a bit of money to donate, and I think it’s important to think a lot about where I donate it. Hopefully writing up my decision and the reasons behind it will

1. force me to think through it carefully so I have something to write up
   
2. give other people a chance to point out mistakes in my reasoning and convince me to change my mind

I’m posting this now so that, come December, if I haven’t written a post about this everyone can shame me until I do. (Not that I think you will actually do that. But my irrational fear that you will will be a good motivator.)

my 12-year-old sister just told me she got in an argument with a boy at her school because he said, and I quote, “malaria isn’t a big problem”

I’m so proud

just got an email from a Korean address that I first thought was spam

then I looked more closely and realized it was from a Korean high school student who wanted to learn more about EA … addressed to me along with Rob Wiblin, Dylan Matthews, and Peter Singer

well then

I saw Elie Hassenfeld speak yesterday and he was really cool, GiveWell is great and I’m excited to see where the Open Philanthropy Project goes.

Probably the thing that struck me most was how much he emphasized GiveWell’s capacity bottleneck. He said they’d rather have a good new researcher than a million dollars a year in money moved, so really everyone should just apply to work at GiveWell.

The road to virtue?—Well, it’s
plain and simple to express:
                  Sin
                  and sin
                  and sin again,
                  but less
                  and less
                  and less.

I.

The other day I was asking someone why he didn’t identify as an EA. “I’m just not a very moral person,” he said. “Oh,” I hastened to reassure him, “I mean, me neither.”

II.

I was thinking about Scott’s recent post on his trouble with accepting that animals have moral value. Lots of people have trouble with this, and lots of other people will tell you it’s because it’s really hard to accept that you’re committing a horribly immoral act every time you eat a steak. But I realized I’ve always found that kind of odd, because for me it wasn’t hard at all.

I think I always implicitly believed that animals mattered. But my first contact with animal rights memes wasn’t until high school, when I learned that animals on factory farms lead really terrible lives. And my reaction was, “Okay. I guess eating meat is really terrible then.” And I kept on eating meat for the next three years, eating less and less and eventually realizing that I’d found enough vegetarian foods I liked that going vegetarian wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience.

When I heard the Peter Singer drowning child thought experiment, my reaction was, “Hmm, I guess spending money on myself beyond the basic requirements of living rather than donating it is morally equivalent to murder. Maybe I should start donating 10%.”

When I heard that animals farmed for eggs and milk suffer just as much as those farmed for meat (this somehow never occurred to high school me) my reaction was, “Okay, I guess eating eggs and milk is morally equivalent to torturing animals for fun.” This was two years ago and giving up dairy is still on my to-do list, somewhere between “read more books” and “learn to do makeup.” But it took me about a day to intellectually accept the idea, and right now I eat ice cream all the time and feel no guilt at all.

III.

I think if I were more scrupulous I would be more inclined to extreme acts of altruism. I’d be more likely to give, say, 50% of my income (once I get a job) if I had some guilt motivating me; as it is I don’t know if I’ll have enough willpower to give that much. But my lack of scrupulosity does make it easier to take moral ideas seriously, and I think as an EA that’s really important.

me three years ago: I should donate blood, that would be the virtuous thing to dome two years ago: I shouldn't donate blood, the marginal value of a donation isn't that high and I could be using my time more effectivelyme one year ago: I should maybe donate blood, the marginal value of an hour isn't that high either and if I make a habit of performing altruistic actions altruism will become a more deeply entrenched part of my identityme now: I should donate blood, that would be the virtuous thing to do

I’m reading Yes Means Yes for Feminism 101 purposes and I feel like feminism really needs to learn how to shut up and multiply.

Like there’s this essay that is repeatedly like “well of course women should have the choice to work at Hooters … but if they do they’re allowing themselves to be objectified and contributing to the commodification of female sexuality thus perpetuating rape culture.”

Like even if you think all of that is true, do you really believe that the actual effect of one (replaceable) woman choosing to work at Hooters can’t be outweighed by, say, that woman donating $1 a year of her salary to GiveDirectly? Generally if someone chooses a job it is probably because it’s the best option they have. Is resisting the commodification of female sexuality by this tiny tiny amount really worth pressuring this woman into taking a worse-paying or less-pleasant or more-hours job?

The nice thing about EA is that we acknowledge how far we all are from perfect. And if you’re not going to be perfect, the best course of action is to consider your impact on the world for a few decisions where the scale actually justifies it and make the rest of your decisions about you. Whereas feminists seem to want me to “face the reality of what you’re doing and make sure you’re self-aware enough to know why you’re doing it” (in this essay’s words), to “examine your complicity in this pervasive rape culture” (another essay) for every little choice and like … no. I have other stuff to worry about.