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

I feel like I see lots of people saying that we should destigmatize talking about about and being open about mental illness, but I don’t really see people making what seems like the obvious counterargument that mental illness is probably contagious/culturally influenced in some ways so talking about it causes more mental illness.

Do people make this counterargument? (Is it even right? I don’t actually know anything about psychology but it seems intuitively reasonable, and I know culture-bound syndromes are a thing.)

given up on that whole maximal altruism thing eh. good on you. the world needs more abject callousness.

Sorry, I haven’t actually given up on altruism. I don’t think occasionally annoying your friends by playing the devil’s advocate for Trump is incompatible with altruistic goals?

uhhhh if I were @theunitofcaring I would write a long and stirring essay here about how compassion and helping others is good but instead I will just say that I disagree vehemently with the claim that “the world needs more abject callousness”

People talk about EA being this all-consuming thing sometimes, but for me it doesn’t really feel that way. Right now I’m earning to give, and so the main thing I need to do for EA is go to work every day and work hard, which is what I would want to do anyway. For the most part I don’t get paid any more money for working more hours. I guess there are things I maybe should be spending time on, like EA community-building and thinking about cause prioritization, but for the most part I think the official EA take on what I should be doing in my free time is “idk, maximize your personal happiness?”

And like, there’s something scary about that? Sometimes on a weekend afternoon I’ll find myself switching from activity to activity, opening and closing a book, starting and stopping a TV show, because the only point of anything right now is to maximize my happiness, and if I’m not really enjoying myself then why am I doing this? I find myself imposing structures, deciding “I will go to Mass every Sunday,” even though I don’t quite know what the point of that is either. And then I go, even though I’m tired and I want to sleep in and I don’t exactly enjoy it, because that seems better somehow than sleeping in and drinking tea in bed and watching Outlander.

I’ve been fantasizing more about having kids lately, and probably part of that is normal biological clock stuff, but I think part of it is that once I have kids, I won’t be trying to be happy anymore, I’ll be trying to make my kids happy. And that seems like a more fulfilling thing to live by. 

When I was a kid, I always thought my mom’s life seemed kind of terrible. After a week of school, all I wanted was to do was play with Barbies and read books and dress up in costumes and generally have fun. Whereas my mom didn’t seem to have fun on weekends, really: when she wasn’t taking us to lessons and activities and playdates, she was cleaning the house or gardening or dropping off the dry cleaning. Even her fun was work: she’d invite friends over for dinner, but that meant hours of grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Now I see it differently; she has a very firm conception of what a good life looks like for her family, and she works to achieve it. And that seems really appealing.