willmacaskill

I'm glad to hear this! We want to encourage people to incorporate EA into their life as much as they feel comfortable with, and everyone's circumstances are different.

And note you can be a 'hard EA' without earning to give. Research, policy/politics, founding or working for a valuable organisation - these are all great career paths, depending on your particular circumstances and skills. See https://80000hours.org/career-guide/ for more!

I think that's exactly wrong, I'm afraid.

In traditional charity, the incentives that charities have are to do whatever is going to fundraise the most. So the charities that get biggest are those that are best at looking good, rather than doing good.

The solution is to have a set of donors who really care about funding whatever does the most good. That means that a charity's fundraising incentives line up with what's actually best for the world. And that set of impact-motivated donors is exactly what we're trying to create with the effective altruism movement.

New Incentives is a great example of that working. In just the same way that a startup will pivot if it thinks it could be working on something else that's more profitable, because of the existence of the EA community New Incentives is able to pivot to a different approach that it thinks will do more good per dollar and knows that, if it succeeds at doing that, it will be able to grow more.

Thanks for the enthusiasm!

I think a lot of your questions can be answered here (including the other pages that these pages link to): http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/our-process and http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/process

Because our fund managers are all GiveWell and Open Philanthropy staff, we inherit their methodology. If in the future we move beyond GiveWell and Open Philanthropy fund managers, we'll need to have pages on their process too (and how it potentially differs from GW / OP).

A more accessible introduction to how to assess which problem area is most important is here: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/

Re: bizarro candidate? Yes, certainly. (as long as they're actually going to be much better for the world and your donation will make a difference). Lower probability of larger upside can easily beat guarantee of doing more modest amount of good.

There's a lot of talk about 'impact investing' and I see potential there, but at the moment the 'impact' side of things is generally very poorly understood so it's not fulfilling its potential in my view.

Some general comments I have on the article (which I thought in general was very good):

- At 80,000 Hours (the social impact career advice service I cofounded) we don't advise that many people to aim to earn to give in the long-term; less than a third of the people who have changed their plans on the basis of our advice have done so in the past, and the proportion will be less in the long-term.

- Most commonly, the people who do this are those who really wanted to work in lucrative career X anyway, but were thinking of doing something else. E.g. Matt Gibb really wanted to do startups, but thought he should instead do something 'more ethical'; our advice made him realise he could do both. He's pledging 30% of his equity at LendLayer. (interview here: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/)

- Another common strategy (which we do recommend) is to gain skills in a for-profit company before then moving to something with greater direct impact afterwards. While you're working for that for-profit, you may as well be donating a lot too!

- if you think this is cool and are an entrepreneur, you might want to take the Founders Pledge (http://thefounderspledge.org/about/)

- if you think this is cool and can't or don't want to take the Founders Pledge, you might want to take the Giving What We Can pledge (disclaimer: i cofounded GWWC) https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/become-member

- If you think this is cool and aren't sure what you should do with your life, then we can advise you at 80,000 Hours (https://80000hours.org/). We're currently in Mountain View for the summer.

I think that's a really important concern. At 80,000 Hours when we encourage people to earn to give we ensure they're embedded in the effective altruism community, take things like the Giving What We Can Pledge and so on - mechanisms by which to ensure that our future selves don't fail to live up to our ideals.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the rate of people becoming disillusioned when they do direct work in charities also (anecdotally seems to me) to be very high. Reason is that it's often very hard, often you don't feel like you're having much of an impact. Whereas if you enjoy working in the lucrative career you're in, the 'sacrifice' of donating even 50% isn't really that great, so it's potentially easier to continue in that path. I'm genuinely really unsure which has the greater dropout rate: earning to give, or direct charity work. If I had to bet I'd say it was direct charity work.

I think that startups where the users are principally people in poor countries is a very promising area for socially minded people to work in.

Startups usually (but not always) generate value for their users in the form of consumer surplus. Because of diminishing marginal utility of money, $1 of consumer surplus in poor countries is worth 10x or more than $1 of consumer surplus in rich countries.

Some examples: Wave (YC alum) is making sending remittances cheaper (taking only 3% rather than 10% like Western Union). $0.4 trillion in remittances are sent every year. Segovia is making benefit payments in India more efficient, so that only 10% in lost in transactions rather than 50% as is currently the case. Both of these in my view have massive social value (and are run by people in the effective altruism community).

Hi Derek! Nice to see you here!|

I actually already think that earning to give isn't the best path for most altruistic people who would be willing to work anywhere. This is a change of view from a few years ago. The reasons are: i) quite a few people are already very successfully earning to give and need really amazing opportunities to donate to; ii) a rising number of very wealthy people are donating most of their wealth (e.g. Giving Pledge). This means that on the margin we really need more talent to spend these donations well.

What I do think is: - donating to highly effective charities (e.g. GiveWell recommendations) is a means by which anyone who's got a job in an affluent country can make a truly massive difference - earning to give should be an option that's at least on the table for altruistically minded folks - as you say, for people who would really enjoy very high-earning careers they shouldn't necessarily think "well I should do something I enjoy less because what I'm doing now doesn't have much social value." (I shudder when I see high-flying lawyers or financiers quitting and doing non-profit consulting outside their area of expertise). Via earning to give, these people really can have their cake and eat it. - some careers are dual-benefit - e.g. entrepreneurship can generate huge social value in and of itself, and also be very lucrative - for young people, the most important thing in the short term if you want to do good in the long term is to build skills, and you often build more skills in for-profits than in non-profits. While there, you should earn to give.

Overall I think that at the moment maybe 10% of the altruistic people who would be happy working anywhere should aim to earn to give long-term. It depends a lot on cause, though - some areas are more money-constrained; some more talent-constrained.

Hey - I'm the guy described in the post - if anyone wants to ask me about anything to do with effective altruism, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, GiveWell (which I didn't cofound but is part of the same charitable movement), or what Derek Thompson's household habits are, please do so! :)

Yeah, I seem to recall that the US gives a similar % of income as other countries once you subtract out donations to churches and to universities, which are both a much bigger thing than in other countries.

That's great! (I'm guessing I probably know you, but can't tell who you are). I'm hoping to donate >50% too; I've been donating about 10% but I've been on a low salary; next year I'll be able to do 50% I think.

I know; his brother actually just gave up and started introducing himself as "Wage" (pronounced as you'd think) rather than "WAG-ee"

I agree volunteering abroad can be a great way to experience first-hand some of the problems in the world, which can lead you to do much more in your life than you would otherwise. I did it as a student and it was important in my life. But that's to say it should be a means to having a real impact later on, rather than an end in itself.

I agree it's important to think about; and that morally you can't just take benefits - harms = net good. It's reasonable at least to be more morally concerned about avoiding harm than about doing good. That said, I've never heard a plausible story about how someone like Matt is causing harm in his career (unlike he might be doing if he worked for tobacco companies, for example).

I and 80,000 Hours take really seriously the harm you might do through your work. I'd feel very uncomfortable to say the least to recommend that someone work in Big Tobacco in order to earn to give.

I don't think of finance like I think of big tobacco though, and the criticisms I hear of finance tend to fall into one of two camps (i) lumping all of finance into one category; (ii) not really understanding what finance does. There are some areas of finance that are morally dubious (creating ever-more-arcane financial instruments that people don't understand). And I'm sympathetic in general to the idea that a lot of finance is rent-seeking, in which case you want regulation to cut down on that. But you don't have to go into dodgy areas of finance. Matt primarily takes advantage of arbitrage opportunities; it's hard to see how that is fucking over the world.

And even on the Big Tobacco front: if you could go in and substantially change their policies for the better (even if you couldn't make them any way close to perfect), I'd think of that as a really honorable thing to do. The same goes in finance. If you do find yourself in a really dodgy situation, you can always be a whistleblower, and potentially do a lot of good that way.

I think this is a really important concern. Btw, 5% is still quite a bit more than the average, so good work!

We're attempting to overcome this worry through community and behavioural economics hacks. E.g. I take every opportunity that I can (like this one) to say publicly that I'm planning to give away the majority of what I earn, which makes it a helluva lot harder for me to back out. Similarly for Matt - it would be embarrassing for him to renege on his commitments when he's been so open about it. And it feels like a much smaller sacrifice (if it's even a sacrifice at all) when most of your friends are doing the same thing - and some, like Jeff and Julia in Boston (http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/whats-it-like-to-give-ha...) are doing much more.

This is a really tricky issue; there are lots of competing considerations either way. (e.g. the return you get from your money; but your donated money also generates a 'social return', which can be much higher than what you get in a bank. And you'll learn more about how to do good later on; but the world is also getting richer so there might be fewer outstanding opportunities in the future. Etc etc.) There's a summary of blogposts on the topic here: http://www.effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_...

That's not true. There are hundreds of thousands of different aid project, it would be miraculous if all were entirely ineffective. E.g. you'd have to be crazily skeptical to suggest that the programs recommended by GiveWell aren't of positive expected value; there's just so much evidence to the contrary. In terms of the link between aid and economic growth - aid is just such a small part of developing countries' economies that you simply can't peer through the statistical fog; it's such a weak signal, and there are so few data points ,that it's not surprising that we can't detect a correlation. A nice even handed discussion is given by Owen Barder of the Centre for Global Development: http://cf.owen.org/wp-content/uploads/Can-Aid-Work-Owen-Bard...

What I find most amazing is when bright Ivy League graduates go and do manual labour, like building a school, in a poor country with massive unemployment. It's not exactly playing to comparative advantage.

Matt is a friend of mine, and someone who got career advice from what ultimately became 80,000 Hours, a startup non-profit I cofounded. I'm really happy to see the positive response on here; we've advised a lot of people to 'earn to give' and some people... let's say they aren't that happy about the idea that working in trading can be an ethical career.

Anyone, if anyone feels inspired by the story and thinks they might want to do something similar, I'm always happy to provide advice (you can get my contact details on my website). Not just through finance; there are a ton of software engineers and entrepreneurs in the effective altruism community, and it's really a place where everyone's trying to help each other be more successful - because we'll all do more good that way. If you think you might want to get involved, or find out more, there's a pretty active facebook group where you can introduce yourself. https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/?ref=br_...

Happy also to take any questions on here.