Giving What We Can is celebrating 15 years of operation. I took their🔸10% Pledge as a grad student back in 2010,1 and haven’t regretted it for a moment. My resulting donations (fast approaching $100k in total) could be conservatively estimated2 to have saved ~20 lives (or 1000 QALYs), which is a nice thought!
One of my strongest moral beliefs is that almost everyone reading this post really ought to take the pledge too. (Not in a “I’ll blame you if you don’t” kind of way, but just in a “this is clearly worth doing, so let’s go for it!” kind of way.) If you list all the possible decisions you could make right now, ranked by the ratio of positive impact : effort/willpower required, taking the🔸10% pledge is likely at (or near) the top. If you’re expending moral effort anywhere else, consider temporarily reallocating those efforts to this goal instead. It may be, in this sense, the #1 best thing you could do. It’s just that important.
A major barrier for my past self was that I just thought of charitable giving as something neat that “other people” did. (I certainly couldn’t have seen myself jumping right in by giving away 10% of my income.) This naturally caused some cognitive dissonance given my consequentialist ideals, but it seemed difficult to overcome my habitual inertia and modify what I conceived of as “the kinds of things that I do.”
For anyone else in this position, I’d recommend a little experimentation: try the🔹Trial Pledge (for some modest amount and duration that you’re more comfortable with), then see how you feel about it on reflection. Assuming you feel pretty good about acting on your values in this way, you may eventually find your self-conception developing in a more philanthropic direction. And once you start to think of yourself as the kind of person who really wants to make the world a better place, you’ll hopefully find the thought of signing on to the🔸10% pledge positively appealing.
If you already quietly give that much, I’d encourage you to publicly sign the GWWC pledge (and add the golden diamond icon to your social media), to help make effective giving more of a cultural norm. If you’re worried about “appearing boastful”, note that it would be more virtuous to instead focus on which option would best prevent kids from dying. The plausible answer: “suck it up and help to promote good giving norms.”
Giving What We Can’s🔸10% pledge is fast approaching 10,000 pledgers. Maybe if you join this year, you’ll help them to surpass that milestone?
Fun story: Nick Beckstead and some friends were setting up the first US chapter of GWWC at Rutgers University, and invited me to join them. We met in New Brunswick to discuss their plans; I caught a ride there from Princeton with a nice physics grad student named Dario. He wasn’t famous back then, of course—but by now you may have heard of him!
Around half went to “global health” charities that admit of such straightforward estimation. Other donations, spanning EA community-building, animal welfare, and longtermism, plausibly have even higher expected value, but it’s hard to assess for sure. A couple were political donations that didn’t work out (alas), but may still have been good bets in prospect.
This is great! I myself started doing the Trial Pledge this year and then the 10% Pledge a few months later! I wonder, though, how one could achieve a wholesale reorientation in ordinary people's thinking about ethics/morality might be needed here: a shift away from ethics as merely a negative project of <not doing stuff> or doing the bare minimum of moral decency towards a positive project of <positively doing good stuff> and doing more and more of what one has more (weightier) moral reasons to do, without it being too maximising and demanding/exhausting. Perhaps memes or a really good movie or TV show might be needed to gradually influence people's conception of morality for the better over time! 🤔
Great stuff Richard! Do you primarily give to animal or human charities? I tend to think animal charities are thousands of times more effective, and so probably better to give to.