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This post made me wonder if emotionally salient donations meaningfully increase long-term giving capacity? like even if the initial act isn’t maximally cost-effective?
I was not initially willing to share this here considering my donation is much lesser compared to other generous donors of our community. However the timing is what largely prompted me to post.
This morning I read a post from ‘Giving What We Can’ that read, “When people share their giving, it can be contagious.”
This morning I also happened to receive videos from the recipients of my donation.
Finally, enough to convince me to write a forum post, I saw today marks the beginning of the “Donation celebration” week on the forum.
In Effective Altruism philosophy, we believe that geographical distance should not hinder our donation interests. So, I happened to give up some of my fee for an org I was working with whose founder operated from a place called Cebu in the Philippines. I asked him to donate it to children who needed some warmth during Christmas. He did so and sent me adorable videos this morning!
My heart is literally throbbing with happiness sensing the joy of these kids from the video and on the fact that I did this, even though I have never met them in person.
Few outside our community might have questions like, “Well we have children here in India who needed warmth during Christmas too”.
From my point of view, it is just that the things aligned (like the location of the founder of the org) in a way that not only made sense for me as an Effective Altruist but also given a chance, I’d now be doing the same again.
For those who also are dwelling if you’d be better off with donations right away, I’d suggest let us start with tiny/small donations like this till we carve a path to greater ones:)
What I'm dwelling upon currently is if this small donation makes me this happy, what would be the extent of happiness that the pledgers or larger donors experience. Maybe they don't get to hear these squeaks and giggles of little kids they help from lead contamination (LEEP donors for instance) or get an instant dopamine hit after their donations because they're silent impact makers, who wish to make deep, radical changes for a better world. I am happy that our forum celebrates them and I say, we should do more of it. It would not surprise me to see events like EAGX but especially celebrating our pledgers/donors in coming times.
Ending this post with a line I read in ‘What we owe to the future’:
People matter even if they live thousands of miles away.
Wishing a great year ending to all the extraordinary people I keep reading from on the forum!
This post made me wonder if emotionally salient donations meaningfully increase long-term giving capacity? like even if the initial act isn’t maximally cost-effective?
Thank you Arnold for your question! tbh cost-effectiveness was never a matter of concern here since I was not funding anything significantly tractable or neglected.
I also believe you are right that emotionally salient donations can increase long-term giving capacity because they help people form a durability around giving rather than a purely instrumental motivation everytime.
Great to see that you're donating, and that the kids had a great time!
I'm curious as to why you chose to donate here in particular (my understanding is that it was rooted in the ease of a wage sacrifice, so limited friction) - it was not necessarily a choice that would conventionally fall in line with EA frameworks, given not optimising for suffering minimised, lives saved, positive utility delivered, or another metric of choosing based on one's worldview.
Of course, not every donation need optimise for those - there is a place for fuzzy altruism in personal satisfaction and sustainability amongst other reasons; looking forward to hearing what the rationale was here.
Thank you Sanu for asking this! This donation happened by chance and led to breaking my first donation analysis-paralysis situation. Considering how large often EA donations are, I didn't quite think if it should be EA optimised since my donation was only enough to cover a pre X-mass event for these kids and their families. I felt somewhere that since the org which donated my fee to them was EA-aligned it was kinda an EA-ish support that way, definitely not downright EA way. As you rightly said, not every donation need to optimise and the fact that the donation was possible due to my work on an EA project is also what makes it relevant for me to post this here :)